#contrast method

Link: https://www.nsca.com/contentassets/b45d7cb117f4488388ccf15097c05e3c/ptq-7.3.8-how-to-utilize-contrast-training-for-strength-power-and-performance.pdf

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Link: https://www.nsca.com/contentassets/916a5692979346ce9a3a83c08c67e1e1/nsca-coach-9.4.3-the-french-contrast-method-theory-and-application.pdf

Note: the track athlete on the cover is Corey Everson, who later became ms olympia

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One of the timeless, effective ways to prepare athletes for maximal power outputs is simply: Playing team sports. 

Typical "general" warmups (marching drills, active stretches, etc.) don't come close in so many cases. 

Every time I've used sport play as a warmup for jump or sprint testing, the results are substantially better than a "general" warmup, and other coaches have found the same. 

Although useful, "standard" warmups can only bring an athlete to a particular level of output

But, how can we "close the gap" between our typical warmups, and what team sports can offer, to help athletes be powerful and explosive?

Amongst several answers, one may surprise you: 

Muscular fatigue. 

It's interesting, because we don't tend to relate fatigue with power.  In fact, the majority of coaches, and coaching literature would advise to avoid fatigue like the plague when working explosiveness. 

At the same time, when you play team sports 

There is fatigue

It's intense

It's repeat burst in nature

It gets your aerobic system (and all energy systems) involved 

It taxes linear, lateral and rotational movement pathways

There is a limit to this.  

Some fatigue is good, but too much can be a problem.  A small to moderate level of fatigue can actually "activate" the muscle by an enhancement of the metabolic pathway, in addition to the neural coordination demand. 

We also see light-to-moderate fatigue methods, coming out of the "DB Hammer" system, used by sprint coach Chris Korfist, such as 30 second single leg line hops, and 20-40 second hip flexor swings, interspersed with short sprints.

When I was in college, if you were feeling flat in your high jumping, my coach told me to "sprint a 200 fast", to get your system going.  It seemed silly given the typical "warmup" protocol, but it worked!

In high school, my highest jump-touch (11'7" at 6'1" tall) came immediately after practice and a bunch of fast COD and wind-sprints, on short rest, that most definitely had my aerobic system punching hard, as well as many muscular pathways. There had been plenty of those "fatiguing", sprint-heavy practices leading up to that point as well.

These methods can be highly effective, but there is also some finesse when it comes to what muscles to fatigue, and how much to do. There is a line between "activation" and "lactate bath". 

While "activating" fatigue is beneficial, over-conditioning is not

There are also some muscles that do better with moderate fatigue than others (such as the hip flexors and calves).  

I've been fortunate to have had conversations with brilliant coaches, such as Christian Thibaudeau, and Chris Korfist, speaking on the nature of light ot moderate fatigue, and its activation potential for power performance. 

A great place to start, is mixing 20-30" single leg, maximal rate, line hops in with your other explosive work, and go from there.  Or just play that game of pickup basketball before your next jumping test.

Go Deeper

Christian Thibaudeau podcast on manipulating fatigue in performance training (and much more). 

Perhaps one of the most defining aspects of training like an athlete, is working the body for multiple qualities of performance.

When people start a fitness journey, they often work on only one quality, such as burning fat, or gaining strength.  This certainly can make one's initial goals easier to see and achieve.  This being said, athletic movement encompasses much more than a single quality.  

Being athletic requires a balance of strength, speed, elasticity, movement quality + skill, endurance (yes, someendurance), and finally, doing meaningful things in one's movement/training regime.

This doesn't mean that all of these elements are going to have equal time and share, or emphasis in a program, but they should be accounted for. 

To make the spectrum of athletic movement capabilities easier to define and train, I wanted to highlight 8 concepts for training "athleticism", in today's email.

They are as follows. 

Move at High Velocity

Catch (and Throw) Flying Weights

Build Your Springs

Prioritize the Gait Cycle

Roll and Dive

Move With Rhythm

Express Variability

Use Sports and Tasks to Drive Adaptation

8 Keys to Making a Training Program More Athletic

1.Move at High Velocity

Despite the debate on how much endurance/conditioning an athletic performance program should ultimately have, we know for sure that moving at high velocity in the form of sprinting, throwing, swinging, jumping, and re-directing momentum in sport and in training, is a requirement for achieving one's ultimate potential and adaptations as an athlete. 

Moving at high velocity, particularly in sprinting, represents the most intensely coordinated effort the body can produce.

For anyone who has spent any significant chunk of time simply lifting, "conditioning", or both, and not performing high velocity movement, you quickly realize just how large the divide is between typical gym/conditioning elements, and moving at high velocity in sport. 

2. Catch (and Throw) Flying Weights

There is a pretty regular debate on whether or not Olympic lifts should be in an athletic performance program.  To me, this shouldn't be so much a debate, as it should be focusing on the general role of catching and throwing (often) medium to heavy objects. 

