[This offering can be
consumed independently but is bolstered by having read Part 1 of The Case Against Shadowboxing.]
Pop Quiz
for Combat Athletes & General Preparedness Trainers
[Answer True or False
for all.]
One-Explosive bench-pressing educates football
players to be fast and explosive in the upper-body.
Two-Clapping push-ups and other like “plyometric”
push-ups educate speed in the combat athlete.
Three—Swinging a weighted bat increases facility
when hitting a baseball.
Four—Swinging a kettlebell increases facility in
takedowns.
Five—Agility drills build speed and quickness for
football players.
Six—Speedbags build punch quickness for boxers.
Seven—Plyometric tossing of medicine balls improves
throwing ability.
Eight—Skipping rope improves footwork and quickness
in the ring, in the cage, or on the turf.
Nine—Lifting free weights improves balance more
than do machine [cam-regulated] resistance work.
Ten—Shadowboxing/kicking/wrestling improves speed
of execution.
There we go, ten
questions, I take it you have your ten answers.
Ready for the answer
key?
First, “Mark, why
did you include sports outside of combat?”
Large franchise sports
[NFL football, and MLB baseball,] these sports have thrown a lot of money at
optimizing the training of athletes. Cash on the barrelhead is key to keeping a
franchise in the running. Coaches and trainers in these high-stakes endeavors falling
prey to the fads and fashions of conditioning and making patchwork quilts of
training top-level athletes based on poor or disputed research is anathema.
The Answer
Key
All are false.
Wait? Wha? Each of
these practices are part and parcel of many a training tradition, how can all
of them be false, let alone any of them?
Laying the
Foundation
First, our false evaluation
is all based on
One—Old School training practices and…
Two current motor learning research which shows
that [once again] seemingly forgotten or misunderstood old ways might just be
the wiser ways.
Motor Learning
We’ll need an operating
definition as we move forward, motor learning deals with movement skill
acquisition and the reinforcement and transfer of these actions.
[Pull out your mental highlighter,
reinforcement and transfer are KEY ideas.]
The crux of motor
learning is to train athletes with maximum efficiency with no opportunity costs
and no interference. [Again, key ideas, we’ll be hammering all of these.]
Specificity
& YouTube Archeology
You are ahead of the
game if you assume that specificity plays a large part in the Old School
approach and motor learning findings.
In essence,
specificity states that learning is task-specific, that is, what you train for
that is what you get.
This holds even for similar
domains, middle distance runners do not train like marathoners. Marathoners do
not train like sprinters. Olympic speed walkers do not train like power walkers
et cetera.
Each of these athletes
may be putting one foot in front of the other but they [and we] recognize that improvement
in a specific domain requires task-specific focus.
If that task is our
main target [or breadwinning moneymaker] training options outside of that task
rob us of time [opportunity costs] and, may in fact, inhibit what we wish to
improve. [More on this to come.]
This non-transfer is
called domain specificity. That is, expertise/ability in a single area in no
way implies similar performance outside of that endeavor. This holds not only
in physical endeavors but in cognitive tasks as well.
Example: Masters of the assumed brainy endeavor of
chess in no way perform above the mean in other board games or exhibit
super-human memory or calculating prowess outside the realm of the 64 squares
on the board.
A Harvard PhD. in
chemical Engineering does not automatically confer the ability to fix my
transmission, tell me when to plant tomatoes, or tell me if my marriage is
stable or not.
This may spark a
question from some…
“OK, Mark I’m down
with specificity and that whole domain-dependance thing likely holds true for
the weekend athlete, but those at the top of their games are elite animals. They
likely have a different sort of make-up to them that makes their prowess a bit
more transferable.”
YouTube
Archeology
ABC-TV ran a show for 20
years called Superstars Competitions. The premise was to take stars of
their respective sport and pit them against one another in sporting endeavors
outside of their bailiwick.
If we look to the
first telecast, we can see such legends as…
·
Jean-Claude
Killy--skiing
·
Johnny
Bench—baseball
·
Johnny
Unitas—football
·
Bob
Seagren—pole vaulting
·
Emerson
Fittipaldi—auto racing
·
Joe
Frazier—Do I even need to say to you, Dear Reader?
·
Elvin
Hayes—basketball.
They competed in 10 different
events including: Tennis, golf, swimming, cycling, weightlifting, rowing and
bowling.
So, how
did these stars with their above-average abilities do?
You can dial it up and
see for yourself or go with my assessment of below average in a majority of the
events they competed in.
In some cases, these anointed
ones were trainwrecks. Mr. Unitas seems unable to row a boat, My Hayes’ tennis game,
well…and the legendary Smokin’ Joe? Could not get a moderately loaded barbell
over his head and seems precariously close to drowning in the swim event.
I say none of this to
shame these men who have already proven themselves in their domains. No one
doubts the power of Joe Frazier in his domain, it simply did not transfer. We mention
these men to call to mind the key points of specificity, domain dependance, and
poor transfer.
Over the course of the
20-year program overall performances improved, but...this was due to the
“humiliation effect”: the top athletes saw what occurred in the early days and
self-admitted that when selected for the program they began training for some facility
in the given events.
So, to improve in a domain,
they had to leave their target domain behind.
“All right, Mark, I
hear ya, no one doubts specificity. One does not need a pool to be a good boxer
or a heavy bag to be a good runner. But c’mon, speedbags and shadowboxing for
boxers and agility drills for running backs, those seem mighty sport-specific?”
They do indeed seem
similar. Turns out though, not similar enough and that’s where an insidious training
trap rears its ugly head.
[In Part 3, we
take a trip deeper into scientific weeds and start on the road to offering how
and why to alter our training approach, allowing recent science to make the
case for what the Old Timers already knew. In the meantime, if you wanna jump
on the real-deal Old School way of physical conditioning see our Unleaded Program. 3 volumes are now available with the next titles on the way, Unleaded:
Shoulder Stability will be available in June and Unleaded Endurance:
The 10/40 for easy stamina acquisition the old school way will debut in
August.]
Or our
brand-spankin’ new podcast The Rough and Tumble Raconteur available on
all platforms.
Comments
Post a Comment