Archive for the ‘Strength’ Category
Thursday, March 3rd, 2011
Train like a lunatic Philosophy is the same for male or female when going into the gym or onto the training pitch. Get focused for 30-35 minutes (if gym) 40-45 minutes (if pitch) and rip the place apart! Ask yourself at the end of the session – have I just improved myself in that last 30-45 minutes? Will this have an impact on my performance? Have I made progress? If the answer is no, and you have not improved or progressed, then you have just wasted 30-45 minutes of your life that you won’t get back. You have also wasted an entire training session that you can never have back to repeat. Now you are one training
session further away from achieving your goals. Why, if you have gone to the bother to get to the training venue and get changed/prepared etc, would you then serve up a pile of rubbish for a training effort? I love the Australian mindset when it comes to training athletes, especially females. At the Queensland Academy of Sport, the Strength & Conditioning Coaches have their female swimmers perform 3 reps of pull-ups with a 30kg weight hanging around their waist. They don’t differentiate male or female. The process is the same for both – as it should be. Some female athletes I have encountered can lift heavier, jump higher, run faster, throw longer than any male, so to sum everything up female or male athletes have similar needs for athletic performance so the process is the same evaluate, profile, plan, prescribe and train like a lunatic.
Mikey
Tags: mike mcgurn rugby blog, rugby female player fitness, strength and conditioning female rugby player
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Thursday, February 17th, 2011
Prescription When prescribing any type of training programme it is important to use all the information we have previously discussed. It is far too detailed and complex to cover all the aspects of successful prescription, but here are a couple of golden rules I adhere to when working with the female athlete.
When prescribing any kind of strength/power programme I initially try to dispel the myth that weights will turn them into huge muscle bound freaks. I focus more on the variety of health and performance benefits that a progressive periodised resistance programme can provide. Benefits include an increase in strength levels, better body composition and an increase in mineral bone density.
I always insist on being present when any athlete begins a new strength programme this will ensure the athlete is carrying out the correct technique, that the speed of the lift prescribed is correct, and rest periods prescribed between exercises are not too long or not too short.
I tend to find with female athletes that they normally need most work in their glutes and hamstrings (the area often referred too as the ‘posterior chain’). These muscles produce the real power we all need to compete.
Mikey
Tags: mike mcgurn rugby blog
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Thursday, February 10th, 2011
Planning We have all heard the now famous sporting cliche
‘Fail to prepare, prepare to fail.’ It has been used a million times in tons of different scenarios but do you know something it is so accurate in sporting parlance’s. I once worked with an American Strength &
Conditioning Coach who believed for every hour of training in the gym or on the training pitch, he felt there should be at least 2 hours of planning and preparation put into that session. Unfortunately, a lot of coaches still use a lot of improvisation during their session when it comes to training. Personally I am unable to do that. I need to have mentally visualised the session before I take it, and I keep my written plan of the session in my hand throughout in order to refer to it as the training progresses. This training plan challenges me to ask the question ‘Is what I am doing in training going to make my athletes perform better in competition?’ If the answer is no, then I have seriously failed the athlete. I also need to ask myself the question is the strength/power programme I have prescribed to the athlete individualised to that particular athletes needs, ensuring that it is not this far too common ‘cookie cutter ‘ approach. I have a major issue with these far too common “cut and paste for all” training programmes prescribed to athletes on a major scale. Every individual athlete, male or female, are different. They have totally different needs with their own respective programmes and almost everyone has different goals, different strengths and different weaknesses.
Mikey
Tags: mike mcgurn rugby blog, rugby female player fitness, strength and conditioning female rugby player
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Thursday, January 13th, 2011
Neural Potentiation is the firing up of the CNS (Central Nervous System) prior to performance or an event, which has been proven to enhance performance. You could liken it to a spark plug in a car engine. Neural potentiation has been widely used by athletes from many sports before competition. The normal procedure used to fire up the CNS is to lift medium to heavy weights before the competitive event in my experience 30 – 60 minutes before kick off seemed to have the best effect.
I have used Neural Potentiation when working with St. Helens Rugby League Club and it inadvertently coincided with the period of our greatest successes, winning the World Club Championship, the Super League, and the Challenge Cup Final.
Conditions
It is worth highlighting at this stage, that our gym in St.Helens was approximately 10 metres from our home dressing shed, so the initiation of firing up the CNS was far more difficult when playing away (for this we used powerbags, and occasionally brought Olympic bars and weights with our kit man, but space was always an issue).
