We often hear about the importance of building an aerobic base early in the off-season to help establish an ability to better tolerate higher training volumes moving forward.
The reality is that the characteristics of the “base” should be specific to the athlete AND to future training phases. For example, the “aerobic” base for a marathon runner should look very different than the aerobic base for a hockey player.
Further, in team sport athletes where speed and power development are clear priorities, the training methods used to develop those qualities need to be introduced and logically progressed. In other words, a team sport athlete’s “base” should include work that prepares them to tolerate high intensity training methods (sprinting, jumping, etc.).
The image above shows the heart rate response from performing 20 sets of 5 Kettlebell Swings, starting on the minute.
The KB swing, performed correctly, is a movement that emphasizes power development through the posterior chain.
Picking a moderate load, and performing a low volume of reps each set at max effort allows the athlete to accumulate higher volumes of high intensity work, emphasizing high threshold motor units, while keeping the overall training stimulus aerobic.
There are many different variations of this strategy both in terms of exercise selection and set/rep schemes, but the goal here is to keep the movement quality high and HR low (< mid 80s as a rough estimate) throughout the series. With KB Swings, when the athlete starts to fatigue, the movement will look less “bouncy” out of the bottom, and they’ll start to “muscle it” – which typically coincides with the HR climbing to higher peaks. When we see this, we’ll build in a break of a few minutes to reset before continuing on.
Take Home Message When we talk about building a base – we need to think of building a base across multiple systems (including tissue tolerance), and specific to the individual needs of the athlete AND the training program.
Feel free to post any comments/questions below. If you found this helpful, please share/re-post it so others can benefit.
P.S. For comprehensive hockey conditioning programs to improve your speed and repeat sprint ability, check out: Speed Training for Hockey
Enter your first name and email below to sign up for my FREE Sports Performance and Hockey Training Newsletter!
Aerobic Training to Support Repeat Sprint Ability
Over the last 10 years, there’s been a wide-spread emphasis on “high intensity interval training” to improve conditioning in team sport athletes.
Recently, there’s been more attention paid to the importance of repeat sprint ability (i.e. clustered maximum efforts with incomplete rest before longer periods of lower intensity activity or complete rest), either as the predominant characteristic of sport or as a key characteristic during critical moments of competition.
Unfortunately, a byproduct of these trends is that the benefits of aerobic training have been either largely overlooked or actively dismissed.
Short sprints rely heavily on the PCr (Phosphocreatine) system as an energy source. One of the major limiting factors to repeat sprint ability is the resynthesis of PCr, which is depleted from max efforts lasting more than few seconds (or short efforts repeated within condensed time periods…like a typical hockey shift).
Aerobic training is one of the primary methods of improving PCr resynthesis rates.
Below is a quote from a paper I reference often:
“High-intensity interval training (6–12·[2 minutes at ~100% VO2max:1minute rest]), can significantly improve PCr resynthesis during the first 60 seconds following high-intensity exercise. In contrast, no changes in the rate of PCr resynthesis have been reported following interval (8·[30 seconds at ~130% VO2max:90seconds rest]), or intermittent-sprint training (15·[6-second sprint: 1-minute jog recovery]), or training involving repeated, 30-second, all-out efforts (4–7·[30 seconds ‘all-out’: 3–4 minutes rest]).“
While the authors use “high-intensity interval training” to describe the 6-12 x 2:00/1:00 interval, this is not a method commonly used by those relying on high intensity conditioning (the later examples in the quote are more representative).
The point here is that even if your goal is SOLELY to support maximum speed efforts, aerobic training plays a KEY role in allowing the athlete to repeat those outputs.
Feel free to post any comments/questions below. If you found this helpful, please share/re-post it so others can benefit.
P.S. For comprehensive hockey training programs to improve your speed AND repeat sprint ability, check out: Speed Training for Hockey
Enter your first name and email below to sign up for my FREE Sports Performance and Hockey Training Newsletter!
Physiological Demands of Ice Hockey
There are many ways to analyze the physiological demands of a sport, but tracking heart rate (HR) is the most commonly used.
When looking at the HR response during shifts of male Canadian university players, forwards had higher peak and average HRs compared to defensemen. This is consistent with my experience, and speaks to the faster playing speeds and greater number of high intensity efforts forwards accumulate during a typical shift (mentioned in previous posts).
Hockey is often described as a “lactic” sport. When analyzing post-shift levels, Noonan (2010) found that players’ blood lactate ranged from 4.4-13.7 mmol/L. 4 mmol/L is traditionally referenced as the “lactate threshold”, which means thinking of hockey as a lactic sport isn’t wrong, but the wide range of values highlights the individual, positional, and game-demand variability.
Further, it raises questions about whether we should be training players to more heavily rely on lactic metabolism or maximize aerobic power to minimize the amount of work that crosses that threshold.
