The backbone to any successful throwing program is emphasizing technical development and training the body to perform the movements necessary to generate the farthest possible throw. While good technique is essential, a thrower’s physical attributes also come into play. In order to maximize a thrower’s physical attributes and make improvements, a coach must create a complete, balanced, and comprehensive strength and conditioning program that will continue to develop each thrower to his full athletic potential.
When putting together a training program, one of the major commonalities between most athletes and coaches is the desire to reach this “full potential” each year for championship season. At the high school level, this usually includes a league, sectional, state, and national meet while at the collegiate level this usually includes a conference, regional, and national championship meet with a last chance qualifier mixed in. In order to prepare the athlete for championship season, the coach will put together a periodization scheme that will bring the athlete from general preparation through competition and into the final championship phase.
The purpose of this article is to provide one method for creating an optimal peak for an athlete for championship season. As you’re reading this article, one important note to remember is that one of the keys to any training program is finding what works for that individual athlete. Athletes all deal with various factors that affect their performance in different ways. These factors can include injury concerns, technical changes, confidence issues, and trainability. Because of the individualized nature of these factors, it is important that as coaches we do not blindly follow what others have done before us or merely apply training principles that may have worked for other athletes. Each athlete is different and many different types of training techniques will benefit some while hindering others. So before beginning this program or any other program, it is important to perform your own research on the particular method of training you are analyzing and adapt it to your athlete, his circumstances, and what you are trying to accomplish. While coaches may have many opportunities to create and refine their training approach to a major championship meet, our athletes may only have one.
In the following sections, I will discuss the final month of the Union College throwers’ strength and conditioning program for the 2009 outdoor season. The program produced outstanding results for our throwers as they continually surpassed or met their current personal bests throughout the four weeks of the program. The first section of this article will discuss what factors went into the design of the program. The second section will provide the four-week template used by one of the athletes, Jun Ho Ham, in his preparation for the 2009 NCAA Division III Outdoor Track and Field Championships. The final section will conclude the article.
Program design
While there is a time and place for many aspects of training, at this point of the season it is important to keep things simple and prepare the body to get the most out of a training session without diminishing the effects of what you are trying to accomplish inside the circle. The focus of our program was to simulate the dominant physiological and motor qualities that were necessary to create a long throw. The benefits of a true peak can lead to extreme advantages over competitors who have not peaked optimally. A true peak can allow an athlete the physical benefits of increased power and recovery but also mental benefits such as sharper concentration and greater confidence. In the following paragraphs, I will break down the key elements that went into creating this program, what we chose to do, and why we made these choices.
The first factor we looked at was the timing and frequency of where we would place our strength sessions as part of our overall program. The training split we chose to employ was a two-day split where we would train on Sunday evenings and Wednesday mornings with each session being a total body workout. (We made some alterations to this split based on the scheduled dates of the meets we attended. If we were to have had Friday/Saturday meets, we would have consistently followed the Sunday/Wednesday split.) This set-up allowed us time off following the previous weekend’s meet, recovery time between our hardest strength session (Sunday evening) and our first practice of the week (Monday afternoon), and the ability to have a quality lifting session and a quality low volume technical practice on Wednesday afternoons. I felt that by splitting practice and strength sessions on Wednesday it allowed the throwers a better opportunity to focus mentally for each session and also be more physically prepared to complete each session as required as opposed to having only one longer session.
The other advantage to using a two-day split was it allowed us to maintain our training frequency. While during the indoor season we followed a three-day split and during the pre-season we had followed either a three- or four-day split depending on the current phase of training, we had shifted to the two-day split right at the beginning of the outdoor season. The reasons behind our shift were that we were satisfied with our current level of fitness and it provided us the best use of the practice time we had. Being a school in the northeastern United States, we were stuck with a short and unpredictable outdoor season, and our time was best used in the circle as weather conditions were beginning to improve. The problem I felt we would run into if we maintained a three-day split up until championship season was that it would reduce the quality and number of sessions we could have in the circle and that altering our routine immediately prior to the start of championship season could be detrimental to our performance.
Our next step was to determine the pattern of each individual strength session. We modeled our program as follows: dynamic warm up, speed/ballistic work, core lifts, supplemental lifts, and post-workout cool down. Starting with a dynamic warm up allowed us to increase blood flow and increase nervous system awareness so we were prepared for the strength session. We followed our warm up with speed/ballistic work, which allowed us to perform key technical and reactionary drills while fresh. We felt that doing these exercises in a fatigued state would decrease the productivity and purpose of these drills. The multi-joint core lifts came next in order to focus on the exercises that used the most musculature, and we finished up with throws-specific isolation work and a post-workout cool down.
Following our strength session format, it was time to address the actual nuts and bolts of what would make up the program in terms of training volume, intensity, rest/recovery, and exercise selection. For the general dynamic warm up, we started with our regular shortened warm up that we had used for strength training all year. This warm up consisted of 12 dynamic exercises in the following order: high knees, butt kicks, high knee holds, A skips, B Skips, backward runs, backpedals, greatest stretch ever, straight leg cross over, one leg deadlift walk, inch worms, and accelerations. We went through each of these exercises twice for a duration of about 20 meters. While many coaches may advocate a longer dynamic warm up or include a static warm up, we decided to keep it short because much of what we do in the four stations used for our speed-ballistic work also serves the same purpose of warming up the muscles. In regards to static stretching, we emphasize this in between core and supplemental lift sets and also in our post-workout cool down.
