There have probably been a dozen coaches to whom it could be attributed, but Loren Seagrave was the first I heard it from: “Any fool can make an athlete tired; a good coach will make them better.”
It used to be “inspirational” posters in gyms, but nowadays social media is full of athletes talking about “the grind”, emphasising the romanticised, somewhat macho notion that the athlete who works the hardest is the one that will enjoy the most progress. I can understand the appeal of this. It seems meritocratic, and the idea that “more work = more results” has an attractive simplicity. This is often most obvious when dopers are criticised often not for the immoral or fraudulent nature of what they have done, but for being lazy and having taken short cuts and skipped the hard graft – the narrative is that it is the “hard working athletes” that have been cheated out of success.
However, human beings are not production lines where more time spent doing something results in more product at the end.
The starting point to understand is that, unless we are talking about a technical element, progress comes from the adaptation (i.e. the recovery) from training, and not the training itself.
This is where the doping criticism is often flawed. I should clarify I am not expressing any sympathy for dopers here, merely a frustration with how the discussion tends to play out. The reality is a great deal of the PED’s that an athlete would use to cheat function by enabling far greater rates of recovery than could be achieved naturally. As a result, those athletes are able to undertake and absorb far greater training volumes than they would do if playing within the rules. Immoral? Yes. But lazy? Absolutely not.
“Recovery” does not just mean the time between sessions of training. It also applies within the sessions.
Certain training outcomes are achieved through having an athlete operating at an extremely high intensity. Maximum velocity training in large part needs to be done at close to top speed. Similarly, accelerating sub-maximally changes the mechanics such that the technical benefit of such work is reduced if not done fast. Speed endurance work is all about maintaining top end speed so, again, to work that the athlete needs to be moving very quickly. These things can only be done with full recovery, which is why you will typically see sprinters spending a great deal more time lounging around the track than running on it.
This can be difficult for many athletes to get to grips with as many struggle to appreciate the difference between training at high intensity and training with high effort. Grinding out 6 x 200m reps off 3 minutes will certainly feel like hard work, and many enjoy that feeling of accomplishment coming off the track. It won’t be at anything like the intensity level of an athlete running 4 x 80m off 12 minutes. It’s important to remember to train to get fast, not to get tired.
Rather than athletes perceiving the effort being in smashing huge sessions that leave them in crumpled heaps, they should see things more holistically. Work hard at recovering better than anyone else; have the discipline to eat well; get plenty of sleep; keep a training diary; do the dull but important general movement skill work in between track sessions; devote time to pre-hab... these may not look as impressive when visualised in a Rocky-style montage, but the reality is that consistency is one of the most important things in any athlete’s training and those are the things that will ensure it is achieved.
留言