Structural and CNS Training Systems

Editors Note: My new site is now at www.just-fly-sports.com Check it out for a wealth of information on jumping higher and running faster, all backed by research and practical experience!

THE YING AND YANG OF TRAINING:
CENTRAL NERVOUS SYSTEM TRAINING AND STRUCTURAL TRAINING

In my last post, I talked about how the CNS (Central Nervous System) is of prime importance in athletic improvements, and how to avoid its overtraining. In this post I would like to talk a little bit about the two sides of the training coin in athletics. These would include training the structure of the body and then the central nervous system. Here is a quick overview of both types of training before I go into greater detail.

Structural Training: Training that focuses on the muscle-tendon structure of the body, the energy systems which support movement, as well as the endocrine and cardio-vascular systems that support the general well-being of the body as a whole.

CNS Training: In a nutshell, this is explosive strength and power training…plyometrics, olympic lifts and heavy squats…you get the idea. CNS training works the neural pathways from the brain and spinal cord to the muscles that they innervate. This training stimulates the central nervous system to become more proficient, as opposed to more efficient.

To acheive the best results in your training, what needs to happen is an optimal training frequency of both types of training. The overload that tends to happen, and cause training regression, is in CNS training. This particularly will occur when too much CNS specific training is undertaken and too little structural training has occurred. To give you a picture of what this is like, imagine what would happen if an overweight, untrained, 50 year old individual suddenly had the nervous system output of a professional level athlete. What would happen would be a high count of injuries, because that untrained persons muscles and connective tissues could not take the high force output of an amped up nervous system. Likewise, their body could not sustain that type of training for very long, because they wouldn't have the endocrine and cardiovascular support that would help them recover from the intense CNS output that they now had. Needless to say, it is important to do a good job with both aspects of training.

So I would like to now go into a bit of detail with structural training. Most of what I am concerned about when it comes to the structural training of an athlete is that of their muscle-tendon complex. In human movement, it is not just the muscles that bring about the movement, it is also the tendons. Our tendons act as speed and force amplifiers for the muscles in the body. Think of them as giant rubber bands, lets actually use a slingshot as an example. When you shoot a sling shot, your front hand is on a forked apparatus, while your back hand pulls back a band which usually contains a rock/bb/paintball/whatever you can come up with when you are 8 years old. Think of your front arm putting pressure on the fork as the work your muscles do….then think of the band being pulled back as your tendon action. The end result? A projectile being shot much faster than you could throw it. The mechanical and elastic elements work together to produce an enhanced reaction.

Back a few years ago, I did a large amount of research on tendon structure in athletes, and how it changes through training. To cut a long story short, tendons play an incredibly important part in human movement, and to neglect the fact that running and jumping is a dynamic interaction between the muscle fibers and the tendon units can really hurt your athletic performance. Now, when training volume is cut low to the point where one is only doing CNS type training (you can only do so much CNS work) you are going to start to neglect the "springyness" of the muscle-tendon structure. This will especially happen when the majority of your CNS style work is done in the weightroom. In fact, what most athletes will typically find if most of their training is done in the weightroom is that...their standing vertical jumps, and maybe 10m dashes will go up, but running jumps and top end sprint speed will go down. Bottom line…..the faster the movement…..the more the elasticity of the tendons will play a role. Sprints and running jumps rely a lot on tendon spring.

If you are not training your body structure to run fast or jump high, CNS training will not pick up the slack, even if you are doing a decent amount of plyometrics. I will say though that a fairly intensive plyometric training program certainly helps, but you can't sustain it all year long. So what exactly are some methods that are used to train the structure of an athletes? Its really a lot simpler than you might think.

