Breathing and Training

What Do They Have in Common?

Well, actually quite a bit…

Breathing patterns can change our pH levels, which in turn can change the ability for oxygen to dissociate with hemoglobin, which ultimately affects the amount of oxygen that can reach working tissues. Excess carbon dioxide exhalation can throw off breathing and health patterns, leadings to a cycle of negative over breathing symptoms.

One of the issues with the way we breathe is the rate. Often we exhale at a rate that is too great and our inhalations too large. Obviously this is not the case for everyone, but it can influence our training.

The Benefits

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The Training Process Deconstructed

*This is inspired by some of Viru’s work, but I kinda put my own little twist to it.

The Breakdown:

Top:

The training goal. Based on your training goal, you will have a specific understanding of what motor qualities you want to target.

In order to improve these motor qualities, we have to apply a load. A load may be applied through repetition (single event), summation (multiple summaries events), or duration (the length of that event).

Left:

Depending on how these are applied, your load with fall in one of the above (left side) mentioned categories.

Depending on the category of loading, specific molecular changes will occur.

Right:

Returning to the right side of the picture (repetition, summation, and duration). The way you specifically sequence those variables, you will hopefully get a specific organized process of how you want to achieve the top training goal.

Once you combine the acute molecular changes that occur with the loading process, alongside the sequencing in which you apply these loads, you will get a specific adaptation geared towards improving your training goal.

Why deconstruct the training process?

Yes, it might seem useless, but if we can understand the basic components of something we can get an idea of how to make it better.

It’s the difference between being a cook and a chef. A chef knows all of the ingredients in a dish and can modify a plate to meet the customer’s needs. A cook only follows a set of instructions, regardless of the customer’s needs.

Applied Principles of Optimal Power Development

Isometrics For Performance

Functional Training

The Breakdown

Stole this graph from Atko Viru, but made a small modification to it.

As hard as we try, we do not know what’s happening inside the human body at all times. We perform an exercise, we see an increase in  performance over time, and then make large assumptions as to what is occurring.

The little black mystery box (seen in picture above) is our body. Changes at the cellular level will always occur first and eventually lead to morphological changes. Based on the training stimulus, we attempt to modify the internal state of the body. Continue reading “Functional Training”

Special Exercise Selection

Make it Simple

Special exercise selection is not as complex as it may seem. For reference, read some of Verkhoshansky’s dynamic correspondence work.

In short, the movement being trained, typically a kinetic pair (a piece of the movement) needs to be trained in a similar force producing fashion that is is done in the actual sport. If we’re talking about the vertical jump, performing a knee extension on the machine is not really comparable to knee extension during a squat.

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The Sympathetic Nervous System: Its Role in Exercise

The Stereotype

The sympathetic nervous system is too often looked down upon. We erroneously associate it with hyperactivation from external psychological stressors and the inability to properly get into a “recovery” state.

Without our SNS, we would never cope with any stressor, period. It’s time we start talking about the SNS with respect, as it plays an integral part in optimal performance.

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Relative Strength Matters

Why Body Weight and Relative Strength Matter

The picture below is a simple mathematical representation of why pounds are not created equal in sport.

In the above theoretical situation, there are two athletes. One weighs 90kg the other 100kg. Let’s assume that they both start from a static position (sitting on a box) and jump straight up into the air. For both athletes, the jump took 1 second to perform (yes very slow) and they both left the ground at 4.4 m/s. Thus, they both jumped the same height. However, the question is, how much more force did the heavier athlete have to create?

Well, the net impulse difference was 44kgs between the athletes, despite only a 10kg difference in weight. Continue reading “Relative Strength Matters”

“The Muscle-Tendon Spring”

MTU

A.V Hill was one of the great sports performance pioneers, whether he knew it or not. One of his many contributions included the 3 element model of the musculoskeletal-tendinous unit (MTU).

In short, it is broken up into 3 regions.

  1. Contractile element (CE). These are your actively producing contractile structures (myosin and actin).
  2. Parallel elastic component (PEC). Just kind of a fancy way to say the stuff that surrounds the contractile element, but isn’t actively contracting, making it passive. (The PEC and CE kind of work together. Because the PEC surrounds the CE, when the muscle tightens up, so does the PEC).
  3. Series elastic component (SEC). This is just the tendon, which if you laid a muscle out on a table, it would be “in series” or basically just an extension of the CE and PEC.

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Fast Force

“Fast Force”

The idea that velocity is an independent quality, especially in terms of physics, is a little erroneous. We often, including myself, label exercises as “force” or “velocity” movements. However, such statements are used to simply label the quality we are targeting and not necessarily to identify the underlying mechanism.

Movement occurs from forces acting upon an object; there is no way around it. However, the way we display these forces can vary quite a bit. As noted in the breakdown of F=MA, one can quickly see that in order to improve the magnitude of the movement, and ultimately its velocity, we have to apply more force.

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Intra- and Intermuscular Coordination

Intramuscular coordination is the firing pattern of fibers within an individual muscle.

For example, prior to a ballistic action, there appears to be a silent period in electrical activity at the local muscle. The thought is that such a silent period is a form of neural inhibition that turns off all motor units to make sure that when the action is about to be performed, non are in a refractory state. Thus, allowing for maximal motor unit activation.

Intermuscular coordination has to do with how muscles fire in coordination with other muscles.

 

The green arrows suggest that all muscles have acted together in the most efficient way.

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Small Adjustments: Staggered Stance

Asymmetry in Sport

Jump exercises in training are usually performed in an extremely controlled environment. In addition, they are typically done bilaterally with an attempt to have each foot hit at the same time; a symmetrical stance. There is nothing wrong with this, however, a further progression towards complexity is rarely made.

In action, sport is quite asymmetrical. By no means am I saying all exercises need to be performed just like sport, but variety doesn’t hurt.

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