The writings of James Smith – known to EFS readers as “The Thinker” --
originally came to my attention back in 2004, after I’d first been hired as a
part-time volunteer high school football coach. I was given the responsibility
of redesigning our team’s entire physical preparation program, and I was
regularly perusing all the usual suspect sites – EFS, Charlie Francis,
EliteTrack, Inno Sport, et al – in search of information I could use to improve
our performance in the weight room and on the field. James’s posts on the
Charlie Francis message board piqued my interest, and it was hardly a surprise
when he was brought on board the EFS Q&A staff.
The thing that intrigued me about James’s work was the fact that he was, and
still is, an actual, practicing football coach. James might describe himself as
a “coach of physical preparation specializing in American football,” but to me,
that just deals in semantics. All coaches who care about the players in their
charge speak a similar language. His help to our program at Cardinal Hayes High
School has been invaluable, simply because he’s someone who’s actually dealt
with the day-to-day realities of managing the simultaneous training of dozens of
athletes of vastly differing levels of preparedness.
If you’ve never coached a competitive team before, I can assure you it’s an
entirely different animal from simply training athletes and sending them off to
their various sport coaches, especially at the high school level, where athletes
of wildly divergent abilities are thrown together in one weight room under your
supervision. It can take even the most competent and motivated coach an entire
competitive year to figure out the associated logistics alone. James’s work
resonates with those of us who coach in such situations, because his material
takes heretofore inaccessible training information and science and presents it
in a form that sport coaches can actually use, offered from the perspective of
someone who actually knows what we’re dealing with on a daily basis.
Taken as a whole, James’s body of work – his manuals, DVD’s and Q&A posts –
offer the prospective sport coach or coach of physical preparation a phenomenal
opportunity to, as James says, “swallow the red pill” and go directly to the
hard science that constitutes the basis of all good coaching and program design.
His new
VIP Seminar Lecture DVD, filmed at the Elite Fitness Systems VIP
Seminar in May 2008, is a compelling addition to this prodigious body of work.
In it, James delivers a one hour and fifteen minute lecture covering a wide
variety of training topics, interspersed with questions from an audience of high
level athletes, trainers and coaches. This is as close as you’ll ever come to a
“lecture” at an EFS seminar, since the majority of presentations end up going in
a direction led by questions from the audience.
Before presenting at this seminar, James had said on several occasions that
he had in mind a variety of topics he definitely wanted to cover – the
intricacies of block training among them – but that he really had no idea what
the bulk of his presentation would entail, since generous question/answer
periods play such a major role in EFS’ events. His portion of the seminar –
filmed, in its entirety, for this DVD – reflects this, as it tends more toward
an introduction of several important training points than it does toward an A to
Z coverage of just one topic.
This DVD serves two distinct purposes. If you’re unfamiliar with James’s
material – or with the work of the various Eastern Bloc and Olympic coaches from
whom his methods have been derived and refined – it serves as a thorough
introduction to the training concepts to which he gives priority, especially for
the American football players he coaches at the University of Pittsburgh. If you
do have a degree of familiarity with his writings, this DVD is a fine companion
piece to his manuals, articles and voluminous Q&A responses.
Of particular interest is his outline of the various methods of planning.
Here, James delineates the similarities and differences between block training,
complex parallel training and linear or Western periodization. This discussion
is one he’s referred to several times in his Q&A responses to various readers –
specifically, his rationale for stating that the block training methodology is
his preferred method of planning for powerlifters – and it’s one in which James
states his case for block training with unparalleled eloquence. In the context
of this discussion, you’ll hear dozens of “real world,” field-tested pieces of
advice that James has taken from the pages of scientific journals and applied to
his athletes. For anyone who works with athletes, this distillation alone is
worth the price of the DVD.
Also of note is a discussion of the correlation – or lack thereof – between
jumping ability and sprinting speed. During this portion of the lecture, James
explains what happens, physiologically, during virtually every portion of a
sprint – from what training modalities are necessary for acceleration, to which
are required to improve athletes’ top speed. He covers, in detail, the
differences between explosive strength and reactivity, what bearing they both
have on speed, and how each can be better developed in the athlete.
For anyone interested in youth athletics, the latter portion of the DVD
contains a fascinating exchange between James and Jim Wendler on the development
of young athletes. Here, James gives his thoughts – supported, as always, by
cutting-edge research – on sport activities and training for pre-adolescents,
and how wrongheaded thinking on athlete specialization has severely weakened an
already misguided American sport system.
For the uninitiated, James’s work can admittedly be a bit dry, but I think
this is more a function of the subject matter than the presenter himself. The
physiological concepts he presents can be complicated, and such material is not
easily broken down into “language we can all easily understand.” To fully
comprehend this material – and, indeed, to “get” where James is “coming from” –
takes some effort. As James has demonstrated to me with the prodigious amount of
research he’s undertaken and the volume of practical knowledge he’s accrued, the
attainment of a high degree of coaching knowledge is not something you can
accomplish by simply reading a few articles and asking a handful of targeted
questions.
If you’re ready to take that next step in your coaching, training or
athletic career, however, “swallow the red pill” and get
this DVD.