Go Getta Syndrome

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For some reason, I can't stop naming my posts by rap songs......

There are some athletes, including myself that are great to coach. They are the hard workers, the highly motivated, "go-getter" type of athletes. Most of them are intrinsically motivated by nature, i.e., they don't do what they do for the external rewards. They don't do it for the roar of the crowd, the medals or trophies, or the swoon of the ladies. No, they train and compete because of the deep inner drive that is within themselves to become the best that they can be. This type of athlete is not only well motivated, but also fiercely competitive. This type of athlete can be great to coach, except for one thing, which is the possibility of overtraining. The following is a list of good ways to overtrain in a speed-power related event, and are ways in my opinion, that hard working athletes fall more prone to.

References in Parenthesis:

Do plyometrics for more than a 3-4 week time period without a "rest week".
(Bompa, Myself)

Lift weights at greater than 90% of ones 1RM for an extended period of time (4-5 weeks).
(Siff, Verkhoshansky)

Do "partial" lifts at over 90% of 1RM for a short period of time (2-3 weeks)
(Myself)

Don't do enough light work between heavy workouts, and only do CNS intensive work when one does work out. (Vern Gambetta)

Lose their fitness level at the expense of CNS intensive work early in the training year. (Verkhoshanski)

Not take rest or transition periods when appropriate, which is often after 3-4 month blocks of training. (Kraemer)


Now there are a few helpful solutions to making your training program a little more nervous system friendly. The main one is just to make a plan and stick to it. Don't do more than you gave for yourself or your athletes to do on that given day, either in the weightroom or out on the track. Some of my best workouts I have had, my body crashed the days after, because I wore my nervous system out too much. A maximal competitive effort can wear the nervous system out for days to weeks, depending on the event. A prime example of this is olympic weightlifting, where after a peak competition, 6 meet lifts can keep an athlete from competition shape for up to a month.

Another helpful solution is to not get over-psyched in the weight room. This is a serious problem for a lot of athletes. We all love to watch the powerlifting and olympic weightlifting videos of lifters getting psyched and hitting a huge lift. This may be an effective strategy if the ultimate outcome of our sport was to lift X-amount of weight. As it stands, it is not, and thus we must take care in the weight room not to over-extend ourselves. It can be a valuable practice to check your heart rate immediately before performing sets in the weight room. If your heart rate is noticable higher for a big set, then you are likely over-exerting yourself, and the training effect of your set is going to be fairly large (it will take a long time to recover from). If you think about it, isn't this what we tend to do though.......we go through a period of weight training which starts fairly easy, and we don't have to exert ourselves too much, and then comes a day where we really start having to psyche ourselves up to get after it and hit the set we wanted, and then we find ourselves lacking progress from that point on. Now some people can get away with this, but all too often, it leads to CNS fatigue, especially in highly motivated athletes who don't have the resiliant, high work capacity systems that some elite athletes do. We can also get away with this once in a while, as the human body does go through various rhythms. It is not a good idea to always push through though. As the textbooks say, 75-80% is the magic bracket that most olympic lifters work in during the majority of their training sets over the training year. When you do decide to push it, you might want to stick to a 3 or 5 rep max lift, rather than a 1 or 2 rep max.


Finally, in order to keep from overtraining, rest and recovery periods should be woven into each aspect of the training cycle. Recovery sessions are often tacked into the nano-cycle (training day) of each athlete in a world-class training system. These recovery sessions are often in the form of aerobic work, stretching, massage, hydrotherapy, EMS and other methods. Recovery periods should also be integrated regularly into the meso and macrocycle format of training.

On a final note, don't rush your training program. We all want 6 inches of vertical or .2 seconds on our 40 right away, but the best athletes are built over a long period of time. It is a good idea to shoot for a gradual increase in weight room strength from year to year, instead of giant leaps. Research has shown that gradual year to year increase in volume is the best way to maintain progress.

Joel