You’re physically and mentally tired. Muscles burn and joints ache. Your heart is still racing from the hour that was just spent training. Whether you worked on your strength, power, agility, speed, or just general fitness, you left it all out there. Now that the easy stuff is done, it’s time to get to work.! What? That’s right, what you do in the facility – all the blood, sweat, and tears – is the easy part. The hard part is what you do the other twenty-three hours of the day. How you spend your time between training sessions is what determines how successful your training will be. This is the time for rest and recovery and it begins the second that training ends.
Recovery between training session is the key to your success. This includes a long list of strategies to help you maximize your efforts. It includes nutrition, hydration, massage/myofascial release, and low intensity work.

• Proper nutrition is vital. Athletes and fitness enthusiasts alike need the right amount of calories, fats, protein, and carbohydrates to ensure adequate growth and repair following training. For a quick review of nutrition, I recommend you check out this quick list http://adrenalinesf.com/parents/nutrition-tips-athletes/.
• It would be great to be able to get a massage following a training session but this is hardly feasible for most of us. Instead, try “rolling out.” The pain felt while rolling across a piece of foam is only temporary and it’s well worth the feeling of relief after you are done. Getting stiff and sore muscles to loosen up can make a world of difference on your next training session.
• Low intensity work (like a mobility session) or some light cardiovascular work can also be a useful tool. Elevating the heart rate a little bit and getting some blood flow through sore muscle tissue can help clear some of the nasty by-products of training by the way, lactic acid does not cause muscle soreness). A light jog or bike ride can really help the legs feel fresh and remove that “heavy” feeling. Mobility is something everyone can benefit from utilizing. After most of our strength training days we will do some mobility work with the athletes. For those that are in-season with their sport and dealing with the daily grind of practice, we may even have them do a full training session of just mobility. It’ can be painful and unpleasant at the time but the muscles generally feel relaxed and a little more fresh upon completion.

One of the most important aspects of rest and recovery is activating your parasympathetic nervous system post-exercise. While you are training, your sympathetic nervous system is in full gear. Your sympathetic nervous system is basically your “fight or flight” system. It heightens arousal, pupils dilate, your respiratory rate increases, your heart beats faster and with more force, blood flow increases to your muscles and decreases to other organs, sweat glands become more active, and so on. This is great when you are training but it makes it very difficult to relax and recover. If your sympathetic nervous system is left on for too long, it can start to damage different systems throughout your body. On the other hand, your parasympathetic nervous system is essentially the opposite. It relaxes the body’s different systems. Respiration slows, your heart rate comes back to normal, sweating ceases, blood flow returns to normal. All of this is essential if you are going to recover fully from a training session. There are several different techniques for activating this system and finding the right one for you is an important aspect of your training. There are diaphragmatic breathing techniques (belly breathing) which focuses thought on deep, rhythmic breathing in a relaxed state to help clear the mind. Meditation to help focus the mind and reach a relaxed state works for some. Yoga and stretching has been shown to help some achieve this relaxation. Finding your own way to relax is crucial to your training success. Tony can be seen floating above his house in the lotus position.
The final piece to the puzzle is rest. Getting a proper amount of rest (sleep) is absolutely crucial for achieving optimal results. Sleep is when the good stuff happens. Neurological repair and growth occurs, mental fatigue is alleviated, positive hormonal changes occur (growth hormone actually spikes during sleep!), tissue repair and growth take place, and the list goes on and on. John O’Sullivan and Mark McClusky point out that sleep is the ultimate performance enhancing tool that nobody really takes advantage of (I highly recommend watching their conversation, it‘s insightful and very thought provoking). The amount of sleep needed differs from person to person, but the general consensus is somewhere between 7-9 hours.
Training, whether it be for athletics or general fitness, is not an easy thing. That’s why not everyone does it. Only a select few of you are willing to make the sacrifices necessary to do it. Time spent in the facility is a small piece of the puzzle, what you do with the other twenty-three hours is what makes you successful.

For those who are visual learners, check out this simple graph below. As you train, you drop below your base fitness level. As you rest and recover, you return to your base fitness level and even “overshoot” your original fitness level (“supercompensation”). This overshoot represents your improvement from training.

Wu- Wei:  The concept of Effortless Action

“If you can’t move, you can’t help us.”

Coaches may not say that exact quote, but that is the bottom line.  Every sport revolves around the ability to move, including running, throwing, cutting, catching, pushing, pulling, crawling, climbing, etc.  These primal, fundamental patterns are ingrained at young ages and nurtured throughout the developmental stages of pre-pubescence to professional levels.  Why do some seem to move with little to no effort while others seem to struggle?

