Enhanced Recovery Benefits of Deloading for Athletes by Alex Cassella

[Alex Cassella earned her undergraduate degree in Exercise Science at SUNY Fredonia. She now works as a personal trainer and powerlifting coach in the Chapel Hill and Apex area. She is currently in the Coaching Mentorship Program at Athletic Lab] Deload Deload is a term that suggests a decrease in training volume over a period of time in a training program. This is not the same as just taking a week of training off completely, rather is a tactic that coaches and athletes use to promote a stronger recovery. The ideal outcome of a deload is to produce a stronger athlete in the meso- or macro-cycle. Strength and endurance athletes can benefit from this training protocol physically and mentally. Training is a stress that the athletes place upon themselves, breaking their bodies down training session after training session. Dialing in recovery should be one of the primary focuses in their training cycle. They are going to eventually need a break, in a way that does not take them completely away from training, but allows them to come back stronger. Fatigue One of the models we can first reference to is the fitness-fatigue model (Below Figure). This gives us the basic understanding of how our bodies work in terms of training to come back stronger, faster, more powerful, etc. at the next training session. The model assures us that as long as we supercompensate, there will be an improvement in performance. The fine line though comes in that ability to recover over a period of time. If things like nutrition, sleep, and proper hydration are not up to standard, we will have a hard time getting over that base level of fitness. What we do not [...]

By |2018-02-02T13:29:57-05:00February 2nd, 2018|Training Info|0 Comments

Overtraining in Youth Athletes: “How Much is too Much” by Laurel Zimmermann

[This is a guest blog by Laurel Zimmermann. Laurel is an Exercise Science major with minors in both Business and Biology at The College at Brockport. She is currently an Athletic Development Intern at Athletic Lab. ] Children playing soccer As a child, I played a variety of sports, but I never joined any travel teams or "specialized" in one sport. I just did whatever I wanted and whatever seemed fun. Parents these days are taught that their child needs to pick one sport when they are five years old and devote all of their time to it. If they do this, someday, they will get a scholarship to a Division I college, or even better, become a professional athlete. As great as this sounds, it is unrealistic for most and incredibly damaging to young athletes. If a child is forced to participate in one sport early on, they may become burned out and sports will become a chore instead of something they enjoy. Youth sports should definitely be encouraged, however, it needs to be done in the right context. The medical dictionary defines overtraining as a general term for any practice of or training for a particular sport which is in excess of that necessary to effectively participate in the sport. In essence, more is not always better. Although there is not a vast amount of research regarding adolescent overtraining, the research suggests that the signs and symptoms reported in young athletes are similar to those found in adult populations (Winsley, R., & Matos, N, 2010). This similarity implies that overtraining in youth populations should be on every coach's radar and should be addressed early in training. If a child attends soccer [...]

By |2017-04-12T19:32:07-04:00July 8th, 2016|Training Info|0 Comments

Using Warm-ups To Assess Overtraining by Gerard Teague

[Gerard Teague is a Kinesiology student at the University of Central Oklahoma and is an Athletic Development Intern at Athletic Lab.] A properly designed warm-up can be an important subjective tool used for assessing overtraining. Before we talk about how to use the warm-up we must first understand the difference between fatigue, overreaching and overtraining. Fatigue can be viewed as a normal part of the training process that happens when stress is applied to the body. As a coach, we have to understand the difference between day to day or acute fatigue and chronic fatigue which is long lasting and can lead to overreaching and overtraining (1). A short-term decrement in performance due to either a planned phase of loading or a result of the accumulation of fatigue resulting form training can be viewed as overreaching. Overtraining on the other hand is a long-term decrement in training that can take weeks to months to recover on depending on the severity (1). One of the many concerns with identifying overtraining is being able to assess many of the signs and symptoms related to it. The markers used to identify overtraining include hormonal, biochemical, immunological and neuromuscular tests, some of which can be time consuming and expensive (2,3). To solve this problem, the athlete could use a performance test to assess how there monitoring fatigue before overtraining ever becomes an issue. Sprints and vertical jump tests can easily be incorporated after the warmup to assess fatigue. Both of which have been shown to be accurate markers of fatigue (1, 2). While performing a dynamic warm-up one can easily incorporated a few sets of of three to five constitutive jumps or build-up sprints before going into and the [...]

By |2014-06-20T13:46:54-04:00June 20th, 2014|Training Info|0 Comments
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