Following our dynamic warm up, we broke into four groups and rotated through the following speed-ballistic stations: kettlebell station, push-up ladder station, jump rope station, and agility ladder station. The following table outlines the exercises used for each of the four stations as well as the details for the specific exercises. Following those four stations the athletes performed the following low-impact plyometric exercises in one group: one leg cone hops-side/side and front/back, double leg cone hops-side/side and front/back, triple standing broad jump, and pogo jumps. We performed two sets of each of these exercises with 30-second breaks between each set.
Speed-ballistic stations
In regards to the speed-ballistic stations, we had different points of emphasis for each exercise. For the kettlebell movements, we focused on hip extension and drive. For the jump rope patterns, we focused mainly on body awareness and range of motion. For the push-up ladder, agility ladder, and the light plyometric exercises, which followed the stations, we focused on time in contact. We wanted to limit the time the athlete was in contact to the ground as much as possible as we were working toward an increased reactive ability. What we were looking for was the ability to utilize eccentric muscle actions (i.e. landing) to facilitate subsequent concentric actions (i.e. jumping). The idea was to condition the athletes for the spring efficiency that would be necessary in a throw.
The core lifts in our program were broken up into two sections. The first section was the use of the cluster method for a single Olympic lift or Olympic lift variation. The cluster method has been a long used method that has been endorsed by many of the top strength training minds and has been popularized by Charles Poliquin. Generally speaking, "clustering" refers to the rest-pause method where you use a heavy load and do single reps with short rest intervals. What we did was perform five sets of five reps using a 1-1-1-1-1 approach with 15 seconds of rest between repetitions and 3:30 between sets. This set up allowed for 25 reps in just over twenty minutes. The intensity of the load was 70 percent of their max lift.
The reason we used the cluster method was simple, and you can look to another track and field event group to find the rationale behind its use. For example, consider a sprinter. He performs under the idea that you must train fast to run fast. This “quality sprinting” is no different than what we accomplish with clustering. In clustering, where we are overloading the total movement, it is important to remember that our type IIb muscle fibers have very little endurance capacity. Because these are the types of fibers we want to train with during our strength sessions, we must not perform movements that last longer than their sustainability and must provide them with the proper rest time to recharge between each use. The pause facilitates this recharge by allowing the local lactate accumulation to dissipate. It also allows oxygen debt to be kept to a minimum granting us the ability to use these fibers for a longer duration.
The power snatch was the primary Olympic exercise we chose to apply the cluster method to. The reason we chose only to perform Olympic lifts is because they force an athlete to use their type IIb motor units because you can’t perform Olympic lifts at this great of intensity without moving at the requisite speed or you will miss the lift. The power snatch was the chosen lift because it requires both a strong posterior chain and involves the entire extensor chain.
For our other core lifts, we used a theory somewhat similar to the conjugate method. Basically, what this theory involves is lifting with a sub-maximal load at the highest possible speed. The approach we used was performing five sets of three at about 60 percent of the athlete’s maximal lift. The reason we chose three reps was that it enabled the athletes to continue to apply an adequate amount of velocity into the lift, which allowed fifteen total quality reps. Basically, no matter how light of a load you attempt to lift, you will lose energy during each succeeding repetition. We felt that after three reps the slowing of velocity would be at a point where our form would break down and the repetitions wouldn’t remain as productive for developing speed-strength.
The lifts we chose to incorporate here varied. We focused on using one hip dominant movement in the back, front, or box squat and one pressing movement in the push press, incline bench, or flat bench press. While the back/front squats and the flat/incline benches were performed at high speeds throughout the entire lift, we performed the box squats and push press differently. With the box squat, we focused on sitting back against the box in order to further recruit the hamstrings, set the proper depth without any depth error as reps increase, and force the thrower to develop a dynamic movement from a complete static start. The reason we liked the push press was because it forced the athlete to initiate the movement with the lower body and finish the lift with the upper body just as the case is with a throw.
Although I have already stated that we had specific percentages outlined for our core lifts, we also measured the lift intensity in another way to make sure we were getting the right type of production. This other method is by measuring the level of exertion needed to perform that lift during the set. We took advantage of both theories because by initially using the one rep max, we had a starting point to measure the proper intensity necessary to produce maximal force. Because we did not have a Tendo unit to measure bar speed, we had to subjectively measure the rate at which the athlete was moving the given load. If I felt the athlete was not moving the bar with proper efficiency, we altered or cut short the workout in order to maintain the proper training effect.
For our supplemental lifts, we focused on movements that we felt would assist the core lifts. We also performed these lifts only during the Sunday session to keep the strength session volume limited on Wednesdays due to our afternoon practice session. The lifts that we rotated through here included Turkish get-ups, one leg Romanian deadlifts, the iron cross, reverse hyperextensions, and Bulgarian split squats. We also performed weighted abdominal work with exercises such as weighted crunches on a Duraball and standing rotational work using cables, medicine balls, or plates.
For our post-workout recovery, we kept it very simple. The first thing we did was perform about two minutes of leg shakes against a wall. The next exercise we performed was hanging torso twists off a pull-up bar for about one minute. The final exercise was to hold steady in a partial push-up position. Following these exercises, the throwers performed static stretching on their own.
Program template for Jun Ho Ham, 2009 outdoor track and field championship season
There isn’t any doubt that the program outlined in this article put the Union College throwers in a great position to compete at a high level during championship season. However, as I have previously stated, the best course of action for a coach is to take the principles and concepts he agrees with and apply them to the athletes and their goals rather than just mirror this program or any other program. I feel this point can’t be emphasized enough.
The purpose of this program was to illustrate a concept, not to merely provide an answer to what to do during a strength session when peaking. No program can be a predictor of success because everyone will have a different physiological response to different types of training. You can never really predict how your athletes will feel. All you can do is take the concepts that are out there, apply them to what you are trying to do, and regulate the results by making changes when necessary. A program is all in the execution, not just in what is written on the paper.