Feel free to post any comments/questions below. If you found this helpful, please share/re-post it so others can benefit.
Enter your first name and email below to sign up for my FREE Sports Performance and Hockey Training Newsletter!
A New Perspective on Energy Systems
A couple days ago, I mentioned that we’re hosting Joel Jamieson’s new Certified Conditioning Coach course at our facility on April 2nd and 3rd. In response to that post I received a bunch of notes from people either expressing an interest in taking the course, or telling me how great it was when they took it previously.
If you’re interested in taking the course, register ASAP. We’re limiting the course to ~40 attendees and have already sold over half the seats. You can get more information and register at the link below.
Given the interest in energy system development my last post sparked, I thought it would be an opportune time to repost a video I’ve shown a few times of a presentation Joel gave on the topic. This is a GREAT presentation, and one of the best free resources available. Check it out below!
A few years ago when I first came across this presentation from Joel Jamieson, it caused me to rethink a lot of what I thought I knew about “conditioning”. Since that time, I’ve read (and re-read) his two books, seen him speak a few times, and even spoke alongside him when the two of us did a one day seminar (where Optimizing Movement was filmed).
Needless to say, I think this information is incredibly valuable; it’s had a profound impact on the way that I write my programs.
Even in rereading my comments about the video below, I know that my perspective on energy systems work has changed considerably over the last 4 years, especially as it pertains to redeveloping aerobic qualities in hockey players (and all athletes in general) in the early off-season. We’re using methods now that I would have never thought to use in 2011, and the foundation for a lot of that change was built on this video.
Enjoy! And if you want to share any of the conditioning methods you’re using or have any questions, please post them in the comments section below.
A New Perspective on Energy Systems
I hope you’re all enjoying your day off (if you got one). Endeavor Sports Performance typically shuts down for Memorial Day, but Matt, David, and I are leaving Thursday night to head up to Boston for the Hockey Symposium, so we have to open up today to make sure all of our athletes can get their sessions in before we go. Just another day in the office! (I’m pretending that today isn’t the first day that it hasn’t precipitated since last November).
Rather than spending the day outside enjoying the sun and BBQing, I thought you’d be more interested in watching a great presentation on energy systems development from Joel Jamieson, who’s a really bright guy. Joel primarily trains MMA fighters out of his facility in Seattle, WA, but he also has experience with football and soccer players. More importantly, and you’ll get this quickly from watching his presentation, his training philosophy is science-based. While I don’t think that every line on a training program needs to have a citation next to it, I think using quality research as a backing for your training philosophies ensures that you understand the underlying principles of athletic development, which can be effectively applied to any sport (in a sport- and athlete-relevant manner).
This video is from a presentation Joel gave at the Central Virginia Sports Performance Seminar at the University of Richmond in Virginia, and he includes a download link for the power point slides so you can follow along. Click the link below and watch the video now (it’s completely free and doesn’t require registering for anything):
I finished watching the video late last week and left with a few good research resources to look into and an augmented understanding of energy metabolism and physiology. I can’t help but feel that some of his words will be grossly misinterpreted though.
One thing that stood out to me as extremely hockey conditioning relevant is the large degree to which the aerobic system contributes to repeat sprint performance with incomplete recovery. Using running as a model, Joel presented that the energy delivery for 200m (~22s) and 400m(~49s) sprints were 29% and 43% aerobic, respectively. In other words, in the time equivalent of an average hockey shift, roughly 1/3-1/2 of the energy provided is aerobic, and this is likely to increase with incomplete recovery between bouts (e.g. as shifts progress within a period).
In my opinion, Joel’s presentation offers more accurate explanatory power than it does a drastic change in the way we condition for hockey. The major take home message is that you need to understand the demands of the sport and prepare accordingly. I think people see something like “50% of energy is from anaerobic sources and 50% is from aerobic sources” and think “50% of my training should be sprint repeats and 50% should be continuous aerobic work.” In reality, all this is saying is that the sprint repeats will eventually be developing aerobic systems in addition to the know anaerobic benefits.
Primarily Aerobic? Anaerobic? Does it matter?
This is one of the reasons why I think it’s more important to have an in-depth understanding of the work:rest ratios and overall work intensities of the game than it is to understand the underlying physiological mechanisms driving them. As an overly simplified example, if hockey includes, on average, about a 40s shift of which about 20s is spent at all out intensities every 3 minutes, and we use some similar work intervals and work to rest ratios to create a slight overload on the involved metabolic systems, does us realizing that more of the on-ice energy AND off-ice training energy is coming from aerobic metabolism than we previously thought change the way we train? I’m not sure it does. I’m certainly not implying that I disagree with anything Joel said in his presentation, and I agree that certain athletes will need a greater emphasis on certain qualities based on their athletic profiles, but I think some people over-emphasize the physiological explanations and under-emphasize the much more obvious and intuitive game demands. What do you think? Check out the video and post your comments below!
