Sunday, April 29, 2012

Fatigue: The Double Agent

In our last post, Owen talked about his personal experience of how perseverance through a decline in performance ultimately led to ‘overtraining’. We are going to dig a little deeper and show you that there is a big grey area when it comes to overtraining.


Revision: Exercise causes a disruption to the body’s homeostasis resulting in an acute decline in performance. When given adequate rest, the body will recover and performance will increase. When we do not give the body adequate rest, this is where problems start to arise…

Firstly, don’t think that the second you get tired you are overtrained. Also, realize that there are a few intermediate steps before you develop Overtraining Syndrome (OTS). The level of ‘overtraining’ is categorized according to the time it takes to restore performance. Now for some new terms:
  • Functional Overreaching (FOR): allowing fatigue to accumulate from consecutive training bouts, knowing they will be followed by a recovery period.  This can be recovered from in around a week.
  • Non-Functional Overreaching (NFOR): Ignoring that recovery period when you have overreached. This can take up to months to recover from. If you continue to train, this will eventually lead to Overtraining Syndrome (OTS), which can take years to recover from.

Time to throw another spanner in the works. Studies have shown that endurance training and resistance training lead to different types of overtraining. Parasympathetic overtraining (thought to arise from endurance training) affects the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis and alters levels of cortisol, testosterone and catecholamines. Sympatheitc overtraining (thought to arise from resistance training) increases excitability and has been linked with restlessness and irritability.
 
Other symptoms of overtraining include:
-       decreased sex drive, loss of appetite, decrease in enthusiasm
-       alterations to resting heart rate, reduced sympathetic drive, reduced heart rate variability.
Hopefully you now realize that temporary declines in performance are the precursor to performance gain. Be careful because this decline in performance is a double agent. If you don’t watch it carefully, it can quickly lead to overreaching and eventually Overtraining Syndrome. In our next article, we are going to talk about ways to avoid OTS. Stay tuned!

Wednesday, April 25, 2012

You can't push through overtaining...

Being a BJJ practitioner is like being in a war of attrition. You accept very early on that you are going to have lots of days where you get beaten down. There's a saying that "some days you are the hammer, some days the nail". You learn that being the nail is part of the course, and that the days you are the hammer are few and far between and you savor these moments for months if not years. This mindset leads to you considering yourself mentally tough and you learn that even when things don't go your way you must keep grinding through and this can be a metaphor for life. These are great qualities that BJJ has instilled in me but once I added strength and conditioning to the mix the extra workload carried with it some risk.

After my first article I explained that there was a dip in my performance whilst my body became accustomed to the new training regime. When I came out the other side it felt like I could adapt to whatever workload was thrown at me. Training hard twice a day was no problem and I kept up a high work rate for nearly 2 years.

At this point, I found that whilst my body was coping ok with the work, I started to notice that I was flat at training. I was just going through the motions and getting from session to session. My mind wanted to train hard but concentrating and every effort I made didn't seem to yield the same results as previous. Whilst I was grinding to a halt my mindset told me to keep plugging along and maybe even increase my workload to combat my stalling progress. If it wasn't for my strength and conditioning coach (Jason Gulati from Real training) recognizing this as overtraining I would have continued to toil away for next to no reward or worse, at the risk of injuring myself due to inattention or lack of concentration. So how do you recognize overtraining and how can you tell if it's affecting you? See Jason's next article on recognizing the signs.

The next problem is what to do about it? Basically there are no shortcuts, your body needs a break and the length of this break depends on how long and how overtrained you are. Do yourself a favour and take a holiday from everything, don't even think about your sport. Maybe even take up a new one? I started boxing with a great coach and friend Eddy Kaliboti, and that really freshened up my mind forcing it to think and calculate new problems making my my brain accept the return to Jiu jitsu more readily. The result, a short well earned break, new skills and a new found hunger for my chosen sport. Win win win!!!

By Owen Gee Kee
Co-Owner of Underdog Gracie Jiu-Jitsu and Underdog Fight Gear

Tuesday, April 17, 2012

You can't shoot a cannon-ball from a canoe

Do you think you could effectively shoot a cannonball from a canoe? Core training is much the same concept and this metaphor has long been used to describe the importance of training the core. How can we expect to deliver maximal force in any sport or exercise if we are not properly stabilized to deliver that movement. We need to be stable before we can move effectively and with power.

What is the core? Without getting into too much detail, the National Academy of Sports Medicine describes the core as simply "where your centre of gravity is located". It is where movement begins and is made up of a variety of stablizing muscles.  Core strength allows your kinetic chain (the synchronization of all muscles, nerves and bones) to work together. You need the cannon and canoe to work in synchronization to shoot that cannonball far. If your "core" is not functioning correctly, this chain will be disturbed.