I can only offer this explanation as conjecture, but it seems that the more a kid plays,  the earlier a kid plays, and the more variety of playing, the better athlete they tend to be.  I have no scientific proof of this so don’t look for any references, but I have the luxury of our “lab” at ASF and anecdotal experience  to lean on.  For those of you who grew up in the 80’s and 90’s, you likely remember how your “training” was the backyard.  There was always that one kid that was faster than you. In fact, it was my informal introduction to speed and agility:  Small = fast…or you get destroyed!  I am more and more convinced that it was those after school games that introduced young kids to the trifecta of early athletic exposure (young, frequency, variety).  Those kids tend to be the best overall athletes as they get older and display Effortless Action when it comes to sport performance.  For years, they were honing their skills to the point that everything appears to come easy.  However, it only appears that way because of the years and years of Deliberate practice, albeit unintentional.  They have reached a state loosely based on a concept called Wu-Wei, in which there appears to be a state of non-doing, non-effort.  It is a concept that master musicians, among others, tend to display.  They just seem to flow through a performance as if they are not even trying!  It is an awesome sight to behold.  What do you think?  Is there anything that you can relate to this state of effortless action?

On a somewhat related thought, I love this quote from the great Vern Gambetta:  Human motion is beautiful to observe. The older I get and the longer I coach the more I have a sense of wonder at the intricacies of the connections, rhythms, and varied tempos of running, jumping and throwing and all the various permutations. The bodies ability to constantly self-organize, to adjust according to the movement problem it has to solve is amazing. The wisdom of the body is wondrous and infinite; there are no limitations – just possibilities. As coaches we need to focus on the possibilities and take advantage if the wisdom of the body. Think connections and flow to facilitate what the body can do, don’t get in the way.

originally written on September 21, 2010.

I was recently watching a group of kids struggling the other day and was trying to figure out why. Was the drill too tough? Were they too tired? Did I not coach it correctly? As I left that night, I came to the conclusion that there could have been any number of reasons, but the fact that they were all physically not as strong as they should be stuck out more than anything else.

In looking at our program design layout, you will notice that we always perform strength and power training after our movement skills. Effective and efficient movement of the body is priority number one. However, I am convinced that movement patterns, especially speed, will only be reinforced and improved through gaining strength. So, I am going to modify our training protocols to include more strength than we have before.

Here are some thoughts as to why strength training is so good for young kids:

1) Before the onset of puberty and during puberty, the Central Nervous System can be thought of as mold-able, or plastic. It is still capable of being introduced to a stimulus, adapting and starting the process of changing relatively quickly. Older athletes and adults are capable of this also but not at the level of young children. These tools will form the foundation for which further changes can occur.

2) We can move a kid as we strengthen them. Typically, strength training is limited to the space of the equipment in use, but in our world of bands, sleds, climbing, crawling, etc, the movement patterns and the strength patterns happen simultaneously. An example would be a walking sled press instead of a bench press, or a sled march instead of a squat. That doesn’t mean we will not use those exercises, but there are options beside the traditional means.

3) While it is a cliche, balance of the body is important for performance and injury prevention. Generally, balance will involve front/back, side/side and top/bottom; it will not always mean an equal ratio, however. For instance, our baseball players will always perform 2 to 3 posterior upper body movements for every anterior movement. Runners may perform more hip extension than hip flexion. Jiu Jitsu players and wrestlers may do core work on their backs more often than a football player. Once the body is looked at Generally, it can be broken down Specifically and Competitively based on the demands and needs of the sport.

4) Strength, more than any other motor skill, seems to have the greatest transfer to improvements in all other motor skills. As strength improves, acceleration, deceleration, jump height, jump distance, and speed typically improve. Couple that with proper teaching of the mechanics of movement, and the athlete is poised to be a dangerous weapon.

5) Similar to #4, as strength improves, force production and force absorption also improve. Sports, in the big picture, rely on producing and absorbing forces, either into the ground, an object, or a person. Take running for example: As an athlete accelerates, he/she must be able to apply enough force into the ground to create the desired speed over a desired distance. If they are not strong (enough), they will not get to where the want to go as fast as they should (this is a very simple overview). Conversely, if they need to decelerate and change direction, they must be able to control their bodyweight, absorb any forces needed and slow down momentum, and possibly re-accelerate.

