Call for greater diversity in athletic development

'Broncos' Rugby League team training
Author:  Graham Cooke
Issue: Volume 29 Number 3

One of the world’s leading strength and conditioning coaches, American Vern Gambetta, believes the time has come to give his profession a more appropriate title.

‘Strength and conditioning increasingly disconnects from what we are now doing in this field,’ he says. “I would prefer it to be called athletic development.

‘We all understand that to be athletic you need to be fit, strong, supple and skilful, and our job is to present the sports coach with the best developed athletes possible for their age and skill levels.’

Gambetta on his fourth trip ‘Down Under’ will present a paper at the University of Queensland’s Evolution of the Athlete conference and will work with various sporting groups and clubs, including the Australian Institute of Sport (AIS).

He says his speciality is still in its infancy, but is developing quickly. ‘If you go back 20 years, you will find it, especially the conditioning part, as just another area of the sports coach’s responsibilities,’ he said.

 ‘There has been a lot of progress in those 20 years but now the field is crying out for redefinition. We have gone astray in our failure to recognise that one size does not fit all and that philosophically and methodologically, we have to have a system that understands the demands of each individual sport.’

The same template cannot even be exactly applied to groups of sports with similar characteristics. ‘Take the example of American football and rugby league. Both are collision sports requiring a certain amount of bulk. However in American football the positions are very specialised and you may be on the field for only four or five plays, whereas in league you have to be fit to play the whole match – that changes the picture right away.

 ‘Looking at soccer, you find that bulk is actually detrimental with the emphasis on repeat spreadability, the ability to play at a very high intensity in short bursts and quickly recover; to be able to maintain your skill in a climate of increasing fatigue.’

The differences magnified even further moving away from team games. ‘In an event like the 1500 metres the need is to maintain good posture and leg strength,’ he says. ‘You certainly can’t afford to have any bulk, but instead you need a tremendous combination of aerobic and anaerobic components – the ability to run a final 400 metres at 51 or 52 seconds.

 ‘You also have to factor in what the athlete brings to the table. I had the opportunity to work with Alex Kipchirchir of Kenya, the Commonwealth Games champion at 800 metres. His was a very different body type, a long legged, long strider. Consequently, some of the things we did with him were different to his training partners who were shorter and had more of a leg speed style of running.

 ‘We also need to know a great deal more about the demands within each game - and Australia has done great work here with its GPS tracking and accelerometer studies at the AIS – so that we really understand what is occurring in the game, rather than what we think is occurring.

‘When we can do that, we can really prepare the athlete for what is actually going to happen in the competitive arena – that is where the future of our speciality lies.’

A key message for his Australian visit is the need to keep the focus on the human body rather than the many technological aids and measuring devices now at the disposal of sports science. ‘We must recognise that the greatest machine we have to work with is the human body – the further we depart from that, the greater difficulty we will have in developing that body.’

He is concerned commercialism and the demand for world records is having a negative effect on athletes. ‘It has probably caused a great deal of the drug cheating we see in modern sport,’ he says.

‘We go into the competitive arena and we compete with the best. The best prevails and if it results in a world record that’s fine, but this incessant drive to constantly break world records is going to reach the point of diminishing returns.
‘I don’t believe we have come close to the human potential, but on the other hand we are asking athletes to compete at the top level for 48 weeks of the year, without providing adequate recovery time.

‘You see a sport like rugby where in England the premiership is played from May to September or in soccer where you play at the top level for 65 matches every year. That can hurt an athlete and inevitably the injury rates rise. Something has to give.

‘When you have a definite off-season you can look at staircase progression and see the athlete’s improvement, but with the extended competitive season and our lack of understanding about what long-term athletic development is, we are really setting ourselves up for disappointments.’

Asked if he is concerned about exposing athletes to the polluted atmosphere of Beijing when they go there to train or compete in the lead up to the 2008 Olympics, he said there was no need to go to the Chinese capital if athletes wanted to acclimatise themselves to a polluted environment. ‘There are plenty of places in the US or Europe, or you can run behind a bus if you want to.’

‘All the normal precautions from a sports medicine standpoint that can be taken should be taken; beyond that there is not a great deal you can do to prepare for pollution. We simply don’t know whether there are any time bombs – possible long term negative effects of stressing yourself in that kind of environment.’

Aged 60, he says he still has new worlds to conquer and is looking forward to working with his Australian colleague and close friend Kelvin Giles on new systems of athletic profiling.
‘We want to put a lot of time into that in the next few years so we can do a better job of identifying and predicting athletes and help them to reach their full potential.’

THE WISDOM OF VERN GAMBETTA

  • We must correct our early failure to realise that in strength and conditioning one size does not fit all. We must understand the individual demands of each sport.
  • There has to be a greater insight into what happens out in the sporting arena, rather than what we think is occurring.
  • Always recognise that technology can go only so far – the greatest machine we work with is the human body.
  • The commercial pressure on athletes to perform at the highest level and break records for 48 weeks of the year is ultimately counter-productive.
  • We must do all we can to prepare athletes for competition in the polluted environment of Beijing, but we simply do not know enough to predict the long-term consequences.


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