01
CHAPTER

THE POWERREV WAY

Tim Dornemann, Ed. D., CES, PES, CSCS, OS Pro

Exercise Science Program & Kinesiology Director, Barton College

Associate Professor of Exercise Science, Barton College

Developing the Total Athlete

THE POWERREV WAY is to develop the total athlete – meaning their body, mind and heart – through sports performance training. This book is designed to encourage, equip and enable individuals and coaches with the tools to design safe and effective training programs for any sport.

Figure 1.1

PowerRev Performance Pyramid

The pyramid pictured above is like your map. Now, let’s get going.

Figure 1.2

PowerRev’s Four Laws of Victory provide a way to teach character through the themes of respect, humility, commitment and love. Once the foundation of good character is in place, then a sports person or team can begin to reach their full potential.

You could design the perfect program for an athlete, but if there is no commitment from them, that program will fail. To optimize performance, one has to be committed physically and also one needs to be committed in all other aspects of their lives. This means being committed mentally and emotionally and includes things like following the program designed for them, showing up on time and maintaining the right attitude. Being fully committed means to be fully committed to the whole process. Physical training only takes a fraction of the day, but what someone does the rest of the day can either enhance or ruin the effects of their training. For example, the proper amount of sleep and proper diet are key  to optimizing the impact of a training session. A program can be designed perfectly to develop muscle, however, without the proper protein intake the athlete will not be able to increase the size of the muscle. To optimize training one needs to be committed in all aspects of their lives, picking and choosing areas to be committed to will not result in an athlete who can maximize their abilities.

To get this level of full commitment a coach must coach beyond the sport. The coach needs to coach the whole individual: body, mind and heart. Coaches must be coaches of influence to truly get the best out of their players.

Strength

Figure 1.3

Character and commitment provide the basis for strength. Building strength is foundational to almost every sports skill. Training the muscles to move properly and work together through functional exercises and to be able to produce maximal strength (e.g., muscular strength) and have stamina (e.g., muscle endurance) is key to optimal performance.

Developing the energy system or systems utilized in a sport is vital to success. Fatigue can inhibit success, which is why the better conditioned team often wins at the end of close competitions.

Coaches often overemphasize physical training and underestimate the value of nutrition and recovery. It is easy to obsess on skill practice and physical training programs, but if proper nutrition and recovery are not implemented the benefit of training can be lost. While the time spent in activity is important, the time spent recovering is just as important, if not more important. If you are going to practice and/or train two to four hours a day, what you do the other 20 to 22 hours in a day is what will determine how successful that training session is.

Skill

Figure 1.4

Strength, power, speed and agility are key elements for most players, regardless of sport. Developing these skills in sport prepares one for the development of the physical skills that are required for that sport.

Power & Performance

Power is defined as force times distance over the time it takes to create that force.

Strength – also known as the ability to produce force – is the basis for producing power. Often in sport, the best players are powerful. Throwing, hitting, sprinting, jumping, striking and kicking all utilize power. Training with fast movement velocities through activities, like plyometrics, that utilize one’s body weight or explosive lifting movements that utilize triple extension (extension of the ankles, knees and hips) are essential tools for building power.

Speed

Whether utilized directly in track and field or indirectly in field and court sports, speed is a key factor in success of a sport. Speed combined with skill makes a great athlete. The ability to triple extend and push off the ground with maximal ground reaction force will determine how fast someone runs. Speed is a combination of stride length and stride frequency. The more ground reaction force one can produce pushing into the ground, the more distance will be covered in each stride as the body is propelled forward.

Direction

Change of direction is a key feature of agility that is important in many sports. To efficiently and effectively change direction you have to decelerate, stop and aggressively change direction. Decelerating from top speed and stopping puts a great deal of stress on the body. Strength not only protects the body from potential injury, it also provides the ability to quickly change the body’s momentum from one direction to another. Once the body is stopped, strength and power are required to move quickly in a new direction.

