Coaching Reflections, Conversations and Revelations: May 2021

To try and document my coaching experience more consistently, I’ve decided I’m going to complete monthly reflections. The coaching experience is such an all encompassing experience; and as I’m fortunate enough to work as a part of a team and with amazing athletes, I don’t want to let this opportunity go by to share what I’m learning in the hope others may benefit from it too. Most of what I post and publish tends to be backed by my belief or fact; what I’ll be reflecting on here may not be that. There may be questions which arise; theories which may be created or questioned; subjective, personal experiences which may not make sense. Let’s begin.

1. Protect our youth

The report published about the practices of Gymnastics Australia had a serious effect on me. I’ve been in a relationship with a former Gymnast (of whom was a serious beast at her sport and represented at an international level) for over four years. I’ve gained an insight into the culture of the gymnastics community and the way they treat their athletes and it sickens me. She completed camps in Russia as a teenager where she was weighed 3 times a day; was fed only a small tub of yoghurt and a Russian broth for a daily meal and had objects thrown at her. There was a saying that if you messed up a routine in Australia, you’d have the CD-ROM thrown at you. If you messed up a routine in Russia, you’d have the CD player thrown at you. Anyways, I’m glad that practices of Gymnastics were investigated and exposed; as no child or athlete should be subjected to this.

It is quite easy to look down your nose at the sport of Gymnastics, however; I believe that if all sports were to have an investigation done similarly to Gymnastics, each sporting culture presents its own problems. In the sport of Track and Field; I think similarly to Gymnastics; there’s continuous malpractice on the behalf of coaches which has led to the decimation of its sports’ athletes. Our success at a youth level and comparatively to the success at the senior level should indicate some of the issues of our coaching practice. We need to protect our youth in the sport of Track and Field. In no case should an athlete have multiple stress fractures as a teenager; nor chronic tendinopathies. Once an athlete has sustained such an injury; the reality is that they’re compromised forever. And this is a reality which is not disclosed to a youth athlete. If a young athlete has talent, has ‘it’; coaches seemingly feel compelled to double down to capitalise and cash in for immediate success. Early international representation; golds at a Junior Nationals competition may be the trade off for later success in the senior ranks. If you have an athlete that has ‘it’, you pretty much have one job. Don’t fuck them up. If they’re talented, they’ll figure their event out and develop physically as long as they’re not set back through trauma.

If coaches were to be audited on their injury history, how would they go? How many weeks of training within the course of the year were lost to injury? Were there injuries which were consistently present throughout their athlete cohort? Were their injuries considered in the training program? If their injuries were referred to a physiotherapist or an EP; what was the process like in returning to the sport? Was it just an offloading of responsibility? Probably the biggest question which seems to rattle me the most is - Following the injury, did the coach even put any effort into understanding its mechanism and did they adjust the training program from the new information they learned as a result of the experience? Or did they just roll the same shit out because it’s what they/the group does?

Look after the athletes. It’s a privilege to work with them and they’ve put their body, which is their only body, in your hands. Do not take this responsibility lightly. You have the opportunity to help them fulfill their dreams and make them happy, but you also have the opportunity to leave everlasting scars which exist beyond their athletic career.

2. What the hell is ‘Ankle Stiffness’?

My understanding of ankle stiffness developed greatly this past month. For years, I observed it as an isolated experience of a firm, yet quick ground contact during sprinting; in which the heel refused to make an extended contact with the ground. Kind of like running on the fore/midfoot. It was quite a simple way of looking at it and I thought that that’s what the best sprinters do. Lower ground contact times = more speed. To get this ‘Ankle Stiffness’, I thought that athletes needed to complete plyometrics for months on end; to have the world’s strongest seated calf raise and to do high force isometrics. I did them all. I have a succulent, strong soleus. I have done thousands of pogos. I was very wrong. Really, all of the aforementioned training interventions affect ‘Ankle Stiffness’ minimally.

‘Ankle Stiffness’ should be primarily seen as a skill which breeds a physical quality. This is backwards to the common thoughts of building a strength and plyometric base in order to feed the skill of sprinting. Ankle stiffness is more dependent upon the position of the ankle and the foot during sprinting and the angle of which it strikes the ground more than anything else. My co-coach Louis sent me this fantastic paragraph from a paper titled ‘Reactive and eccentric strength contribute to stiffness regulation during maximum velocity sprinting in team sport athletes and highly trained sprinters’ written by Jamie Douglas, Simon Pearson, Angus Ross (a kiwi guy who I’d love to go and visit with my squad some day) & Mike McGuigan (2019).

