Thoughts.

My Situation

I’m presently doing rotations in San Francisco for a couple months (working at California-Pacific Medical Center‘s Pacific Campus); as such, I am a long ways away from Dartmouth’s free-for-student gym access and the resources it offers. Unfortunately, my current finances and location are such that I have no close, cheap gym options to get my iron fix on. At this point, it’s a bona fide jonesing to lift heavy; there is something deeply satisfying to me about a heavy pull or nailing that last squat in a set  that is hard to recreate elsewhere, but necessity is the mother of invention, and here I am needing to gear up for another season without my old, comfortable training allies.

So, what’s the alternative? There are a range of options for the aspiring trainee without a power rack:

• Acquiring a decently-weighted kettlebell enables a lot of strength and power work without a lot of expense or equipment
• Likewise, a TRX setup allows for several motions (I’m thinking of inverted rows and other pulling movements, but also unstable pushups, ab “rollouts” and bulgarian squats with an unstable rear foot) that broaden the palate of strength training options.
• Finally, the best implement to master is the one that you carry with you every day – your own bodyweight. Many challenging movements exist that push not only your strength, but your balance and aid in the development of athleticism.

In the interest of not paying excessive baggage fees, I opted against bringing my kettlebells out here – I have put together a homemade TRX setup for under $30 that I highly recommend (though they just came out with some elastically-rigged “Rip Trainer” that I’m dying to emulate as well). I’ve been using it mostly for inverted rows but there are many, many options to incorporate this into one’s training.

General Concepts in Strength Training

But enough about that – the meat of this post is about bodyweight strength training. A general review of the notions of how to improve strength includes a few options:

1. Moving a heavy load. This engages the nervous and (depending on how heavy and how long) muscular system to both improve the capability to express the strength you have, as well as stimulate muscle growth with enough volume.
2. Moving a less-heavy load, at high speed. This method focuses more on engaging the nervous system – with an intent to move at full speed, you recruit more muscle units and therefore train more of your muscle mass on a movement. This is generally the case when doing olympic lifts or dynamic effort work on the basic lifts.
3. Moving a less-heavy or light load to the point of fatigue or failure. This method, often used by bodybuilders, is intended both to maximize time under tension for a given muscle group (believed to be a prime variable for stimulating muscle growth); additionally it’s thought that the last few reps of each set occur at a point where the smaller, weaker muscle units are so fatigued that you cannot help but recruit the larger, more powerful units, allowing you to stimulate a large percentage of the muscle to adapt, grow and improve overall strength capacity.

My personal bias has always been more for methods 1 and 2 – with method 3 you lose some of the nervous system training component (typically one ends up “training slow” doing bodybuilding work and not developing athletic qualities such as speed and explosiveness; there’s also the notion that this encourages adding less-functional muscle mass.  If you’re training for speed, every pound of excess weight, be it fat or muscle, that isn’t making you faster is slowing you down; I’m also not fond of training to failure on a regular basis, as it tends to promote more lasting fatigue and injury risk). With bodyweight work one ends up necessarily trending more toward the low-load, high-rep end of the spectrum, but there are ways to keep efforts challenging enough to develop real strength.

Increasing the Degree of Difficulty

This is something I plan to focus on – if our sweet spot is somewhere less than 15 reps/set to maintain at least some strength development, it’s important to progress in the type of movement being done to keep it challenging. Examples of this are progressing from a split squat to a Bulgarian (rear foot-elevated) split squat, or adding range to reverse lunges by doing them off of a step, or elevating one’s feet while doing pushups. One does not need weight to make such progressions.

Another way to go about this is to regularly change the exercises done. If after a few weeks pushups are feeling too easy or taking too long to get the effect you want, experiment with handstand pushups against a wall. Return to pushups again later, try a different progression, and see if allowing your body to “forget” the movement doesn’t allow it to become useful again.

High-speed Work

An additional way to go about this is to add a high-velocity component to the exercise. Again, time under tension and doing slower movements can be good for stimulating growth, but it fails to develop explosive athleticism; rather than (or ideally, in addition to) doing slow, controlled reps of your split squats, try an explosive variant like split squat jumps or scissor kicks (or work the absorptive rather than generative side of explosivity with some jumps to lunge position landings). One could even combine methods and start with an explosive variant and transition to a more controlled version once fatigue makes the explosive version too hard to sustain.