Once the players bought into the practice it was only a matter of the players going into the gym before the match (at home) doing 3 x 6/8 reps of cleans, jammer, squats, bench throws or whatever suited them individually at any time between 10-25 minutes before warm up ( which lasts 17 minutes).
Mikey
Tags: mike mcgurn rugby blog, pre-game warm up, preparing to play
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Thursday, October 21st, 2010
Following on from last weeks introductory article the attached pdf contains an example programme for under 14s/15s and 16s.
U141516 development progs
Mikey
Tags: conditioning programme for junior rugby players, mike mcgurn rugby blog, rugby strength training, strength development
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Thursday, October 14th, 2010
I often get asked when is the right time or what age should junior players start to do weights? I don’t have the definitive answer as all teenagers develop at different rates. I would not subscribe to the ‘one size fits all’ approach. A very general rule of thumb that has worked successfully in the past for many junior athletes, is to learn to use your own bodyweight as a starting point to resistance training. Then the athlete should progress onto very very light dumbbells or even just a barbell, before considering introducing weights into their programme.
DEVELOPMENT SQUAD EXERCISE DESCRIPTION
Here are some descriptions of some of the exercises that can be done at home and only involve using your body weight as resistance.
Squats with Barbell or Light Dumb Bells
Set up your barbell in a squat rack. Rest the barbell on a rack or pins just below shoulder height. Stand under the bar with your feet shoulder width apart, resting it on your upper back behind your neck, grab the bar with both hands rotate your elbows under the bar pointing towards the floor. Keep your chest up and out the whole time.
Balance your body weight evenly over both feet, keep your chest up and out, and pull your shoulder blades back and down.
Take a deep breath, and hold. Tighten your abdominal muscles and lower the bar. As you lower the bar focus on your hips sitting back as if you are sitting down on a chair behind you. Your movement should be smooth and controlled keeping your chest up as you sit down into the squat.
Throughout the squat make sure your weight is felt through the middle to the back of the foot and not at the front.
Squat down as far as possible while keeping your stomach tight and your back in a natural arch.
A good target is to get your upper thighs parallel to the floor, or slightly below that point.
Lifting the bar back up you need to drive from your hips pressing down through your heels, pushing your upper back into the bar as you return to the starting position, squeezing your bum muscles (glutes) to assist you.
As the bar returns to the starting position breath out.
If doing body squats, principles above apply except cross your arms across your chest.
If doing dumb bells squats principles above apply except hold two dumbbells down by your side.
Push Ups
With your body straight, lie on the floor face down.
Put your hands flat on the floor directly under you shoulders.
Your bodyweight should be resting on your hands and toes.
Your body should form a straight line from your neck to through to your ankles.
Tense your stomach/abs
Using your two arms push from your hands against the floor until your two arms are now straight and locked at the elbows.
Your body should still be in a straight line from your feet to your head.
To lower yourself back to the ground bend at the elbows until your chest touches the floor, again keeping your body straight.
Turkish Get Up
Lie flat on your back with your legs out straight shoulder width apart.
Hold a dumb bell in one hand keeping that arm up straight vertically above you.
Using your non working arm as assistance, progress into a sitting position, keeping the dumb bell vertically above your head.
You may use the non working arm to prop you up behind you while you are in sitting position.
Whatever arm you are holding the dumb bell with, slip the same side foot up under your glute/buttock, using that foot to push yourself up off the floor into a deep squat position, keeping the dumb bell vertically over your head.
Pushing up from that position to a standing position with the dumbbell now directly above your shoulder.
Door Pull Ups
Pull up using a strong door. This is a pulling exercise that can be done with just about any door . Open a door halfway and place a towel over the top. Place your hands on the towel and let yourself hang off of the door. Pull yourself up against the door until your chin is over the top of the door. Lower yourself slowly back to the starting position. Ask the door owners permission first.
Single Leg Squat Holds
Single Leg Squats Hold one leg in front of you and hold your arms out straight ahead. Looking forward at all times, lower yourself slowly on one leg. As you pass the parallel position, flex your butt and stomach as hard as you can and pull yourself down to the bottom position. Hold the bottom position for a second and rise back up to the starting position.
Squat Thrusts
Squat Thrusts Stand with feet together. Squat down and place your hands on the floor next to your feet. In an explosive movement, jump feet backwards into a push-up position, jump feet back between hands and stand up.
Plank Holds
Plank Get into push up position on hands and toes, or on elbows and toes. Contract your abdominal muscles (and core). Keep your back straight (don’t collapse in the middle) and hold this position for as long as you can.