“It is also possible that a certain threshold of eccentric strength is necessary, beyond which improvements in reactive strength are attained by changes in neuromuscular activation. Indeed, it has previously been demonstrated in trained sprinters that higher levels of reactive strength are attained by the development of a more effective DJ motor strategy (i.e. co-ordination and activa- tion pattern preceding and during ground contact) independent of changes in maximal strength or RFD capabilities of the ankle plantar flexors and knee extensors (Alkjaer, Meyland, Raffalt, Lundbye-Jensen, & Simonsen, 2013). This raises the question as to whether we should consider reactive strength as a strength quality per se; rather it could be considered a specific motor skill (e.g. “reactive ability”) that is influenced by, but not entirely depen- dent upon, maximum strength (i.e. eccentric, isometric or con- centric). Therefore, the role of motor skill in attaining a high level of reactive strength cannot be discounted, and it is proposed that stiffness regulation at maximum velocity may also be largely gov- erned by motor ability versus maximum strength capabilities. It is possible that the strong associations observed were a product of a developed and partly shared coordinative structure (i.e. stiffness regulation) expressing under similar task constraints (i.e. a rapid and forceful ground contact phase) (Moir et al., 2018). Therefore, the neuromuscular regulation (i.e. “skill”) of stiffness under task- specific conditions may be equivalently as, if not more, important rather than strength qualities per se.”

What do you take away from this paragraph? I took away that the real way to obtain stiffness is far more simple than I have ever imagined. All you need to do is to run at 11m/s for 6-9 seconds every 10-14 days for 4-5 years with a technical model which allows for the physical adaptations to complement the coordinative expression stiffness. Sorry, but a better RSI; stronger ISOPush; Seated Calf; Pogos and skips won’t do jack compared to contextually specific adaptations made at high velocity, high force and with high levels of coordination.

Maybe ‘Ankle Stiffness’ is a phrase which has been adopted because it appeals to those who fall prey to chasing the immeasurable, and therefore, their training is purposeless. If you are chasing ankle stiffness; break it up into a combination of physical and skill based qualities, with an emphasis on the skill. Otherwise, as my good friend Mr Rohan Browning says, “Maybe ankle stiffness is a white whale”. You’ll be chasing it unsuccessfully forever.

3. I think quarter squats are becoming my least favourite exercise.

Quarter squats have been all the rage in the sprinting community for many years. Studies have proven their transfer to sprint performance (such as Joint-Angle Specific Strength Adaptations Influence Improvements in Power in Highly Trained Athletes. Human Movement 2016) and from a coach’s eye perspective, I think people view the quarter squat superior to its full range variation as the positions found in the quarter squat seemingly better reflect the positions found in mid-stance during sprinting.

• Let me start by outlining the fact studies completed aren’t with elite sprinting populations. They’re with random cohorts of mostly team sport athletes with unknown training backgrounds and unknown sprint performances prior to the collation of data.

• Strength training, and sprinting, sit on entirely opposite ends of the force velocity continuum and strength training’s transfer to max velocity in particular is very minimal.

• Spinal loading is extremely high and the set up requires high quality equipment in order for the exercise to be safe. A mishap with 250kg+ on your back, if you are hardly capable of handling it, could alter your athletic career.

So the studies conducted are with non-sprinting populations; it’s probably unsafe and if you’ve actually worked with people who are fast at max velocity, you’ve probably seen no correlation between the guy who can quarter squat the most and sprinting performance.

Show me an athlete who spends the majority of the time quarter squatting and I can guarantee they have an inability to sequence good hip extension motor patterning, particularly from a block start. I have observed that athletes who have the ability to quarter squat and the inability to full range squat heavily rely on knee extensors to move. Their knees will extend prior to their hips, and as such, despite having squat numbers coming out of the wazoo, will often start poorly and have an inability to project horizontally. Their first step will project themselves vertically. A well executed full squat demands for the hip extension pattern to begin with the glutes. Jerome Simian, S&C coach for decathlon world record holder Kevin Mayer outlines this far more succinctly than I.