All of these work together. Speed is a display of the power that can be produced, but strength is what develops the body’s capacity to produce that power and agility.

How to Use this Book

This book will help you develop your players in all aspects of the performance pyramid, which will allow you to develop the total athlete: body, mind and heart.

Section 1: Coaching Essentials

Chapters 2-3 cover how to become a coach of influence and the basics of exercise science to catch you up if you have not had previous exposure to the science of exercise.

Section 2: Activities, Trainings and Tools

Then, chapters 3-10 provide guides to the practical activities that you will use in your programs. Consider these the tools that are in your toolbox. This section covers dynamic warm-up and cooldown, core conditioning, strength development, power development, agility training, speed training and plyometric training.

Section 3: Create Your Program

Chapters 11-14 will teach you how to utilize all the tools in the toolbox from the previous chapters and create your program. These chapters are about resistance training programming, athletic development programming, energy system development and periodization. The resistance training chapter covers how to develop resistance training for a sport starting with the needs analysis, and guides you through how to set up a resistance training workout. Athletic development training teaches how to design speed, agility and plyometric programs to optimally develop your players. The energy system development chapter will show you how to design programs to develop the stamina needed for your sport. The periodization chapter provides strategies to help vary training to promote continued improvement over time and create an annual plan.

Section 4: Recovery & Nutrition

Chapters 15-17 cover recovery and nutrition. This section includes chapters that cover general recovery strategies, sports nutrition and neural resets. Neural resets help enhance mobility and performance. These chapters provide the information to help optimize the effectiveness of your programming.

Section 5: Performance Testing & Evaluation

Chapters 18-19 go into detail about performance testing and program evaluation. The programming process is a cycle that begins and ends with testing. Chapter 19 teaches how to properly test the target areas of your program. For example, if a basketball team is being trained to be more explosive and to jump higher, a vertical jump can be used to measure improvement in producing vertical power. Program evaluation is the ability to interpret your testing results. A good programmer knows what aspects of a sport the training program emphasizes and tests at the beginning to establish a starting point, then tests periodically to monitor improvement. If the desired progress does not occur, then changes need to be made.

Section 6: Auxiliary Training Methods

The last chapter, chapter 20, is a bonus chapter on auxiliary training methods. This chapter focuses on eccentric training and use of flywheel technology. The benefits of eccentric training and how to apply eccentric training in almost any situation are explained. Additionally, the use of flywheel technology to train eccentrically is covered in the instance when one has access to flywheel equipment or can acquire flywheel equipment in the future.

Basic Exercise Principles

Before you begin the rest of the book, here are some basic exercise principles that are foundational to successful training.

SAID Principle: Specific Adaptations to Imposed Demands

The SAID principle applies to all training regardless of the targeted outcome. Training places stress or imposed demands on the body to cause a specific adaptation to occur. For example, lifting weights that push the muscle past its normal limits makes that muscle adapt and get stronger to be able to meet that demand. To produce power, plyometrics are done quickly and explosively to challenge the neuromuscular system to produce force quicker and more powerfully. Manipulating the heart rate during aerobic training is done to produce improvements in the cardiorespiratory system. Everything goes back to the SAID principle. Programming is about designing activities to stress the body in ways to produce the desired improvements.

Basic Training Principles

    • Overload: In order for a muscle to become stronger, it must be worked beyond its normal limits.
    • Progressive Resistance: Once a muscle adapts to an exercise stimulus, a progressively harder stimulus needs to be used in order for improvements to be made.
    • Specificity of Training: In order to make the gains one is striving for, one has to implement a program to specifically meet those needs.
    • Use/Disuse: When an exercise stimulus pushes the muscle past its normal limits then gains will be made, but when that stimulus is absent the gains will be lost.
    • Individuality: No exercise stimulus affects everyone in exactly the same Everyone’s response to exercise is different.

Now that you have a map of the journey that this book will take you through and you know the principles that guide the process, let’s get started.