We can catch and throw objects for athleticism in the form of medicine balls (likely the easiest, and also highly athletic).  

We can swing kettlebells, which also involves a "catch and throw" mechanism.  We can also do Olympic lifts which is the throwing and catching of heavier weights. 

To me, instead of spending time trying to validate using, or not using, one tool, we should spend more time understanding the nature of ballistic movements, and ensuring that regardless of the specific method utilized, that they are performed well.

I definitely lean towards using Olympic lifts for athletic populations, when appropriate (i.e. I generally use them for track, but not for tennis, for example), but at the same time, if I was relegated to Medicine Balls and Kettlebells, or even sandbags (which are great, by the way) my program wouldn't suffer, as I'd ensure athletic ways to experience the catching and releasing of these implements.  

Sometimes the shift itself from one to the other (KB/Med Ball to Olympic, or vice versa) can actually be a novelty that induces athletic gains as well. 

3. Build Your Springs

If you want to learn a fundamental aspect of the "spring-like" nature of athletic ability, watch children play on the playground, and watch them skip and gallop (things they do naturally). Outside of skipping around as a kid just being a fun thing to do, I also see this type of motion in children as learning how to manage and utilize elastic energy in a rhythmic manner on an instinctual level. 

Jumping rope and hop-skotch are other basic spring-like qualities that are written into the play of children all over the world, building feet and ankles, alongside laughter, smiles and community play. 

So much of the plyometric training we see in high school, college and pro populations are iterations and basic intensifications of many of these general child-hood activities. 

Take for example, the quick-foot ladder work that Mac McClung did in his basement growing up, or the hop, gallop, bound basics that John Garrish uses with his high school team sport and track and field groups.  

These can all be traced back to even more basic "spring-like" activities that we see happening from an early age. 

4. Prioritize the Gait Cycle

The feet and lower leg need to be able to return energy well to be athletic. At the same time, "plyometric" exercise is only part of the equation, when it comes to maximizing our spring and speed.  One of the most potent speed and elasticity exercises available is also the most simple:

This is the gait cycle.  Walking.  Running.  Sprinting.

In my time coaching and training, I've found that the overall elasticity and speed of the body is easily and effectively trained, via sprinting and running variations.

This is a primary reason that "long sprint" variations are such a non-negotiable in my training programs for those who seek to maximize their elastic abilities.  Playing team sport also offers an exposure to the gait cycle that is also extremely potent, and variable in nature (curvilinear running, accelerations, changes of direction, etc.). 

Ultimately, not all running is created equally.  Athletes "slogging" through a long sprint workout is going to have a drastically different impact than a highly rhythmic, springy execution of the training. There is an element of art to it.

We can complement and build on the elasticity found in the sprinting pattern with plyometric work, but the more we foundationally understand acceleration, sprinting, and sprint variations/mechanics, the more we can derive from basic human locomotion, to maximize our overall athletic ability.  

5. Roll and Dive

If you watch skillful, high level athletes on the field, what is the major thing you notice that might separate them from their competitors?  

In a "skill heavy" sport, such as basketball, you could have an extremely skilled shooter.  In tennis, you could have an individual with an incredible touch with a racquet.  

At the same time, in any sort of "invasion" sport, and sports with contact and collisions as part of the nature of movement, the ability to roll and dive safely and effectively, not only can help keep an athlete safer in the midst of chaos, but also create play-making opportunities (such as in the case of touchdown-flips in football). 

Beyond even the mechanics of the game, the ability to dive and roll represents a fearless nature.  It shows movement ability in the form of controlled risk-taking to score points and make plays.  It also requires body and trunk control to manage the impending impact of the ground, and the control needed to do so filters into many athletic activities. 

You see this, not only in team sport, but in the "diving" nature of limbs in sport outputs, such as javelin throw, or high jumping.  Take Johannes Vetter, for example, who has produced the #2 javelin throw in history.  The leading action of his leg, into the throw, represents a "dive" forward, which takes a combinations of fearlessness, body awareness, and extreme skill.  The way a high jumper sets their leg into the plant for the takeoff is similar.  

With all of this in mind, taking some time to program safe and simple rolling, and basic dive-roll progressions, that allow athletes some "air time", and ability to "catch" their bodies in potentially awkward, or dis-advantageous positions against the ground, is another important aspect of global athleticism, and athletic qualities. For more dynamic work (like javelin or high jump) a plyometric progression that sets an athlete up to engage with collisions in more dynamic ways can help athletes get more out of their bodies, but is beyond the scope of this article. 

6. Move With Rhythm

If you want an illuminating experience, put music on for your next warmup, and see how you, or your athletes can "sync up" to the music for your skips, marches, hops, crawls and medicine ball throws.  