Diminishing Rest Intervals

Finally, if there’s anything I’ve learned from Crossfit it’s the magic of incorporating a time element. Sure, you might be able to do 50 pushups at one go, but how long does it take? What if every 10 pushups you alternate with some lunges or air squats? What if these pushups are at the bottom position of a burpee? If you’ll pardon this coming from a scientist, there’s something magical about what happens when you take routine exercises and integrate them into a larger circuit, when you track time and incentivize doing more work with less rest – this probably also relates to the time under tension concept, where it’s not only the overall volume, but the density, that stimulates the hormonal responses that encourage growth.

More to Come

Those are the general considerations. I’ve decided to follow more of a set program for my bodyweight training rather than wing it entirely (based off of the Vertical Jump Development Bible‘s bodyweight strength program – incidentally, the whole thing is a great read for some grounding in basic concepts of athletic training), but I’m hoping to actually lay it out more specifically along with the rest of my training plan in a future post.

I’m a big stickler for sleep, for various reasons – general health and well-being being a big one.

However, there are more tangible, concrete reasons to value your sleep, too – and the Harvard Business Review does a great job of touching on some of those needs.

As an ultimate player, you should know that throwing is a dynamic motor skill – in much the same way that professional violinists need their sleep to continue to progress, we as athletes likewise need to give ourselves appropriate time to consolidate the motor learning we do by taking the time necessary to sleep. (PS – It can help with controlling your weight, too).

Make 8 hours the minimum, not the ideal. Consider napping. Reap the benefits!

For those of you who don’t already read her blog, Melissa recently dropped a post I wrote on in-season peaking from both an endurance (tapering) and strength (deloading) perspective.

It’s the fullest bit of writing I’ve done in a while outside of the Huddle articles I’m working on (my first there should come with issue #32), and I’m pretty happy with the article, so check it out.

• Foam rolling and mobility work are pillars of athletic (and general) health.  Do them to warm-up, (and/) or include them as part of your workout itself.
• Follow your “big lifts” with related assistance work (2-4 “extra” lifts after the big one(s)) – for lower body, this means single-leg work and/or higher-rep work; for upper body, this means an appropriate balance of pulling exercises (thin pull-ups/chin-ups and rowing), grip and single-arm work.  If you’re doing full-body days rather than upper/lower split, it’s ok to mix upper-lower assistance work.
• Core work counts as assistance.  Focus on core stability (planks, holds) and rotation for ultimate; situps have less functional carryover.  Recognize that a lot of single-limb work emphasizes core strength/stability too – there are many ways to work “core work” into other exercises and save time and see (perhaps better) carryover.
• Make sure you’re pulling!  This applies to lower-body lifting (deadlifts, RDLs, cable pull-throughs – all technically “pushes” through the feet) but ESPECIALLY to the upper body.  The mirror muscles may look nice, but true power and injury prevention is rooted in the posterior chain.  Balance any upper-body pushing you do with equivalent pulling, if not with extra pulling work for the majority of us who are imbalanced (those with shoulder woes, I’m looking at you).
• Set & Rep ranges: Very much dependent on one’s goals and Training Age.  Some generalities:
  • “Big Lifts” – squat/deadlift/bench should be at relatively high loads/low rep ranges (~5 or less reps/set).  Strength first, here!
  • Novice: Focus on quality technique at relatively low set/rep ranges (3×5 for working sets, perhaps 3×8 if you’re not getting heavy).  Recovery and progress can be made on a workout-to-workout basis, so less variation in exercise selection and intensity is needed for progress – you can do the same routine over and over and still make progress.
  • Intermediate: Technique is less of a concern now, so higher-intensity and higher-volume work can be done (heavy x1,x2,x3 sets – this should be preceded by good fitness base development for any intermediates coming off of some down time).  Total reps generally need to be higher than for novices at similar % loads to generate progress – where a novice would do 3×5, an intermediate is more likely to need 5×5, at a higher % of their 1RM.  Variation in volume should occur on a weekly level (e.g., 5×5 in wk 1, 4×5 wk 2, 6×5 wk 3, and 2×5 in wk 4 to deload).  With greater training stress needed to stimulate progress, greater recovery is needed and this is enabled in part through weekly variation; broader exercise selection is usually necessary as well (even subtle shifts, e.g. from flat bench to incline bench, front to back to box squats, can stimulate new gains).
  • True advanced lifters are competitive powerlifters and the like; they’re beyond the scope of what you need for ultimate and what I’m comfortable commenting on, but adaptation occurs over even longer timeframes than weekly to volume due to the massive loads they can wield (monthly or even annually for the most elite lifters) and rather rapidly to specific exercises (necessitating rapid variation).
  • Assistance work generally operates in higher rep ranges (8-15); this is where you stimulate metabolic changes (ie, muscle growth) – the lower-rep big lifts are for cultivating strength proper.  Novices don’t need assistance work to stimulate progress as much as intermediates do.  If your goals include packing on a lot of weight, doing extra volume here (an extra set or two) can be sufficient to stimulate the extra growth – but keep in mind that most are held back not by work, but by recovery here – eat and sleep more!

