Thoughts.

Xi Xua’s Huddle entries on Crossfit (a follow-up to his earlier article on play intervals in elite open ultimate) provide an informative look into what Crossfit is; however, he does not go in to much depth at all on how to go about how to incorporate it into ultimate training.

This is by design, I think; done verbatim, Crossfit is an extremely taxing regimen to adhere to.  3 on, 1 off, learning how to do technical lifts like the squat and deadlift and the Olympic lifts too can make things overwhelming (to say nothing of the renowned intensity of the workouts).

For me, there have always been two keys to keep in mind with incorporating Crossfit: Progression and Flexibility.
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Solid gold! And I’m not just talking about Team USA’s prospects at the World Games.

• If you read only one thing about cutting, read Bart Watson’s piece. Concise but full of useful information; re-reading is certain to yield more information than the first glance. His thoughts on cutting not only echo mine, but exceed them. I especially like his notion of “control[ling] your defender;” it’s a nice, succinct way to think about your goals as a cutter, and synergizes nicely with my favorite “create space, attack space.”

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In light of Xi Xia’s article on the Huddle about the brevity of ultimate points and the ensuing discussion, I thought the topic bears some revisiting.

Re-framing of the energy demands of ultimate

Taking the average point (not play segment) duration rounded up to 40 seconds, and with a conservative estimate pegging every game at 15-15 for 30 points/game we get an estimated 40 sec/pt x 30 pt/game = 1200 seconds, or 20 minutes, of “active” play per game. And we’re not even factoring in stoppages or “standing time” for your pulls, stack-setting players or non-active handlers, etc.

20 minutes.

In a conservative estimate¹. Football seems to be in a similar timeframe for active play with all its stoppages…in terms of a single game’s demands, ultimate doesn’t strike one as particularly taxing endurance-wise, at a glance.

Set the notion of “taxing on endurance” aside for a minute. We have 20 minutes of action a game as a baseline figure. How spread out are those 20 minutes (In other words, what’s the work-to-rest ratio)?

You have to figure your typical ultimate tourney has rounds of at least an hour, some closer to 1:40-2:00 rounds. This pegs your work:rest ratio at anywhere between 1:3 and 1:6.

NOW, factor in that a given player likely only plays one way²–let’s assume again our 15-15 game, which presupposes even O/D loads (give or take a point depending on how the breaks lay at halftime). We can halve the effective workload, so now we’re talking about activity in the 1:6 to 1:12 work:rest range! You don’t have to be a sport physio to know that those kinds of rest intervals put activity squarely in the sprint/explosive range. Granted, it’s not just work:rest interval but the duration of effort that determines aerobic vs. anaerobic, but XX has established pretty well that typical play segment durations are not extending significantly beyond stressing your glycolytic (in other words, you’re still operating primarily in your anaerobic range).

All of this suggests that preparation should first and foremost be sprint work–exactly what XX advocates in the article.

But there’s more to it than just one game.

Parinella brings up a good point that we should perhaps be training for those points at the long end of the tail. Those can be more important than the quick, “easy” points–think of the morale swing that comes with winning/losing hell points³. The last thing you want is to lose for lack of conditioning on a drawn-out universe point.

More relevant in my mind, though, is the issue of ultimate as a Tournament. We almost never play just One Game of Ultimate–summer league, perhaps, but at any serious level of commitment you’ve got 3,4,5 games a day for 2-3 days (your extended 2-a-day Nationals formats are the exception, rather than the rule). That’s your 20 (10) minutes of action multiplied a few times and spread out. Regardless of how you’re training at home–whether it’s sprint-focused, or more aerobically inclined–you’re not putting your body under that kind of prolonged yet intermittent and intense demand, so your body invariably hates you by the time you’re piling in cars and vans Sunday afternoon (if not on Saturday night at the hotel).

The issue I’ve always had with training for tournaments revolves around this dichotomy between the intensity of a game–start, stop, change direction, sprint, break–and the extended timeframe of it all. Sure, you can get up for a single game, but can you get up for two? three? four? The third game the day after you’ve played four?