What I've found, is that the better sense of rhythm an athlete possesses, the better they can adapt to movements in training overall.  They can use rhythm to work their way through a challenging training session more easily, and can find the rhythm present in explosive movements to achieve a better outcome. 

I also find rhythm showing up in the scope of team sports.  One of the things I really love about basketball is the rhythmic nature of dribbling and moving with a ball.  Having a ball to bounce is an "automatic timer" by which we coordinate our every move.  There are many other sport situations where rhythm is clear and present, but basketball is on the forefront. 

At the end of the day, being able to find the rhythm present in a variety of sport movements, and at the very least, paying attention to it, is an important aspect of the total athletic equation. 

7. Express Variability

One of the things that good athletes do well is creatively find ways to accomplish their sporting task, and use variability in a masterful way.  

The most skilled individuals in sport will display "functional", or "controlled variability" in their movement, where as less skilled individuals do not have enough control of their movements to "play" with the ranges.  Poorer athletes tend to have "uncontrolled variability". 

For example, a skilled blacksmith will consistently strike his target with a hammer (control), but at the same time, he will actually bring the hammer back in a subtly different way with each swing (variability) in Bernstein's original experiment.  

With "good variability" skilled basketball players will find various ways to angle the ball off of the backboard in their layup lines, or different arcs to hit their shot from (and they usually make them).  The less skilled players are often simply trying to find the "right angle" to conservatively make their layup each rep, and don't have the skill to play around with different angles and still make the shot.  If they do try various angles, it might be a helpful practice, but they will also often miss the shot. 

We can see this type of variable adaptation in explosive sport skills as well, such as the greatest "height over head" high jumper of all time, Stefan Holm, and his "6 Degrees of Jumping", where he showed proficiency at jumping over a high jump bar using a wide-variety of techniques.  We see elite sprinters like Usain Bolt exploring different rhythmic variations of sprint acceleration. 

In addition to the natural creativity and robust skill development, having a level of controlled variability in each repetition of a mundane movement can actually make us more resilient against injury, since we "spread the load" more widely by diversifying the movement pattern subtly (it's not a broad and obvious difference from rep to rep, but subtle and variable enough to get the job done).

What this means for athletic ability in training, is that, rather than constantly drilling into a "perfect form" with our exercises and drills, we can encourage the exploration and variability within movement (like Holm's jumping, or Bolt's accelerations) to help athletes find a more athletic, and fluid technique that can fit either a single output (track and field) or the needs of team sport.  

This concept is even more important once athletes have a solid working ability with a given skill, as "chasing one perfect technique" won't give them their ideal improvements as much as giving them the needed exploration.

8. Use Sports and Tasks to Drive Adaptation

It's no secret that we perform tasks more effectively, and more powerfully in a social, or competitive environment.  We also do them better when there are external objectives,rather than a barrage of instructions on how to move our limbs in space. 

In other words, keeping training more task oriented, with lower technical barriers to entry is a huge key to effective sessions, as well as athlete experience. 

These task orientations could be things like setting out a series of rubber dots, or low boxes, on the ground to teach bounding.  It could be playing low-net volleyball with a medicine ball to teach explosive trunk rotation.  It could mean low-rim dunking to teach variety and efficiency in a one or two leg jump takeoff.  It could mean a small-sided game with a long rectangular field to encourage breakaway sprints and pursuits.  There are a great variety of possibilities here that can complement more traditional training setups extremely well.

This past weekend, I was helping my brother-in-law move into his new condo and was pulling a massive 8 foot credenza up a set of stairs with a narrow ceiling.  By the time I got to the top and realized the ceiling was too low to get the piece into the condo, my shirt was completely covered in sweat.  I was so immersed in the task, however, that I had no idea how hard I was working until it all caught up to me.  In this sense, I spent no "willpower" achieving a high cardiovascular output, but let the task bring my body to a very high metabolic level.  (The credenza eventually had to go back down the stairs, and then down more stairs, into my other in-laws house nearby, and had me remembering the value of measuring twice before moving a large and awkward object).  For athleticism, letting tasks give us our conditioning is a much more effective and efficient way than slogging miles or doing brutal workouts designed for the purpose. 

In conclusion, we are absolutely wired for athleticism as human beings, and the more we can infuse these qualities into our training sessions, the more balanced we are as elastic-explosive movers, and the better our sport play and outputs are as a result. 

It also makes training a lot more fun, in my opinion. 

This week's podcast is with coach Clifton Harski, who has a mind-blowing level of experience both learning and teaching strength and movement practices.  Clifton dunks a basketball well at age 41 (at 6'1" tall) with athletic, kettlebell style training being a large part of his training regime.  

Clifton's combination of the "movement" and "S&C" worlds, is something that any coach or athlete can benefit from, and in the podcast, he speaks on how to combine a fundamental strength foundation with movement and athletic adaptability, in a training program.

Sign up for the Applied Speed and Power Seminar! (Dec 9th, Cincinnati OH)