What is proper functioning of the core? This simply means that our deeper muscles (our core muscles - TA, Diaphraghm etc) are working together in unison with our "bigger muscles" (glutes etc).  If these two systems are not working properly together, compensation and muscle imbalances will occur - meaning less power in the short term, and muscle imbalances and injury in the long run.

So how do you effectively train the core? Before deciding to just do any exercises labelled as a core exercise a person should understand the different components of core control and the core continuum.

1. At the lowest level a person should be able to use their diaphrahm to breathe correctly,  isolate other deep stabilizing muscles, and have the ability to keep a neutral pelvis and spine in low level exercises such as kneeling floor planks or bridges.

2. The next step is to work on your specific weak links (this gets complicated but relates to a persons ability to prevent movement of the spine when force is applied - such as doing  swiss ball rotations or landmines). For instance, if you cant keep a neutral spine during a front plank, thinking you can do this when doing a back squat = injury.

3. Next comes putting it all together. Integrating this stability means linking this ability to stabilize your spine with your core muscles, and matching this together with your movement system. This is the part where you put the cannon on the canoe. It can take the form of exercise in which your stability, core muscles and movement system is challenged simultaneously. For example, during the split squat, the body is forced to resist movement in a multitude of planes, as well as execute correct breathing technique, while the leg muscles (among others) are responsible for moving the weight. In this way they work together to finish the lift.

This is why doing big compound lifts can also be considered training the core. However,  it is important to recognise that a person should have the ability to isolate the deep stabilizing muscles - without initial core strength, no integration can occur, and injury and compensations will develop, not to mention much less power output.

Written by Mark Baskin
Mark operates his own personal training business out of Dover Heights and preaches a similar training philosophy to ours. Mark has an undefeated MMA record of 3-0, has his Cert III and IV in fitness and is studying Exercise Science at UTS.

Sunday, April 15, 2012

Don't Follow Fighters, Follow Principles

There are big dollars involved with celebrity endorsement.  Catherine Zeta Jones was reportedly paid $20million by T-Mobile and before Tiger Woods' sex scandal, he was receiving around $900million each year. What does this have to do with training?

We buy Air Jordan's because we think that if Michael Jordan gives them the tick of approval, they must help with basketball performance. Similarly, we think that by following the training regimen of a professional fighter, it must help with fight performance. Sounds good on paper, but it will probably do you more harm than good. We are going to outline five reasons why following a fighters (or professional athletes) training regimen may be doing you harm.

1. Training Level - Most professional athletes have been spending their whole life training. The intensity and volume of training increases the more you train. Their body has adapted to the training load they have been subjected to over many many years. If you haven't undergone the same foundation work the athlete has gone through, you can't expect to perform the training routine that follows safely.

2. Honesty - watching Floyd Mayweather Jr. hit pads looks more like a choreographed dance routine then skill development for a fight. What we don't realize is that there is more to his training than what we are shown. The cameras are turned off before most sparring sessions, and we have never really seen him hit pads properly. So how do we trust what we read in a magazine?



3. Injuries - Combat sports are tough on the body. Injuries are common. Athletes have to learn to train around injuries to make sure they don't detrain. For example, the athlete may be avoiding heavy structural exercises because of a back injury. But without that back injury, heavy compound lifts would be used to improve sports performance. In addition, sometimes we have injuries of our own. Trying to implement a program designed for someone else is a recipe for making your injury worse.

4. Time Availability - Many professional athletes train as their job. They have time between sessions to recover, and often have access to sophisticated recovery tools. Most of us don't have the luxury of training as our job. We have social commitments and work commitments that will probably interfere with trying to employ a similar training volume to a professional. Sleep is considered a good recovery tool, but when you do it in the office, your colleagues or managers may not be too happy.




5. Variety - We often hear that athletes spend every minute in the gym, and sacrifice every social commitment they are exposed to. This makes it more surprising when they are caught DUI, or a video of them snorting drugs in the toilet comes out. Athletes, even at the very top, have periods where there training volume/intensity is altered. It is necessary to avoid burnout. Rarely do we see how the training program of a professional is sequenced, or recommendations on how long they should be using the program before switching it up.

So, with all that said are supposed to find our own way to reach sports mastery? Definitely not. If we take a step back, we can take three valuable things from those who have made it:
i) The Programming they employ: In an interview with Freddie Roach he outline that they have x amount of rounds to work with per day which is divided into shadow, bagwork, pads and sparring. The methodology coaches use with their athletes is something we can try and adapt.
ii) The intensity during training: the effort that pro's put into training IS something we should try and mimic
iii) The work ethic and determination: Perseverance is also critical for success. Missing a lift should make you more motivated to make it next time, losing a match should make you want to learn from your mistakes and win your next one. The resiliency that comes with sporting success is another characteristic which we should try and emulate