What impacts day-of performance?

For one, recovery.

While not directly relating to training itself, tournament nutrition is crucial for effective recovery of energy (primarily glycogen and electrolyte) stores over the course of a day and weekend. (To say nothing of pre-tournament nutrition). Even the best-conditioned athletes will run out of gas and cramp up if they don’t eat/hydrate properly.

For two, work capacity.

I refer you to Ross Enamait for a brief explanation and example workout⁴, but in short: work capacity is the ability to repeatedly perform at an intense (high) level. Sound familiar?

How do you train work capacity for ultimate? (Ross’ workouts are geared more toward the fighter’s short rounds–definitely some carryover there too). Seigs posed this question on his blog back when it still existed, and conventional wisdom seemed to be “play in more tournaments,” and let the principle of SAID (more here) take over, but I’m convinced there are better strategies than that, or at least alternatives.

I figure enough sufficiently strong training stresses in sequence–the equivalent of your football double sessions or the like–might do a good job of training work capacity; generally, I’m thinking in terms of stressors you can apply to ultimate athletes and then force them to perform at a high level in relatively short (but no too short) interval afterwards. For Dartmouth, where winter practice times tend to fall at late-night indoor locations or early-morning outdoor turf, perhaps having an intense track workout in the afternoon before an intense scrimmage/workout that evening, or a really hard conditioning session the evening before a morning hard scrimmage might do something to simulate that late-Sunday soreness that can be all too common–and, importantly, learn to work through it.

What are your thoughts? In college the two-a-day (two-a-<24 hour) seems to be fairly few and far between, but I'd love to hear your thoughts or experiences with that sort of thing, as well as any other thoughts on training/preparing to perform in the tournament setting.

Go read the issue.

Miranda Roth and others tout the inside lane for when you’re going to get the block, and the reasoning for this is solid (namely, that it’s nearly impossible to get the reach-around outside-shoulder D sans dangerous play); however, I’d caution enterprising stud defenders out there to recognize the copious warnings against overzealous baiting, and to only take the inside lane (aka conceding the deep cut) when you’re certain the throw will go up–or it already has.

The Huddle’s authors don’t go into a ton of depth on the technical side of laying out, which underscores the importance of how you deploy the layout (i.e., in the context of a larger team defensive strategy) over fixating on the details. If you’re looking for a slightly more technical look at layout technique, however, I’ve posted on that previously (note that I’ve tidied up the original a little…the topic bears revisiting, and once I have some fresh victi-uh, fodder-er, athletes to work with next year, I’ll likely have some more concrete experience teaching to draw from for that purpose).

I’ve written about the mental side and visualization a bit too (I’d take the Huddle’s “Many mediocre players spent many hours visualizing these outcomes” line more as a caution against fixating on daydreams of sweet universe-point callahan layouts to the exclusion of visualizing a realistic one, rather than a condemnation of visualization itself).

The Huddle has an issue on Zone O.

My favorites (Ryan Morgan’s assertion that wings are not just a throwaway position for rookies is worth repeating, too); again, they put things a lot more succinctly than I.

I don’t see a ton of revolutionary (compared with my experience) information there, apart from the number of endorsements of the two-handler set; this says to me that zone O really comes down to a good, solid fundamental approach/understanding.

On the skill spectrum, a quick catch-throw turnaround and composure with the disc in your hand are great for any zone handler (and by extension, all players) to have–the former can be worked on pretty much anytime, while the latter would come with more throwing experience/confidence, both under pressure (ratchet it up in practice/drills) and in conditions (find it, and do it).

Knowledge goes hand in hand with skill. Recognizing what kind of zone you’re facing and where the weak points are, along with knowing what your own team’s assets are, likewise will do a lot to prepare for success. Insert Sun Tzu quote about knowing your enemy and yourself.

Quite a lot of commentary to see there.

