Young Functional Training

Build, Connect, Perform
1. Auflage 2019
ISBN: 978-1-78500-580-0
Verlag: Crowood
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 160 Seiten

Functional Training: Build, Connect, Perform aims to provide a framework that can be used by anyone who wants to develop an athletic physique and perform better in their chosen sporting activity. It provides a varied programme that aims to reduce injuries in competition whilst maximizing all-round athleticism and continued progression. Tried and tested with athletes around Europe, the ideas in this book offer a solid foundation which will keep your performance gains developing for years and help you develop programmes to suit your body type, experience and athletic development needs. This book covers: building a foundation of strength, connecting the strength to be a functional athlete and performing without the risk of over-training. An instructional guide to help you develop an athletic physique and perform better in your chosen sporting activity, it is fully illustrated with 200 colour photographs and 20 diagrams and tables, and contains a Foreword by Richard Attwood.

Ross Young received a scholarship from British Rowing to complete his Master's Degree in Strength & Conditioning Coaching from Teesside University in 2010. He has worked with athletes ranging from amateur weekend warriors to full time professionals in a variety of sports as diverse as rugby union, rowing, table tennis, triathlon, golf and equestrian. Ross has been a coach at University and Youth Talent level with Gloucester Rugby's U16 academy. He has also held consultant coaching roles for a number of rowing and rugby clubs and provided strength and conditioning consultancy for Gibraltar's National Rugby team.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Young, Ross

Leseproben

CHAPTER 1

PRINCIPLES AND FOUNDATIONS

What Do we Mean by ‘Functional’?

To be functional is to be useful, to have purpose, to be well designed. How applicable is the solution to the challenge in front? This does not necessarily mean does this replicate, mirror or tick every box of the criteria, so much as does the solution provide enough to make an improvement or performance enhancement to a situation?

An alternative definition of function may be more applicable to human performance and is defined as ‘an activity that is natural to or the purpose of a person or thing’. Therefore being functional could be seen as having a special activity, purpose, or task, i.e. a functional role.

Function could therefore be described in terms of training and movement as the performance of activities to purposefully enhance the natural movement ability of the person in order for their movement expression in competition to be improved.

How is functionality measured? We critique. We identify specific items of the action, process and/or performance, to identify the most important components. In the workplace or business world this may be in the form of targets sometimes referred to as Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), which again break down the role of the person or team and the performance of that unit. In any case, they are checklists, specific figures or targets that need to be met in order for a performance increase to occur.

In sport and fitness, we will also identify areas key to success within a given challenge. Within team sports we ask questions such as have the athletes added to the overall performance of the team, the competition? Have the athletes been a useful asset? Were their performances purposeful or wasted?

Was their game plan well designed? These types of questions are being asked of the athletes periodically. They are often answered through performance indicators. For example, did the athlete get bigger, faster and/ or stronger? We can quantify these with changes in body weight, specific speed over a set distance comparison, or via endurance or strength testing protocols for comparison of the result pre and post training or competition.

In the field of performance enhancement, the coach must be critical of him or herself in the same way, and especially critical about their chosen methods, or philosophy. The coach’s role is to enhance performance on the field, court or pitch. Therefore the training schedule must be useful to the athletes, it must have a purpose, a reason for performing and not be there to fill time in the daily schedule. This all culminates in is it well designed? Does it do what is required (or more than) for the athlete to perform at the optimal level for the individual?

Often coaches can get sidetracked by new ideas or buzz words and lose themselves. After years of interacting with many sports coaches, trainers and professionals, it is overwhelmingly obvious that the simple basics work fantastically well and will always work. There are no short cuts that last.

These ideas and buzzwords have been used within the fitness world to enhance the appeal of a trainer’s methods and or philosophies. Throughout the past twenty-five years a number of these buzz words have come and gone as the thing to be seen to be advocating at any one time; they include core stability, instability training, tabata intervals, sport-specific, threshold, fartlek and non-specific fitness. The phrase ‘functional training’ seems to have been hovering for a long time, waiting for its chance in the spotlight though not really enjoying as much time spent in understanding it as other methods. This is likely the reason why many athletes, coaches and parents have possibly mislabelled functional training, or been misinformed as to what it really means, and have followed the route of sport-specific training, often too early in an athlete’s career.