Single Leg Lunges
Starting with your right leg bend down so the right knee is directly over the toes and
at a 90 degree angle. The left leg should be behind the body and almost straight, Pushing against the ground raise the right leg back up to starting position and repeat with the other leg .
Single Leg DB Step Ups
Grab a pair of dumb-bells and place a bench in front of you. Step up with your left foot onto the bench pushing your body up until your left leg is straight, use your right leg to balance you as you raise yourself onto the bench. When you have reached the top of the bench place your right foot onto the bench and step back down onto the floor using left foot.
Next Week the programmes for Under 14s, 15s & 16s.
Mikey
Tags: conditioning programme for junior rugby players, mike mcgurn rugby blog, rugby conditioning, Rugby conditioning session
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Tuesday, August 3rd, 2010
The final aspect to making an athlete stronger is application. No strength programme in the world is worth the paper it is printed on if it is not done with intensity, attitude and pushing to the limit. The athlete needs to get to a pint where they are sweating their nuts off. For me a gym has to be a place of severe intensity. You walk in focused. You get stuck in for 35-40 minutes. Rip the place apart, and crawl out the door. Anything less and you have wasted a piece of your life that you will never get back! The great Dan Baker (Brisbane Broncos strength coach) uses the analogy ‘we are here to improve athletic not aesthetic performance.’ I personally love the quote “the more you sweat in training the less you bleed in competition.” This intimates that a strength programme will get the athlete strong only if they work like a lunatic in the gym. Competing should feel easy by comparison. The strength work is done so the athletes are prepared for hand-to-hand combat and full metal jacket when the time to compete has arrived.
Don’t get too caught up in having a perfect technique with the likes of squats, dead lifts etc. As long as your technique is safe and will not cause injury then ramp the weight up. Unless you are competing for a gold medal at the Olympics as a weightlifter, then having absolute perfect technique is a waste of the hours upon hours needed to achieve this. Just get stronger.
To finish up, don’t lose sight of the fact that the reason for going to the gym is to get stronger. In order to get stronger lift heavy, heavy weights. If you make your athletes stronger in the proper fashion I can guarantee that development in other areas will naturally follow.
Mikey
Tags: mike mcgurn rugby blog, Power, rugby conditioning, rugby strength training, Strength
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Thursday, July 29th, 2010
As well as fancy machines, swiss balls, spin classes, body pump, zero carbs are all some of the many short term fads which go as quick as they appear. On the other hand, barbells, squatting, heavy plates, dead lifting, heavy dumbbells have been around for centuries. Ashley Jones gave me the quote ‘to get stronger lift heavy rocks.’ He wasn’t too far wrong. In my opinion the latest fad to entice athletes/coaches are kettle bells. For me kettle bells are great for body conditioning, but absolutely not for making you stronger. With a barbell on your back and 180 kg of plates on your bar, you can squat heavy and gain real strength. I can’t envisage how any athlete can swing two 90 kg kettle bells up onto their shoulders and do a front squat.
I coined a phrase ‘the bullseye theory’ to explain my approach to gaining real functional strength. This theory is explained by the fact that I believe in throwing 3 ‘good darts’ to try and hit the bullseye. This is much more favourable than throwing 15 mediocre ones! In other words it is better to concentrate on a few aspects and do this well, instead of trying to cover a multitude of areas. Trying to do too many different things only leads to the athlete spreading themselves too thin, and diluting what they are doing. This means that despite busting themselves in the gym, they don’t really improve at anything in particular. This is where I feel a lot strength programmes are seriously flawed. Too many strength programmes have too many exercises as athletes/ coaches are effectively throwing those fifteen darts to hit their target. In reality they only need three. Some strength programmes I have observed have up to 15 different exercises. The reasoning behind this excess of exercise prescription was that in order to make the athlete stronger every muscle group needed to be activated. What will actually happen in that situation is that any energy that was available was becoming so depleted that no one muscle group was getting enough to allow any significant improvement.
I firmly believe if all you ever did in the gym was squat heavy, power clean, and ground base jammer or dead lift (three darts) and do these hard all the time you will get better performance results. My opinion is that to improve athletic performance squats are king. Squat often and squat hard. Supplementing squats with an exercise like cleans (high pulls if you fail to master safe technique) and jammer or dead lifts will go a long way to achieving your athletic goals.
It really is that simple, a strength programme does not have to be complicated to be effective. Equally there doesn’t need to be15 exercises in a programme to make sure all the bases are covered, as this will lead to diminished returns.
