Stimulus

A large part of our coaching responsibility in class is creating a context around the day. The workout of the day can be applied to each athlete, but it may look very different to the untrained eye. The key to the whole equation is the relative fitness of each athlete. Each person has the need to squat. It’s easy to imagine that between a seventeen year old girl and an eighty-two year old man, capacities may vary. But, at the root of all movement, both have the need to squat. We use scaling to move the dial appropriately for each athlete.

Each day has a stimulus, or a goal of the day. I like to think about it as a target to hit with each athlete. Imagine a list of work on the board. For this example, let’s say the workout is four rounds of 400 meter run and thirty Russian kettlebell swings. This workout should take 8-14 minutes. If an athletes finishes this workout in twenty-two minutes it would be safe to say they missed out on the stimulus of the day. I am not claiming their fitness had no efficacy, but I am saying they missed the target for the day.

In the grand scheme of things, if you move and you sweat you are moving the needle on your fitness, but part of fitness is adaptation and to drive adaptation you need to stress tissues. If you do the same routine every day, your body is used to it. You need to rub up against the current ceiling of your fitness. There are three primary energy systems your body uses. Phosphagen is very short in time and maximally powerful, glycolytic is medium-high output and can be maintained for few minutes, and oxidative is long time periods and relatively low output. These all have value, so they all need training. These are things we think about while programming. Does this workout fall into one of these categories, or is it just vague with sexy movements. Simple and effective training is the best for this.

The stimulus of the day should be clear. If you are unclear on what is happening and what is expected, raise your hand and ask your coach. This goes for energy systems, this goes for strength training, this goes for skill work, and this is should always high on the priority list. We are here for adaptation. We must stay plugged into stimulus.

 

Danny Lesslie

@dannylesslie