There you have some of my current thinking on strength training for ultimate.  I think all of these points apply regardless of where you are in your season, but are easier to not compromise in your off-season.

When in season, keep your big goals in mind – is adding weight to this lift the most important thing?  What do you need to do in order to really thrash this coming weekend?  Keep the big picture in mind – lifting is a means to an end (strength) which is in turns another means to the more relevant end (on-field success).  It is one component.  It is not the only component, and is not the most important one. Set your goals, evaluate the tools that can help you achieve your goals, and never lose sight of that forest for the iron-bound trees you travel within.

(Two posts in two days, I know – but don’t get too excited; I’ll settle in to a lower rate soon enough.)

There’s some good new stuff springing up around the ultimate blogosphere and beyond lately – check it out:

• If you haven’t seen it yet, Skyd Magazine looks to be off to a promising start (they’re looking for writers, for any of you aspiring contributors out there).  There’s a heavy US ultimate tilt for the international readers out there, but you do see some gems coming like a series on training for ultimate, and another on building a championship team.
• Speaking of training for ultimate, check out Melissa’s training blog and Ultimate Results for some great information and ultimate application. I Like the post on holiday gifts for the ultimate player – the books are gems (I’ve added a few more recommendations in the comments as well).
• Skyd links up a Breakmark post on off-season training; as the title alludes, it’s a simplistic model and in my opinion focusing just on GPP is missing out on an opportunity to develop along several other modalities as well (I’m thinking primarily of strength here – GPP workouts are a great adjunct for recovery days after a good lift. That said, interval training and speed work can fit in at this point too, depending on your goals).
• Parinella and others have linked up Lou Burruss’ series on Cheating to Win (Without Cheating).  Codifies a lot of the unspoken agreements that teams make at the highest levels – his point about how it’s ironically a bigger issue in college because of the disparity in what teams expect (whereas in club everyone anticipates their opponent employing such strategies) rings very true to me, and is an issue any rising college squad needs to address.
• Speaking of the Huddle authors, other news includes the Huddle being absorbed into USA Ultimate‘s infrastructure.  This is a huge boost for USAU and a great opportunity for them to continue to make steps forward from being an amorphous and anonymous governing body to one more actively involved in and contributing to the ultimate community in meaningful ways beyond running the Series’.  I’ve hopped on board the writing staff officially now along with some 40 others who’ve contributed to the Huddle in the past; looking forward to helping continue the site’s massive contribution to developing the sport.

Ironside vs. Chain, Semifinals, '09 Club Nationals. Photo taken by Keegan Uhl.

While the college season is picking up steam, a lot of club players are just getting in gear for the coming tryouts and season.

Ballometrics has been maintaining a fitness list for the past few months (tryouts start soon, if you’re interested in playing competitive mixed out of Boston, drop a line); people are starting to do track workouts now that the land is thawing.

I sent the following to the list about doing pre-season track workouts, which segued into a lot of thoughts on running form. As we still have the luxury of training without the constant performance demand of weekend tournaments and practices, it’s a great time to focus on technique and go into the season not only with a good base of strength and conditioning, but efficient form, as well.
Continue Reading »

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.
Continue Reading »