The best exercises to train the structure of an athlete are simply repeated jumping or running exercises. If you are involved in a team sport, such as basketball or football, you are probably getting plenty of structural training in. If you don’t really play a team sport, or play a team sport, but don’t really practice the sport much in the offseason then you might need to do a little extra work in regards to your muscle-tendon structure. Some training methods that some elite track coaches use to remedy in-elasticity are called “rudimentary jump circuits". These jump circuits involve multiple jumps over a distance of around 20-30 meters. The jumps are low intensity, however, and instead of shooting for max distance, each jump only covers between one and three feet. In each jump, the aim is for minimal flexion of the knees and also low ground time. Biomechanically speaking, the tendon units will come into play to a greater extent when the ground time is minimized.

From my understanding and experience, changes in tendon stiffness are the result of repetitive efforts (100+ contacts/session). Research has shown that distance running has a positive effect on increasing the stiffness of the Achilles tendon. Now I don’t think that aspiring strength/power athletes should spend a lot of time running distance, but I think that repetitive efforts are important to optimize the tendon function of the body. So, take home message of this section, you are not going to get a whole lot of elasticity by only doing 4 sets of 5 depth jumps a week for jumping work. The elastic changes are the result of prolonged stretch-shortening cycle work. Flash back to discussions about the "training" of guys like team-flight-brothers (they don't train in the traditional sense, they just play basketball and practice dunking) these guys get a great mix of structural and CNS work, from just playing ball all the time, and then practicing dunks.

So what exactly would constitute a “structural” type workout for an athlete? Well, for a team –sport athlete, just playing your sport usually is a pretty good structural workout, as there are many ground contacts, jumps, cuts, etc. For non-team sport athletes, such as track, structural work includes warmup and general strength work, mobility, tempo sprints and repeated jumps, hops and skips and med ball throws. For those of you familiar with track, I am sure you are also familiar with many of these exercises. Here is an example of a typical non-CNS, pro structure and fitness based training day.

Jog 800m
General Strength (squats/lunges/inchworms,etc) and Light Accelerations
Hurdle mobility work
Sprint Drills, A-Skips, B-Skips, C-Skips, etc.
Repeated Skips: 3x20m for distance, 3x20m for height, 3x20m double arm
3x200m at submax pace
10 minute medicine ball circuit
Abdominal/Core work and stretch

So that would be a structure based training day. The opposite of this would be a CNS training day. A CNS training day might look something like this.

Jog 800m
Sprint Drills/Accelerations
2x20m, 2x30m, 2x40m sprints @ 97%
10x jump attempts/dunk attempts
2x5 depth jumps over hurdle
4x4 hurdle hops

So I am sure you get the idea, and it is a pretty simple concept really. I feel that the more difficult aspect of this comes in the split of the weekly workload and deciding what workouts to do. I think early in the season, aka preparatory period, structural workouts will dominate the training of the athlete. A preseason schedule could look something like this:

Monday: Structural
Tuesday: Structural
Wednesday: Rest
Thursday: CNS
Friday: Structural
Saturday: Structural

Once the season is a little farther along, the training will shift to a little more CNS intense work. The week might then look something like this:

Monday: CNS
Tuesday: Structural
Wednesday: Rest
Thursday: CNS
Friday: Structural
Saturday: Competition (CNS)

The last training setup listed above is a more traditional program, but works well. My favorite training setup for jumps actually wouldn’t really fall into a clean-cut version of dividing CNS and structure work, but I’ll try to divide it up below.

So here is my favorite training split for jumping events.

Monday: Weightlifting and Structure (50%CNS/50%Structure)
Tuesday: Track Work and Plyometrics (heavy CNS demand)
Wednesday: Structure, non-impact focus…med ball, hurdles, core circuits, etc.
Thursday: Weightlifting and Structure (50%CNS/50% Structure)
Friday: Track Work and Plyos (heavy CNS again)
Saturday: Long jog or tempo sprints (structure and fitness)

The reason that this setup will work is because of the principle of workload spacing. Olympic lifters will lift over 10 times a week, and sometimes more than that. The reason that they can handle it is because the space out the lifting sessions, and have a lot of recovery sessions. In the 4-day CNS training setup, each CNS session is fairly short (45 min) so the heavy fatigue from a big lifting/plyo session is not there. I will say though, that this type of block, over time, will bring about some serious CNS fatigue so it is important to schedule rest/structure weeks.

