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Thread: Training and Performance for the Novice Athlete

  1. #1
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    Default Training and Performance for the Novice Athlete

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    by Nicholas Soleyn

    “An individual’s mentality and approach to training is as defining a characteristic of an athlete as the fact of competing in sports. . . This article discusses important distinctions between training, practice, and performance, and will, hopefully, provide some valuable perspective on how to approach training for performance for the young or novice athlete.”

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    Brodie Butland is offline Starting Strength Coach
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    This is a terrific theoretical/foundational piece. Great job, Nick!

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    Hey Nick, excellent article! This is a keeper for the archives.

    I have a very general comment about training/performance that I keep coming back to.

    As an individual, you only get to do the experiment once. By this I mean, you pick a plan, and live with dozens of major and minor parameters,and you do it. The results are what they are, good or bad, but regardless of what you do next, you are ALWAYS doing a brand new experiment. You are now, slightly older, maybe stronger, maybe injured, and so on. All of this is fine, as this is a simple fact of life.

    That being said, I am a big advocate for standing on the shoulders of the giants, i.e. read the book, hire a coach, figure out what has worked, and stick with it. As professional coaches you guys have access to large number statistics and that really should be sufficient for the non-proffesional, novice or advance athlete.

    In the context of your article, are these contradictory ideas? As an individual doing the experiment on his/herself performance provides (hopefully) positive feedback. Do a thing, adjust, and so on. But as coaches, and/or scientists, it looks more like a prescription for training. Do the program.

    In other words, the "curves" are shown as smooth and convergent at genetic potential. And I have no doubt that the terminal state is correct. But I think that the curve for any individual, is anything but smooth, and, if that's true, how should we deal with this?

    (I'm not complaining! I'm just wondering if this has been addressed.)

  4. #4
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    What I like most about the article is how clearly performance, practice and training are distinguished from one another (I've never seen these distinctions laid out quite so vividly before as in this article); exercise has to be included because it is part of the confusion when dialoguing with other athletes, clients, and coaches on the subject of training.

    For the most part, it is the regular performance of a sport (in the sense of participation) that produces the adaptations many athletes are satisfied with... for a time. When those performance gains slow to a stop, however, that's when participants turn towards practice and refinement ad nauseam (usually of the thing they're weakest at) and call it training. Before that, it was just called "skills and drills" during the participational development phase (IE as a beginner or intermediate within the context of being sports specific).

    What most people do not consider is that there is this other thing entirely that has the potential to satisfy their desire to improve. It looks like nothing they have ever done before (to 90% of sports anyway) but is incredibly effective at building the body's muscular and nervous system's strength (general capacity) and is a relatively simple thing to do. The nature of these changes does take time though (longer than a performance perspective can see). It is obtained by the incremental loading of the 5 basic barbell movements; beginning where you are and adding the appropriate amount of weight every subsequent training session. You might even have to bring your "performance" mind set to your day's training... the first set of heavy squats may even make an athlete out of a non-athlete (priceless observation Nick).

    Regardless, the direct relationship of improvement that exists between barbell training and sports performance is not an obvious one to most people. We need these "snap shot" explanations of the big picture written out... spelled out... in as many ways as possible because conversations on the subject of training need to meet people where they're at; and from what I can see there's a lot of different people in A LOT of different places, which requires a lot of different ways to say the same thing.

    I hope it reaches a lot of different people. Or helps those who'd like to.

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