“Once that is said, I like the full squat a majority of the time because it forces a proximal to distal activation from the bottom and involves the muscles of the hip. I see a lot of athletes whose triple extension’s sequence is altered by the use of partial squats. The knee extends slightly ahead of the hip. In that case, we often see problems in jumping and sprint starts.”

I may seem like a hypocrite in proclaiming the transfer of a full squat to sprinting and then poo-pooing the transfer of the quarter squat; and I probably am. My observation thus far is similar to what Jerome describes. These jacked-up-vastus-lateralis ego-lifting boys and girls all present similar problems. A constant reinforcement of faulty hip extension patterning through high load and small ranges, practiced for months on end, may have an interference with a sprinter’s capacity to execute the skill of the start and acceleration. I rarely envision a circumstance in which a quarter squat is the BEST option for a quality worth pursuing.

4. Adapting Ebonie Rio’s tendon health rehabilitation protocol for performance.

My injury history is purely tendon related. Perhaps it can be correlated to the fact that I’m a diabetic training for the highest tendon stress sport one may possibly do. At the beginning of the month, I finally got a scan on my hip after suffering hip pain since last November, where I decided to try downhill sprinting for a few weeks. It was awesome, and I ran faster than I ever have before, but it left me hobbled. I wasn’t ready for it. I’ve been working around the pain, but I decided enough was enough and finally wanted to know exactly what was the cause of the pain. The scan revealed a bilateral adductor longus tendinopathy, with evidence of a tear on one side. I’ve been sprinting at a pain at 3/10 for the last few months, which is acceptable and necessary as a part of the return to sport as outlined by Ebonie Rio; and the scan revealed no bone stress. I knew that I could still train through this pain as whenever athletes take time off with a tendon injury; athletes decrease capacity. Tendon’s hate changes in load, whether be more or less. I modelled my training around Rio’s 4 Stage of tendon load protocol. Essentially, it’s asking the athlete to stress the tendon as such:

• Day 1: High Tendon Stress

  • Tendon in compression and tendon performing high velocity stretch shortening cycle activities. For the adductor longus tendon, this is in a lunge position, in hip abduction at length and while sprinting. Day 1 for me was 4x60m or 3x180m or 20s run.

• Day 2: Isometrics

  • Firstly, observe the pain from the previous day's training. If it’s more than a 3/10, you’ve done too much. Complete the isometrics out of compression. 5x45s is an ok place to start. If you don’t see a decrease in pain, it’s not a tendon problem. I completed 4x30s single leg standing cable adduction and seated adduction machine.

• Day 3: Isotonics

  • Similarly to the previous day, observe the pain from the previous day’s training. If it’s over 3/10 you did too much. Strengthen the structure to support the tendon. I completed 3x12 single leg standing cable adductions and 3x12 on the seated adductor machine to start. Rep ranges have since come down to 3x8.

Within 4 weeks, pain has decreased significantly and the tissues supporting the tendon have strengthened by 20ish%. More than anything, the protocol has simplified the training process for me greatly. In the past, I had an achilles issue and used Keith Barr’s research as a guide. I completed isometrics 3x/day with 6 hours rest in between. I resolved an acute achilles tendon issue within 12 days. The only issue with this is now I do not have the time and the access to isometrically load 3x/day, nor do I really want to. I also do not know how to ween off the isometrics; as if I were to stop the isometricss once pain symptoms disappeared, it’d cause a significant load change and the problem would come back once again. With Rio’s protocols, I see a 3 day roll over program which can be used for life for athletes with a history of tendinopathies. Sprint, jump and throw; therapeutic exercise and then strength training. Perhaps, if I were to ever coach an athlete to a level where they’re on tour around Europe, I can envision this as a good, flexible training program. To learn more about the work of Rio, Cook and Barr’s work, I’d advise listening to Jake Tuura’s Jacked Athlete podcast. He interviews the leading tendon researchers in the world (mainly about patella tendon). He also synthesizes all the researcher’s findings on youtube as well.

Final words

This was my first monthly coaching reflection. If you want this as an email, let me know and I'll send one out every month. Not sure if it’ll be as comprehensive as this, but if I were to send an email, it’d hold me accountable to writing so bully me please. Reach out to me anytime for coaching chats and I hope you’re all coaching and running like animals.