The main goal of this article was to show a little bit about how it is important to balance training the CNS and the structure of the body. I covered the structural training aspect of things a bit more in this particular article, so in the next one, I am going to cover how to maximize gains in the training of the Central Nervous System. Hope this is helpful to you! If you have any questions, the best way to get them answered is to email me at joel.smith.7@gmail.com

Joel

Final Note: This past weekend, Chaunte Howard Lowe broke the American Record in high jump, with a leap of 2.05m! This jump is also currently #1 in the world!

Central Nervous System Series: Part 1

Editors Note: My new site is now at www.just-fly-sports.com Check it out for a wealth of information on jumping higher and running faster, all backed by research and practical experience!

So I am dedicating myself this summer to writing some more articles, and fortunately, I think I have learned just enough in the last year to put some new fresh information out. My summer vacation is underway, and right now it is the first time in 8 years that I haven't spent the months of June, July and August slaving for the man to make some extra change. So basically, this should give me an opportunity to write just a bit more than I have been in the past year.

So right now I would like to talk a little bit about the Central Nervous System (CNS). I think that this is a buzzword and popular topic in strength training today (as it should be), so lets get into it shall we? In a nutshell, the CNS is the primary controller of strength and power gains in athletic pursuits. Most of the gains that you make early in a strength training program are not the result of your muscle-tendon unit becoming stronger, but that of your CNS working more powerfully and efficiently. A simple way of looking at this is in terms of fiber recruitment. In any movement, a certain number of muscle fibers are involved. In a state of de-training, however, there will be a lot of muscle fibers that are left out in a given movement. When you train though, your body will turn on more of these fibers. You can't turn on 100% of your fibers though, except for in life/death situations (lifting a car off a baby, etc.). I beleive the maximal number you can turn on in normal situations is around 80-90%, but you get the idea.

For speed/power type work, training emphasis is usually on "recruiting the fast twitch muscle fibers/fast twitch motor neurons", which is theoretically done by doing explosive work with all out effort (to recruit all available fibers). This is why doing 3 sets of 5 depth jumps with 5 minutes rest between sets beats doing 2 sets of 100 squat jumps with a minute rest (the sets of 5 will allow each jump to be much more explosive, and thus have higher recruitment, then the 2 sets of 100).

Now eventually, in any strength program, the gains that your CNS will pick up will max out, so to speak (can't recruit any more fibers/all available fibers are now recruited), and now the only way to keep gaining strength will be for the muscle to increase in size. This is not a completely fine line (pure neuro gains for certain time/then all muscle size), but a small muscle can only produce so much power. Also, an interesting and important fact is that performance gains that are acheived by muscle size gain will last longer than those gains which are brought about by CNS recruitment gains. Part of the reason that this is true is the "soon ripe-soon rotten" principle. An athlete who does high powered CNS training for 6 weeks prior to basketball season will probably make some great gains in that 6 weeks, but will also lose it pretty quickly once the season is underway, unless he/she is somehow able to maintain that training.

Before I get onto the next section of this article, let me quickly get into what I would consider "CNS" training. I have ranked these in order of the CNS demand of these exercises.

1. True Plyometrics: Depth Jumps, Hurdle Hops, Bounding....Basically any type of max-effort rebound style exercise. These are very high demand exercises!

2. Heavy Weightlifting: Anything 80% or greater definitely falls in this category, but explosive lifts in the 50% and above range could fall in this category as well.

3. Short Sprint Work: The shorter the sprint, the higher than CNS strain. Sometimes sprint coaches will actually steer athletes with weak nervous systems towards towards longer distances in their sprint workouts to avoid overstraining the CNS. I would say sprint work that falls into this category would be any sort of max effort sprinting that is 100m or less. Hill work also falls into this category.