6) Many times strength is measured by how much an athlete lifts in the weight room, and rightly so. If Athlete A squats 400 and Athlete B squats 300, Athlete A is stronger…or is he? In powerlifting, that is true. Weight room strength is a tool that must be able to transfer into sport. Much has been debated about how weightlifters and powerlifters can hang with sprinters for the first10-20 yards of a race based on their strength levels, but don’t win the race. That is for another time, but strength for strength’s sake is only as good as the degree of transfer. Athletes should see a positive correlation between improved strength and improved performance. Also of importance is the concept of relative strength. There are a few interpretations of relative strength:

* Strength relative to bodyweight;

* Strength relative to their maximum or absolute strength (expressed as %1RM);

* Strength relative to the forces found within a given sport (ground reaction forces, for example).

Athletes obviously need both relative strength and absolute strength to be successful.

7) The variation of “stuff” that a kid can use to get stronger will yield more results than the traditional machines found in gyms. It is widely accepted that the more stimuli a child is exposed to, the greater the long term adaptations (which is why it is also a good idea to let your kids play as many sports as possible at a young age). The tools they get exposed to at ASF include:

* Dragging sleds

* Bands

* Medicine Balls

* Kettlebells/dumbells

* Tires

* Pneumatic resistance

* and of course bodyweight.

8) Puberty has a way of evening out the playing field at times; who was once the small, slow kid is now the fast, bigger kid. Once kids accept that puberty gives them the tools to get where they want to get, they can enjoy the process of learning how to do everything correctly. Personally, I was very small until 18 (135# as a senior in high school) and then in college put on muscle like I was on steroids! I know all of my years of free play and sports gave me the foundation to really take off (albeit after high school ended). So, parents and kids should trust in the natural, progressive way of the human body and be patient while building a neurological library of information.

9) Believe it or not, overweight kids thrive when it comes to strength training. It does not involve the things they are not good at, or do not like: running, jumping, teams, gym class, getting picked last in games, etc. It is one-on-one activity. The extra weight that has been a “burden” to this point actually prepares them to be somewhat stronger than average weight kids. I am not suggesting to become overweight to get stronger, but I am saying that if you cannot find the activity that suits you because of your size, try strength training. It will certainly lead to #10…

10) Let’s face it, getting stronger makes you perform better. It also improves your performance from the neck up by helping confidence, body image, self-esteem, discipline, pain tolerance and healthy competition (“what’s your bench?!”). I have seen kids in one hour improve their attitude just by increasing the amount of weight that they lifted compared to their previous session. That is priceless.

11) Similar to #10, I truly believe that kids can also become more aggressive with strength training. Sports are hard~physically, mentally and emotionally. Aggression can pull you through even the most challenging obstacles. Before I go further, my definition of aggression always involves sportsmanlike conduct, respect for the game and your opponents, and playing within the rules of the sport. Aggression does not imply fighting, cheating or bullying. It is a mental tool to use when needed: when you need to attack a defender, grab a loose ball, win the race, or always being ready. I use the word “aggression” quite often as I see more and more kids going through the motions but not really attacking that particular drill or exercise.

12) Finally, strength lays the foundation for longer term consequences. Statistically, most kids will not play sports in college and even fewer will become professional athletes. However, if strength training is introduced correctly at a young age, it can be done forever. Conversely, if it is used as punishment (“drop and give me 20!”), do you really think a child is going to want to do that voluntarily? We are in a position to affect not only the present, but the future and how healthy this generation becomes.

There you go….I am sure I missed a few, but these are the big ones. Now, GET STRONG!

Every now and then, we will devote an entire training session to playing various games.  While the casual observer may construe this as unproductive, a waste of time and a waste of money, we beg to differ.  If you would like to read our rationale, this post by Brian Macdonald is for you…

You, the parent, walk into Adrenaline a little earlier than you usually do to check and see how your kid is doing with their training.  You walk in, and all you see is a game being played.  You look at your watch and see there is still 30 minutes left; 30 minutes that should be devoted to hard work and training.  Instead, it seems to just be play time.  You think to yourself, “This is not what I am paying for.  I expect to see sweat, yelling, and hard work.”

I have heard too many times from women that they are scared to weight train because they will look manly or bulky.  This is completely false.  There are so many mistakes that women make in the gym because they don’t know anything other than what female magazines tell them.  Women love to focus on cardio and ab exercises, when in reality this could be ruining the physique they are striving for.  There are so many articles out there that share the mistakes women make in the weight room and give great exercises program ideas.  One article that I love focuses on these mistakes and how to correct them.  Check it out!

http://www.t-nation.com/training/10-mistakes-women-make-in-the-gym