The forest and the trees - a better perspective on time

There are many reasons we fail to stick with a plan long enough to achieve meaningful change.  Among these is an unreasonable notion of how much time will be needed.  To flesh this idea out I thought I would provide a couple of examples: power and maximal strength vs efficiency.  Efficiency, energy spend to complete a task (e.g. moving from point A to B) has been a topic in several recent posts.  Efficiency is the slowest product of any athletic and sporting program.  It is a long-term training target.  By comparison, power (high rate of force production) and maximal strength are short term products.  They rise more-or-less immediately and will continue to grow in a predictable fashion though the rate of improvement slows as skill grows.  They are also among the first capacities to ebb with rest, whereas efficiency remains high after months of rest or detraining.  
Which is the more important training target?  The answer is efficiency.  Efficiency determines general injury-risk profile, power and strength potential, rate of skill development etc.  It even strongly influences slippery concepts such as how well you feel.  It is usually what's meant when someone says they're not after big muscles but they want to be stronger.  Intuitively, we understand that there is a connection between a stronger body and greater functional well-being.  Efficiency, however, relates more strongly to a better organised or coordinated body with higher aerobic capacity than it does to one with stronger muscles.  There is essentially no correlation between stronger quads or biceps and improved basic function.  Our bodies function 'inside-out' and not 'outside-in'.
Of those who step up, how many achieve meaningful change?  My answer is very few and the data agrees with me.  Certainly poor instruction/ coaching for the journey doesn't help but our bodies are clever and will, with persistence, naturally develop more efficiency.  The more basic explanation is a lack of patience and persistence.  Commitment begins to wane in just a few short weeks regardless of how important the changes are.  
Why do we struggle to stay the course even when our lives depend on it?  The most obvious answer is that health and fitness outcomes are the product of the structures of our lives and unless these change neither will the outcomes.  I believe that our vision of time is at fault as well.  We think in short periods of time: how many days till the weekend, how many weeks until the holidays.  It isn't merely that we focus on outcomes but that even these are short term.  We do not 'think' in the long term, and that is where big change lives.  I am not actually suggesting that we think long-term but instead place much higher value on the long-term products and much less on short term outcomes.  We should all aim for more efficiency and fret less about big muscles.  The pay off would be better health and physical capacity and much happier lives.
 

Speed conditioning for children

Speed can be hard to achieve but it isn’t hard to explain.  It is also not difficult to coach though it can take years to materialise.  There is no magic formula to ‘transform’ a slow body into a fast one.  Progress will proceed rationally along a development curve that all bodies appear on.  Those bodies that begin further up the curve (fewer starting deficits) can reasonably expect to advance further or more quickly than those beginning further down.

The link below will connect you with the full article. 

speed conditioning for children - full resource

The forest and the trees - the role of planning

Unless you plan and assess, natural variation can have a profound aggregate effect on the size and nature of your stimulus and the long-term trajectory of your exercise and athletic programs.  The link below will take you to a PDF of the full article.

 

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B8foxxYnBfVodDVpUE5QWW5CMXM

Fitness is 'task-specific'

Fitness is 'task-specific', meaning the nature of how we spend energy during exercise depends on what we are doing.  As we become more and more familiar or conditioned to a task, we spend less energy achieving specific output levels.
The job of trying to become 'fitter' divides into two phases: An early phase we can call the strengthening phase, and a second or later phase we can call the work capacity phase.  The purpose of the first, strengthening, phase is to ensure we use the correct muscles, and time is needed also to ensure these tissues are appropriately adapted.  The strengthening phase of fitness can take many months or years because the brain must first figure out what you're asking it to achieve and which muscles are best suited for the task.  As we age, this process takes longer because the 'motor program' or instruction manual depends on the quality of the information that flows from the body to the brain during exercise and inactivity, characteristic of adulthood, leads to a poor flow of information.
The second phase of raising fitness, the capacity phase, overlaps with the first phase in the general sense that all repetition and practice improves capacity but care must be taken to ensure the body is structurally sound and movement is efficient before significant load is imposed.  Mike Hosking was on the radio yesterday complaining of recurrent leg muscle strains when he runs.  The basic reason he is experiencing these strains is an incomplete strengthening phase in his running.  He possesses structural faults and/ or faults in the way he applies force when he runs.  The moral of his story is to seek help when it is obvious something is wrong.
Jeremy, Aug 2017

Physical and athletic assessment of swimmers

Something in my wheelhouse!
We have a saying at Sport Performance:  Your body is your toolbox and it's all you have.  The better the tools, the quicker and more completely you build skills and capacities.  
The structure of your body is your most basic tool, and the simplest expression of the health and integrity of structure is posture.  Posture represents the position of the bodies joints and segments.  The anatomy of the human body means there is ideal posture.
For swimmers, good posture is essential to avoiding injury.  Poor posture is also the most common fault affecting swim speed via greater drag and poor joint and muscle efficiency. 
The article attached explains the relationship between posture and mechanical efficiency, and describes the muscles need to be 'long' and those that need to be 'strong' in swimmers. 

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B8foxxYnBfVoNVV5S2dxWFZYcFE