3. Jump and Dunk attempts: Any sort of high jump/dunk attempts would be considered a high CNS effort, but not so much as something like a depth jump. I would put this in a similar CNS category as short and intense sprint work, so I labeled them both #3.

4. Medicine Ball and Shot Throws: Any all out full body overhead or underhanded shot or med ball throw. Not talking about chest passes or ab twists here. This is more of a track and field specific exercise.

Alright, so there are some way to train the Central Nervous system.....so whats the point? Well, the point is that too much CNS specific training, or too much sequential training with an emphasis on the CNS will lead to overtraining and greater likelihood of injury. Also, although CNS training gains come the soonest, overtraining of the CNS will also last the longest (as opposed to overtraining other systems in the body). Overtrain the CNS of an athlete and they will be functioning submaximally for weeks, or sometimes even months if you did it bad enough. This alone is a very important reason to pay attention to the amount of CNS in training. I am assuming most people reading this article have, at some point in their training reached a point where they were very worn out because of this type of burnout.

Now I am not one for babying training, and only going hard once in a great while, in fact, I think that you can train hard every single day. The catch though is, that you can't train the CNS hard every day, you have to rotate the trainable facets of the human organism. A great DVD I bought in the last couple years is on the 5 biomotor abilities in athletics. They include speed, stength, endurance, flexibility, and coordination.

You can find a link giving a greater rundown of these abilities HERE: http://www.coachr.org/fitness.htm

Now really, you can divide these qualities up into CNS and non-CNS demand abilities. The CNS demand abilities would be Speed and Strength. The non-CNS demand abilities would be endurance, flexibility and coordination. I don't really recommend training the CNS hard more than 2 days a week in most situations, so a weekly setup involving the training of the different motor abilities for a team sport such as basketball could look something like this:

Monday: CNS Speed-Strength (Plyos and Weights)

Tuesday: Specific Endurance (maybe something like 10x45 second sprints)
Wednesday: Coordination and Flexibility (this could be as simple as game drills and stretching)

Thursday: Upper Body Submaximal Lifting (under 80% max)

Friday: CNS Speed-Strength (Speed and Weights)

Saturday: Endurance and Flexibility (2 mile jog and stretch)

Ok, so this is a weekly setup with 2 intense CNS training days a week. An average trainee will be able to make some decent gains off something like this for a month or two, but after that a plateau will occur because of the CNS stress. This will happen even with a switch of exercises and format. I will mention that some athletes have stronger nervous systems than others. There are a few things you can do to reduce the total CNS stress of the training system. Probably the best thing you can do to combat CNS overtraining is have an easy training week every 3rd or 4th week. This is one of the most important, but overlooked principles in sport training. In an easy training week, you could have one or zero CNS intensive days, but still train the other qualities throughout the week. The following is an example for a low CNS stress week.

Monday: Endurance/Flexibility

Tuesday: Coordination/General Strength Training

Wednesday: CNS-Weightlifting (the one intense day, but no plyos...the #1 stressor)

Thursday: Endurance/Flexibility

Friday: Coordination/General Strength Training

*General Strength Training would be bodyweight style circuit training and possibly low intensity repeated jumping drills.

So over the long haul, say 3 months time, a training set up designed to reduce CNS burnout could look like this:

Week 1: CNS 2 day

Week 2: CNS 2 day

Week 3: CNS 0 day

Week 4: CNS 2 day

Week 5: CNS 2 day

Week 6: CNS 1 day

Week 7: CNS 2 day

Week 8: CNS 2 day

Week 9: CNS 2 day

Week 10: CNS 0 day

Week 11: CNS 2 day

Week 12: CNS 3 day (shock week)

Week 13: active rest

Week 14: active rest

Week 15: start over again (bump up the volume 5-10% next time around)

So this concludes the first part of this series. The next article will talk about training the structure of the musculo-skeletal system in conjunction with the nervous system for optimal results!