What separates great performers or great athletes from regular ones?
Great athletes isolate specific aspects of their sport or their training and focus on just those things until they are improved; then it’s on to the next aspect.
So when it comes to training, if you want to get stronger, bigger, faster, leaner, and more conditioned, what is the most important objective for you? Focus on that one thing only. Once you get it, you can then move onto a different quality needed.
Example: Unless one of my athletes has a tournament coming up, 9 out of 10 times we’re focusing on getting them stronger. When it comes time to train for conditioning, our goal is a attempt to maintain the strength qualities while improving their conditioning to make them an endurance machine. If we tried to train to many things at the same time, we’d be mediocre as opposed to marvelous. Like the old chinese proverb, “a man that chases two rabbits catches neither”.
I can also personally see the correlation to the statement above with being a strength coach. I don’t believe you can learn new things from information outlets such as books, dvd’s, or seminars unless you personally apply the information, and do it long enough to “lock in” the information so to speak.
This would be the equivalent to reading a bunch of jiu-jitsu or MMA books and never getting on the mats or in the cage to apply it. Knowledge isn’t power unless it’s applied knowledge.
This is one thing that drives me nuts about people on the internet claiming to train athletes. Anyone can read a book and regurgitate the cliff notes and sound like they know what they’re talking about, but actually learning what you’re doing requires extensive time in the trenches. I occasionally have people (mostly personal trainers) ask me what I’m certified under. I’ve had four certifications since I’ve been doing this for a living, which was over 10 years now, but you’re not qualified just because you are certified. Qualified is something you get through the process, not something you start with from passing a test.
So how does one first isolate specific aspects to focus on within their training? In order to do this effectively, you must first know the 3 main zones you can pick from to isolate.
These are the “comfort zone”, “learning zone”, and “panic zone”.
According to the research, only by choosing things in the learning zone can one make progress. That’s the location of skills and abilities that are just out of reach. You can’t make progress in the comfort zone because those are things you can already do easily, and the panic zone activities are so hard that we don’t even know how to approach them.
The practice of top level athletes falls into two main categories. One is training the strength and conditioning capacities that are most useful in the given sport.
The other category of practice is working on specific critical skills within the sport. i.e in the “learning zone”. I train Jiu-Jitsu at Gracie Barra Chicago and I have my theories in regards to training within the sport, but I’m only focusing on outside of the sport for now.
Unless you have OCD and are scared to death to change your training, I can’t see a panic zone within strength training, but I do believe in the comfort and learning zones.
One principle within strength training is called the SAID Principle. Specific Adaptations To Imposed Demands. This simply means you get good at what you do. Which also means you’re not getting good at what you don’t do.
So when it comes to training, if you’re solely focused on strength endurance (conditioning) and your sport also has a high power and relative strength component such as the grappling sports or MMA, do you know how to train them?
If you’re a freak when it comes to strength, yet you gas out every time you’re training within your sport, what are you doing outside of your actual sport training wise to fix it?
To do this effectively, you must know the rules, have a plan, and it must be measured. If you’re simply winging it every time you’re training, you’re selling yourself short.
One thing worth adding, and hopefully it’s not confusing, is you must have a comfort zone first. Which is basically saying you must find and know your strengths before you can train your weaknesses. This is why it’s important to have a competent coach that knows what to look for and is objective. You’re not going to get that from taking training programs out of a magazine. Practicing without feedback is like bowling through a curtain that hangs down to knee level. You can train all you want, but if you can’t see the effects by measuring them, two things will happen:
- You won’t get any better, and
- you’ll stop caring.
(If you do have a program that you follow, measure, and make changes to accordingly, I tip my hat to you. You are not the norm.)
So with using the above examples again, if you’re strong as hell and you continue to train just for strength, your endurance won’t improve. And vise versa.
The training programs for these two examples would be completely different. One would require low reps with long rest periods and the other would require a different variety of rep ranges with short rest intervals that are progressive so you become more acclimated to removing the waste by-products.
Occasionally I come into contact with people who have these comfort zones that they don’t want to get out of. If you’re training within the grappling sports or for MMA and your training in the weight room resembles something a high level drug enhanced bodybuilder does that you got out of a magazine, you’re wasting time on training methods that won’t necessarily transfer that well to your objective.
And remember your objective. Becoming a better grappler or MMA fighter by training the right strength qualities and energy systems that are most useful to the sport.
PS. I plan on putting up some more training videos in the Exercise Database today. I’ve been down with the flu though so If it doesn’t happen today, look for it within the next day or so.
If you have any suggestions on how I can make the blog better, please don’t hesitate.