Yours truly has a long treatise up there; I’d caution against taking a lot of the stuff as gospel though.

My methods for generating those percentages you see was a little different than simply comparing % of answers in each group: to try to control for the different sample sizes (as well as respondent sizes) in each group (whether it’s nationals vs. no-nationals or coaches vs. no-coaches) I aggregated response counts and divided by total number of teams, or players if the question entailed roster counts…essentially creating an average rate for either group, and then looked at differences between these rates. I’d encourage caution to the tune of discounting anything below 10% difference or so as being less significant, but some of the differences are really prominent and that’s the stuff I keyed in on in my opening paragraphs as they’re likely significant.

I worked on this all a few months ago…was channeling my college stats pretty hard but converting the survey responses into something SPSS would be able to work with for rigorous analysis proved beyond my time or pleasure.

All that said, if you want to take a look at the original data set (caution: I didn’t make the sheets with prettiness/usability in mind: probably best reserved for people who enjoy playing with excel) you can download the .xlsx (or .xls if you’re incompatible) here.
UPDATE: I’ve been informed that the data is not for sharing, at the lack of consent of the team captains.You might ask the Huddle for permission if you’re interested in working with the data.

I’d love to see somebody with time, desire, and means hit the data hard(perhaps some of the other Huddle contributors already have and it’s not apparent from their commentary), and I’m sure the Huddle would too.

Love the Huddle’s latest stuff.

One thing that almost every author hit on–know your teammates, know your thrower. The rest will flow from knowing your thrower, and from your thrower knowing you. It’s when things get tight that chemistry really shines, and more often than not, things get tight in the endzone.

I’m just going to stop commenting and tell you to read Gwen’s stuff. She nails it.

Be a good thrower for your decisions, not your throws. Put your throwing practice in the context of a game-time decision to make it that much more of a seamless process in high-pressure situations.

My two cents on forehands…first, read what Miranda Roth has on long backhands (she covers it very well–all of the articles in this issue have gems):

I’m all about maximizing torque when throwing—using rotation to generate power flowing into your throw. On a long backhand the first point is to step out so that when you twist your body you’re not killing your defender with a giant elbow to the face (this is easier for tall players—shorter players should focus on a quick stepout). While stepping out, I also reach the disc out as far as I can to create the longest lever possible (thus creating the most force). The last major step is to rip it—use your abs to pull your arm across and really focus on opening your body all the way toward where you are throwing.

A lot of the same rules apply for forehand hucks. Take into account your grip and your arm action, but the power all comes from the torque of the hips and torso transferring to the disc (this occurs through your arm and grip, so those things are not trivial: refine your mechanics if you find your best effort still yields poor (wobbly) results), with your core as a mediator (and mover–train your core rotationally).

The key difference between the backhand and forehand hucks is how the body generates power and how power is transferred. Forehands are much more of a finesse throw, but you can still generate a very significant amount of power using your body properly. For me, this means stepping out to the side, even slightly back, as I torque my torso back slightly, particularly at the shoulder (to load the scapula). Using my step slightly, I use the momentum and transfer that energy up from my foot to my body, as my body undulates–leg, then hip, then shoulder torque forward in time, and as the next link in the chain comes forward the previous link comes back, creating a whipping motion (Which is to say, as my shoulder is coming forward, my hip has begun to move back).

The essential component is to relax. Whereas you can usually brute force a backhand, too much tightness on a forehand will sap your power. Allow your body to flow, to seamlessly send the energy up through your body and into your arm. You will be tense at the core, but your arm will be very loose up until the moment of release (but your grip will remain tight throughout). Unlike the backhand, where the arm can do a lot of work, the arm can really only hinder a flick. You’ll see a lot of people throw with their elbow on the hip, which displays the lack of necessity for the arm very nicely–the ideal, however, is to get the elbow off the hip and leading the throw, much the same way a pitcher like Chad Bradford throws (but with more upright posture). Get that extension, but relax and let your body (esp. your shoulder) whip the disc.