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I have to admit, those are some of the best circus tricks I've seen in a while. But I think they can do better... how about single-leg, barbell squat jumps on a bosu ball with the strobe glasses... Now that would really focus on "muscle coordination" so it becomes second nature and the athlete doesn't have to think about body control! An added benefit, I bet it wakes up any sleeping glutes!
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I saw a UFC promo this weekend where they were tossing the athlete, who was standing on an exercise ball, an implement with three colored handles coming from it. The coach would toss them and then yell a color for each hand and they'd have to grab the corresponding handle. How the hell do they come up with this stuff?!
Member
Coach,
Can you please talk about WHEN this type of training started and elaborate on WHY it started?
TMPHBITEU
I don't know when exactly. I'm sure Mike Boyle had something to do with it. Why is easier: it's easier. Inventing novel ways to display talent is simpler than learning to coach the lifts.
✓ Member
As I recall, boxing trainers used to do something with tossing colored balls to toss at the boxer to have them catch, dodge, or block one color ball or another. But then too they also used to have their fighters chase chickens around to get their hand and foot speed faster. So Silly Bullshit has no shelf life as we see.Originally Posted by Corrie
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I'm actually quite familiar with this type of training. I did it all the time as a kid: http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-UriDV-HXfT...it+extreme.jpg
Member
Not professional athletes, but a lot of training spawned in the same circus tent. This popped up in an ad on my facebook today and I couldn't stop watching it in amazement.
Here’s a glimpse of what’s coming soon... - F45 Training East Setauket
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I remember that Mike Boyle guy. The easier part makes sense to me now as I have seen some local high school football players and kids on the weightlifting team with very poor technique. It's usually the local football coach that is coaching the lifting and he's never actually read a book about lifting.
This is probably impossible but how do you combat this? I don't think I need a degree in exercise science to understand that being stronger than the other guy for grappling sports, football, etc. is better.
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Yeah, seems tricky. It has a certain superficial plausibility. And how can you say for sure that standing on a balance ball with strobe goggles on your eyes and elastic bands on your arms, catching footballs, won't help you make a few more catches during the season? Or jumping onto an unstable surface won't help prevent ankle sprains if you land on someone's foot after going up for a rebound?
Player does squats and deadlifts, sprains ankle: See? Should have done our training.
Player does the unstable training, sprains ankle anyway: See? Would have been worse/happened sooner without our training.
Things like catching passes, ankle sprains, etc. are random enough, with enough noise around them, that the benefits or lack thereof of this training vs. strength training seem hard to quantify.
Member
This is the key insight. It's very hard to prove with convincing data that strength training directly led to less injury, better stats, etc... You could probably do it with a large enough data set over a long enough period of time, but that's basically impossible to get, especially with any kind of reasonable standard to what the "strength training" entailed and how progress was measured. In the absence of good theory and good data, I don't like to make absolute knowledge claims, but falling back to good theory and the small amount of good data that comes from it makes a stronger case than anything else I see out there.
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