Tag Archive: sporting

1. Jigsaw Training won’t help you win the US Open

   15th June 2012 10:10 am Leave a Comment

   Focus on the picture not the pieces

   Golf fitness training is a boom industry. There are umpteen “golf specific” exercise dvds, books, apps and courses you can attend.

   Taken out of context, the exercises and “tests” could lead to your game actually getting worse.

   I have been discussing this over several months with Golf Coach Stuart Wells. He wants his golfers fit enough to be able to address the ball and strike it well throughout the tournament.

   That makes sense to me and is a reasonable goal.

   How do I test for Golf fitness?

   Is what Stuart has been asking me. He is not interested in how far a golfer can do a standing long jump.

   I am not interested in doing isolated body tests such as the static leg raise (pictured right). 

   These give isolated information, completely out of context. They assume that the athlete is broken, and that we can rebuild them piece by piece.

   (In fact I came across some tennis coaches looking at this test, who really should know better, telling me that it helps predict tennis playing ability!)

   What we want are simple measurements that look at the golfer as a whole, but give us specific information to work on.

   I use a 5 point assessment with all my athletes that give a starting point on how their body works as a whole. This information allows the golfer to know their own body a bit better, and how it works.

   The golf swing is a massive connection of the kinetic chain. Trying to isolate parts of it and put it back together will just make it an omnishambles

   Don’t train to the test.

   There is a danger when “testing” to just practice the test in order to “show improvement”.

   This is a danger when coaches are trying to justify their own worth. It is “scientificy” rather than proven science.

   The most important test is on the golf course. When we work with golfers we look at their overall athleticism and improve that.

   They can all hold their positions throughout a tournament and hit killer drives.

   Athletic Development is more than shuffling isolated puzzle pieces around. 

   It is looking at the complete picture and working with golfer and coach alike.

2. Bruce Lee on agility

   28th May 2012 2:24 pm 4 Comments

   Traditional Martial Arts Training = Organised Despair

   According to Bruce Lee in the Tao of Jeet Kune Do, where he talks about traditional martial arts training and refers to it as organised despair. 

   “Instead of facing combat in its suchness, then, most systems of martial art accumulate a fancy mess that distorts and cramps their practitioners and distracts them from the actual reality of combat, which is simple and direct.

   Instead of going immediately to the heart of things, flower forms (organised despair) and artificial techniques are ritualistically practiced to simulate actual combat. Thus, instead of being in combat these practitioners are doing something about combat.”

   Now, if you substitute the word combat for agility, you may then see what is going on in your own sport. What happens in coaching environments is that a fancy mess of equipment is laid out and the athletes are told to perform artificial techniques that have no bearing to the sporting contest.

   (Remember John Madden’s thoughts on footwork?)

   A prime example is the Ickey shuffle through a ladder. This footwork pattern was Ickey Wood’s touchdown dance for Pete’s sake, he didn’t do it in the game!

   I saw this drill being used by someone training a tennis player this morning – when is he ever going to do that in a match? Unless he celebrates winning a set by doing the shuffle.

   Testing doesn’t help

   One problem is with agility testing. An athlete told me this morning that he was agile because he came 2nd in an agility test. Agility testing tests your ability to move between fixed points with some change of direction.

   It does not test your response to realistic stimuli, or your ability to change direction in an unplanned sequence.

   There is a place for using equipment and training specific, pre programmed, foot patterns. It is useful in training lower limb strength at specific speeds and angles. Don’t mistake this for true agility though.

   The body has an amazing ability to move and adapt. We have evolved that way in order to hunt, or avoid being hunted. Our ancestors did not practice organised despair instead they would have had more realistic hunting, chasing games.

   Think about using these type of games in your agility work, don’t try and constrain your athletes into artificial foot and movement patterns.

   Agility is the focus over the next few weeks of our Sports Training System