Mikey
Tags: mike mcgurn rugby blog, Power, rugby conditioning, rugby strength training, Strength
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Wednesday, July 21st, 2010
My belief and philosophy on strength training is that it is done in the gym with a barbell, heavy plates, and heavy dumbbells. If you have a squat rack and a bench even better (if you stack 2 sets of 9 breeze blocks on their flat, you have a poor mans squat rack to lift the barbell off). Some so-called strength programmes I witness these days resemble a gadget assault course, with all sorts of bosu balls, rubber tubing, vibration platforms (worlds most expensive coat hangers), dyna jumpers and indoor ladders! Incidentally swiss balls are banned from my gyms. When I see a player using a swiss ball in the middle of Croke Park or Twickenham during a test game, only then will I have them in my gym.
Another aspect of these diluted strength programmes that winds me up are exercise machines. The exceptions are hammer and dominator machines, which are ground based and sport specific. I won’t mention the company names for fear of libel proceedings, but they know how they are! They saw a niche in the fitness market with their highly engineered exercise machines and boy did they have an impact. All of a sudden gyms, health clubs and sports clubs embraced this concept and were covered in rows of fancy sexy looking technological machines, which had the sole purpose of allowing you to do one exercise!!! After these clubs had shelled out thousands and thousands of pounds, their members soon got bored of sitting on a chest press machine, and a leg press which had you lying on your back looking at the ceiling!!
Lo and behold medical experts have recently discovered that these machines are detrimental to the joints. They make the joints work in a fixed position and therefore only exercise the skeletal muscle. The machine does not permit involvement of tendons and ligaments. This can hypertrophy the muscle and if a strong muscle is pulling on weak ligaments or tendons, injury is more likely to occur. This means that the body cannot actually get stronger using this method. It is also important to remember that there is a neurological element to muscle improvement, movement and co-ordination. After all, the brain is the complex organ that controls muscle. For it to control muscle movement in an effective an efficient way it must be trained to do so. For example to strengthen quad, it is of little benefit doing hundreds of reps on a leg extension machine. The muscle must be strengthened in the way it is going to be used, so a much better alternative would be for example to use body weight with resistance i.e. squats.
The producers and suppliers of these wonder machines did not factor in to their master plan that no matter how hard an athlete/gym goer trained on their machines, they were not getting that much stronger. This had a major impact for coaches and athletes who trained on these machines. The fact was that their strength training wasn’t having much of a positive effect on performance, and was actually leaving the athlete’s joints and tendons more susceptible to injury.
Mikey
Tags: mike mcgurn rugby blog, Power, rugby conditioning, rugby strength training, Strength, strength development
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Tuesday, July 13th, 2010
Any sport I can think of all require basic strength levels. Having greater strength levels than your opponent normally will indicate a higher chance of victory. How so? Well, for starters it will allow the athlete to execute the skills of the sport for a longer period of time, and with a lot more accuracy. This in itself is a major plus. Couple this with the proven reduction in injuries that a solid strength programme provides.
Strength training, all of a sudden is a much sought after attribute in the athletic community.
Kinesiologists, physiologists, athletic trainers, experienced professional strength coaches all tell us that if all you did was increase muscular strength by 35-40% in an athlete without changing any of the other attributes needed for the sport, there will be a definite improvement in performance levels. The doubters may disagree and question how getting stronger can be of benefit in sports such as bowls or golf, where the technique is the priority. Surely though being a lot more stable when bending over to deliver the bowl, or being able to send the golf ball 20 or 30 more yards is a huge advantage. As in any sport if a game of bowls or a round of golf is played over a number of hours the stronger athlete should hold better concentration levels?
I have always found that there is a massive transference from doing a proper strength programme into improving all the other physical components the respective sport requires. Various journals and abstracts on Muscle Activity tell us ‘without sufficient strength, factors such as skill, flexibility, and endurance cannot be used effectively.’ Therefore, common sense tells us that when an athlete improves their power and strength they can then for example jump higher, get faster, have better repeatability. This can all be done in a more controlled accurate manner with far less fatigue.
This is not ground breaking information, nor will it allow me to claim that I have discovered some amazing new angle in the fitness industry that I can exploit to become a millionaire overnight! The reality is thousands, possibly millions (I don’t have an exact figure) of athletes and coaches in every sport, in every corner of the world are undertaking so called ‘strength’ programmes. I do question however if these programmes are actually improving strength? Or are they one of the plethora of sexed up fitness programmes masquerading as the next best must have conditioning programme, promising to make you X % stronger and Y % more powerful?
Mikey
Tags: mike mcgurn rugby blog, Power, rugby conditioning, rugby strength training, Strength, strength development
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