Sport-specific training encompasses repetition of the main movements within the sport. Take the sport of rowing, for example. Traditional training views are that the athlete must become more efficient at the movement sequence of rowing, and the way to do that is repetition. I have personally seen hundreds of athletes being ‘educated’ by their coaches post-race that the way to get the first place is by doing more miles than the winners, and that they will be upping their training on the water and on the rowing ergometer. In that view the rower who at the point of competition has performed the most strokes should in theory win. However, this is not necessarily the case. To illustrate this, Helen Glover became a world silver medallist just three years after taking up the sport of rowing following a talent identification programme in the UK.

It is this misguided view that could also be damaging the next generation of athletes. As the information on training is becoming ever more readily available through the internet, parents and coaches are finding increasing numbers of supporters of sport-specific training, who are pushing this idea onto other coaches and athletes in the hope that getting the ‘10,000 hours’ practice required to become a master of a skill or sport will produce the next sporting superstar. This focus on a single sport from a young age, which in the industry is called early specialization, often leads to the early drop out of the sport by those who don’t make the grade quick enough.

Functional training is arguably the reverse of sport-specific training. It generalizes across sports and identifies common themes of movement in relation to orientation, loading and the true muscle action. These components take us a step closer to understanding the term functional training.

Looking at movements and applying what you know about those movements to an athlete in his or her discipline allows you to use a less restrictive training approach. Typical actions you see in land sports involve sprinting, jumping, rotational striking and moving from side to side. So surely we can identify that training movements to enhance these general sport actions can enhance a player’s performance. To improve a rugby centre’s speed over the first 10m will be similar to improving a high jumper’s speed during the approach and similar to a soccer goalkeeper getting off his line to a through ball. The end result may be different but the methods to achieve the desired outcome are comparable.

Functional training therefore looks to enhance primarily the sport’s general skills rather than performing only specific exercises to enhance a specific sporting action. That is not to say sport-specific drills and actions are excluded but a holistic movement approach is taken that should allow sport-specific movements under its umbrella.

The Mechanical Gym Problem

By looking at how we play sports we can identify weaknesses within modern gym technologies and why some training tools are more beneficial to the functional athlete’s training programme.

With a few exceptions, the following statements are true for many sports:

•Sports are played in upright positions on your feet, though the amount of time that both the athlete’s feet are in contact with the ground is low

•Sporting environments are dynamic; there are forces outside of the athlete’s control that will influence performance and movement

•Sporting movements encompass the whole body in motion.

Most modern gyms in our towns and cities are now well equipped with machines for every muscle group; most of these machines allow for simple understanding of the cause and effect nature of training. Look at the pec deck or chest press. This machine will help you build a bigger chest because the muscles used in the action are the pectorals. No doubt the constant pounding of the machine will give you a bigger chest, as performing endless leg extensions will give you bulging quadriceps, and preacher curls provide you with T-shirt-gripping biceps. But answer this, in modern popular sport, where has the biggest bench been the difference in winning and losing a rugby, soccer or hockey match? Or where has having the highest numbers on the leg extension given a tennis player an ability to place a drop shot?

The answer: they haven’t. Where the exercise involves sitting or lying and moving a single joint in isolation there is little function and the exercise is placed low on the functional continuum.

If the exercises we perform are within the remit of a sport’s general action, then we can more effectively train a useful component of the athlete’s game. Therefore, the more functional exercises we can incorporate into our training the better results we will have. Not only that, but the better our time will be spent. Exercises that challenge not only our relative strength, but our coordination and balance will have a greater benefit to the dynamic component of sport.

From the above observations, functional training will consist of exercises performed in an upright position, normally with feet in contact with the ground. They will add external stressors to the athlete to challenge stability and body control and will encompass whole body movements and sub-actions thereof. And they will naturally progress onto single leg variations that will be useful when performing in sports.

There are exceptions to the basic rules and when it is necessary we will address this. All exercises should have a purpose, and those that won’t don’t need to be in your programme and will not be in this book. That said, this is not an exhaustive text on what exercises are functional, but it will help to guide your...