Training Talk With Vern Gambetta (Part 2)

Earlier this week I posted part one of my interview with athletic development expert Vern Gambetta. Among other topics, we discussed how throws training stacks up to other events and sports. As we all start up our training for the 2012 season, this last installment discusses a timely topic: what are coach Gambetta’s views on rest periods and Fall training. We both also provide our opinion on what scientific advances we see on the horizon.

If you are interested in learning more about Vern’s ideas, pick up one of his books, read his blog, or follow him on Twitter.

Fall training

Martin: I was talking with Jean-Pierre Egger a few months ago and asked him what he would have done differently with Günthör. He’s had a similar career path as you have, working with various sports after Günthör retired. With all his experience he said we wouldn’t have changed much for the technique, but he would have spent less time building a base in fall training. I’ve heard that from quite a few athletes now.

Vern: We are operating in the wrong paradigm. When I look at an athlete’s program and it says “preparation period” or “general preparation” I see an antiquated model and the USATF and IAAF coaching programs still teach this. You should never get very far away from the competitive implement.

I heard a young American throws coach at a convention a few years ago and he said “We don’t touch an implement for the first 6-8 weeks of training, we just lift really heavy to build a better strength base.” And I’m thinking then it will take you another 6-8 weeks to get back to your technical model. You need to train all elements all the time in different proportions. That is contemporary thought and what the best coaches do in all sports. Dedicated periods of general preparation don’t work; you thread them into the rest of training.

It was interesting to hear Egger say that because it is the same conclusion I came to. Every year with my athletes we would go back in the fall to these periods and I call it dulling the knife. They started razor sharp and we just dulled it for three months. We took away the fine coordination they had.

Martin: Do you use any type of general preparation period now, or do you jump into combining everything at once?

Vern: Just like injury prevention and other elements of training, it should be threaded throughout training. I was talking to Jerry Clayton about this the other day and we talked about “resetting the system.” If you finish something with a real technical emphasis, you can go two or three days working on balance stuff to work on calming the nervous system down and taking the load off. Instead of putting blocks of time in, you put elements of it in.

Martin: Did you notice a difference when you started switching to that method with your athletes?

Vern: Yes. I didn’t have to hesitate. There was a smoother transition. We used to talk about the X model: moving from high-volume and low intensity to low-volume and high-intensity. We always said the biggest danger of energy was at the X where they crossed. And you were. But with volume and intensity parallel at a rather high level we didn’t have the little niggling injuries and some of the problems with transition to the actual event.

There is a famous swim coach who actually lives in Switzerland named Gennadi Touretski who used to coach Alexander Popov. I remember him saying on my first trip to Australia that his swimmers should be able to dive in the pool anytime, any day, and be within a certain percentage of their personal best. When I was an athlete we would do all this slow volume training in the fall and then do a pentathlon to test our form with a long jump, 200m, and some other events. It felt like running in wet concrete. I thought this is really stupid and we should rethink this. This was in 1972. It took me a while to really figure it out.

Off-season rest

Martin: How long was the rest period for most of your athletes when you were coaching them hands on?

Vern: Too long! I wouldn’t do that now. I’d say “I’ll see you in three weeks or a month”, but you can’t afford to do that now and compete at a high level. When I coached high school I had some really good distance and middle distance runners. I tried to make them take a month off, but I caught them running all the time. They were smarter than their coach. They were thinking, “Why should I take a month off. I just ran in the state meet and feel sharp. I should be reinforcing that.” That doesn’t mean that you need to compete. You can let the nerves rest and muscles work. If you look around, you don’t see people doing this much anymore, taking the long forced rest breaks.

Posture

Martin: You also write a lot about posture. Can you talk a little about that in general role of posture in training, and then its specific role in the throwing events or hammer throw?

Vern: Absolutely. Let’s start with training in general and that transfers directly to the throws. Posture, again, is how things connect. We tend to think of posture as a still picture. When you look at a throw, it is a series of postures. To me this is the unifying element that goes hand in glove with the concept of training movements and not muscles.

What is your posture at release? There is a real strong core component to it, but there is also a component of how things connect and how things work together. Posture and rhythm are two unifying elements that connect everything. Posture is where your head is and how your center is aligned in regard to your base of support will determine your success or failure. Your posture in the hammer throw as you initiate your first turn is crucial. If you are hinged or bent at the waist, it just isn’t going to happen. It is absolutely crucial and must be trained and threaded throughout your strength training and all your elements of training.

Future advances in training and technology

Martin: This last question was one I just thought of during practice today. If you look at most of the advances in training over the past few decades, you see that most of them relate to technology. You have different threads of this. You have technology giving people better access to information. The average high school coach can learn much easier nowadays with the availability of information online. You have technology helping with injuries and rehabilitation through new medical treatments, and devices like the cryosauana or Alter G treadmill. And you also have technology providing better data. The cameras are better, runners can use high tech watches to provide all sorts of details about training runs that you just couldn’t do before. But with training methods, names like Anatoli Bondarchuk, Tom Telez, Arthur Lydiard are still dominant even though their biggest advancements were a long time ago. Do you see any big advancements in training methods that I have missed or that are on the horizon?

Vern: That’s a great question and one of the themes of an upcoming presentation I’m doing in Scotland. I’ve really been looking at this lately and looking at the new technologies. But as far as training systems or training methods, I’m just seeing the new technologies simply going in and verifying why some of these methods that have worked actually do work.

I think we’ll see the big breakthroughs in technique by looking at how we help athletes process the information in making technical changes with more feedback. Another big area will be monitoring training; monitoring the effects of a strength training workout neutrally and metabolically. There improvements in tracks, and improvements in shoes (there is a lot of room for innovation in spike placement depending on how someone runs a race, but the shoe companies won’t put money in that because they are paid for by jolly joggers who don’t care where the spikes are).

There are some really new innovations, but most of them are in relation to monitoring training. The cryosauna needs research, but there are some coaches and scientists I really respect that have anecdotally said that is works, especially for collision sports. Will it help a hammer thrower speed up their recovery? I don’t know, but for a player right now at the Rugby World Cup, I’d give it a try as long as I don’t get frostbite.

One idea that should make us take a note is the central governor theory put of by the South African Tim Noakes. That will make us take a look at how we are training our distance and middle-distance people. But in terms of the other events, this monkey-see monkey-do syndrome worries me. I can do a google search right now and come up with 50 different videos on the long jump. This is an advantage compared to when it used to take weeks to obtain information, but it also a down side. Somebody can just come up with an off-the-wall idea and there is no filter.

We live in exciting times and I do think there will be some innovations, but I don’t know what they are now.

What do you feel as an athlete? Do you see anything on the horizon?

Martin: What I see a lot of, since I am involved with it on my site, is the proliferation of information. For example, before Bondarchuk moved to North America only a handful of his articles with little substance had been translated into English and most of what people know about him was based on (mostly wrong) hearsay. Now I see that people are reading his books, attending seminars, etc. More people are learning new ideas from him and others, but they are not necessarily new ideas.

Vern: What is his opinion about it. Does he see anything big on the horizon?

Martin: When I say Bondarchuk is among the old ideas group, that isn’t necessarily correct. He is still collecting data from his current throwers, reanalyzing his older data, writing articles and books, and adjusting how his training plans are put together. Bondarchuk’s training is not a static concept. What he did in 1972 with himself, is different than what he did in 1980 with Sedych, different than 1986 with Sedych, different than the 1990s, and also different than his current training group.

Vern: That’s part of the reason I have so much respect for him and Gary Winkler. Gary hasn’t ever gone 180º about face . . . great coaches never do that . . .but he is constantly reevaluating his approach.

There is a guy I didn’t mention, Franz Bosch, who has looked at sprinting and running with different eyes. That is where the innovation is also coming. By looking at the same thing with different and new eyes, we will get new ideas.

Martin: What I see is that Germany is one of the few countries doing a lot of research on the throwing events. I’ve talked to a few graduate students this year that are doing dissertations on the hammer throw. If you went around schools in the US, you wouldn’t find anyone.

Vern: There is no one doing research on the throws in this country. Virtually none and very little in athletics as a whole. I was very involved in 1982 through the 1984 Olympics in organizing a lot of research. That was the golden age, but it dropped off. We need to take a hard look from the scientific perspective at the technical events. We certainly have the capability to do it.

Martin: Well Germany is one area I’m looking for more innovation and new ideas to come from just because they have more people working on it. Bondarchuk still works on it, but he is on his own. Thirty years ago he had a huge team of coaches and scientists helping him everywhere. He had resources from the federation and athletes to test ideas on. Now he has ten throwers and works on his own. He still keeps his charts and records by hand for the most part. There are only so many advances you can make in that setting. I think that is one of the reasons Germany has had so much success in Daegu and also at the 2009 World Championships.

Vern: Yeah, it didn’t come out of nowhere. And you look at their juniors and follow the sport, you see it didn’t just happen overnight.