Should Gymnasts Run For Cardio? Rethinking Methods

And so they were asking about , like what's the programming we offer ? And they were asking about , like the symposium versus like our course , the peak gymnastics power . And it just allowed me to go back and look at that course . I was like Jesus , that thing is a monster man .

I was like , yeah , if you want to learn everything that we think about with gymnastics , strength and conditioning , I was like this is the course that one of your coaches should probably go through .

So the way that uh , the podcast has been going , as people were listening the last few weeks , is like it's kind of like off the hip ideas that we're working through things that are more relevant to our day-to-day discussion , versus like these long hour and a half , you know , deep dives with guests , which are cool .

But , um , the one that sparked this was , uh , I did two consulting calls with colleges who just finished their season and then one consulting call with a club which I just spoke about , and they essentially are asking a lot of questions around off-season prep , and so two of the colleges and one of the clubs all are in the planning stage of their cardio and

their endurance and they're like , what are we doing for circuits ?

Like , looking back at the old year , like one had a new strength coach at a college and they were , like this person's , really big into like mile tests and so all the girls would do mile sprint tests multiple times throughout the summer and then there was a baseline number they had to hit when they come back to fall to be like a team average had to be like

this time . And then there was another team that just does mile testing every two weeks in the summer and then at school you have to get a certain time on the mile test in order to like be good , to train preseason , and so that's kind of been a pretty historic thing . I hear a lot in gymnastics and then the club program .

Um , they essentially just do circuits and then it sounds like a lot of like plyo panel mat conditioning , so like jumping over piles , box jumps , you know , running circuits , which again maybe has merit in some ways . But essentially I was politely guiding them on how maybe there's a better approach .

And so the next day walked into the clinic with Duesh and I was like Duesh , I was like how do you feel about coming on a podcast and maybe elaborating and sharing your thoughts ? Cause Duesh and you know you and your other strength coaches are kind of the resident experts that I have when I have questions myself about cardio power development stuff like that .

So yeah , that's why I asked you to come on .

I think that the strength conditioning profession partly has some blame here , because I think we had so many like yo-yo moments and in time we were like , all right , long distance running is really bad , you should only do sprints . And now it's like too much sprinting is bad , you should only do non-impact , you should only do like .

You have so many polarizing views and I think we've made it all too confusing , um , so hopefully some of the stuff and you know , by no means do I claim to know all the answers but hopefully some of the stuff that we can talk about today and the stuff that I can share , based on experience and also the knowledge , is just giving you guys a little bit more

of the bigger picture . Coming back to the physiology , a little bit to explain maybe why we do what we do , maybe why we've had the success that we've had . Um , but I wanted to come out and say that it's probably our fault . We probably made it confusing to start .

And then it honestly wasn't until I did my SES and started working at champion and met you and everybody else . I was like , oh wait , a minute , there's probably a lot more layers to this that are important . I also worked a lot with Chris Hinshaw , who just had so much extremely good knowledge on , like aerobic capacity and , you know , sprint type work .

So I think there of it that's important to mention . The other layer on top of this is everybody that I talk to oftentimes is kind of trying to dually attack performance and injury risk , right . So a lot of people come to me for consulting work , especially in this like off-season thing .

It's either like we didn't perform as well as we want people are falling all over the place on floor routines . They were gassed out , they couldn't get through their routines , um and or they couldn't get through practices . They were just exhausted all the time , didn't feel like they had the endurance for a really hard floor or bar routine .

But also , you know , there's sometimes when injuries come up and then people are doing a little bit of a reverse engineering of the season and asking themselves are there things that we did that maybe we're contributing to that ?

And I don't want to go down the rabbit hole of of all the things I was involved with , but a lot of people are saying , well , maybe they're running volume and the running cardio approaches that we're taking are correlating to shin splints , into back issues , into Achilles , uh , tendinopathy type issues .

So there's that layer of it too , which I think is important . It's like , yes , we want to find the optimal . How do we get someone ready to hit a floor routine , a bar routine , and do well at meets comma ?

How do we make sure we have the best valve of efficiency to make sure that we're not putting junk mileage on someone from a plyometric or a impact point of view , which is something you and I talk a lot about in the summer , when we have 20 girls coming home right that are all trying to stay healthy ?

We do things because we just like think it's , you know , just hard work and like time spent getting tired that's going to make you better and it's going to make you a well-conditioned athlete . I think we gotta be a little more precise than that , right ?

I think I think we owe it to our athletes to be a little bit more precise than that and not just rely on can we get them really tired so that they get good at ?

Yes , adjusting to Like that doesn't make any sense , like that's just layering stress on top of stress , and now we can now relate this back to aches , pains , injuries , whatever , because now we're adding another factor into it , we're adding another layer .

So , yeah , I love , I love that you mentioned that , because I do think that there is a way to just put junk conditioning in there and we're just simply not going back to the physiology and know and knowing the science and doing meaningful work .

am I increasing their metabolic capacity for gymnastics ? Like that's always should be the fork in the road . Like all right , is this workout just getting kids sweaty or am I actually doing something ? Because , yes , there is a cultural grind effect of like all right , maybe we do this like really hard metabolic workout and it's like a team culture building thing .

Blah , blah , blah . Some people have that discussion .

It's like okay , I understand that , like , maybe there's a layer to that , but like if you're just getting , if you think that you're just working hard just to make people work hard and grind and sweat , but there's literally no physiology understanding of like why does this exact set time and rep scheme and how many reps in this interval we're doing if it doesn't

correlate towards a plan that increases a bar routine or a floor routine or a ring routine , endurance ? It's not helping . You know it's . It's like I said , junk conditioning , it's not . It's not adding benefit . You're hitting a ceiling effect there .

So when you take this podcast from your ears to your company or to your college and you present a very different um thought process for the next year , you have to have a leg to stand on from the metabolic point of view .

So yeah , maybe break down a little bit of the physiology , of how it applies to gymnastics , and then we'll can kind of talk about , you know , our recommendations for colleges and programs and stuff .

But we have our aerobic conditioning and then we have our anaerobic conditioning , okay , and then within the anaerobic we have our lactic work and our alactic work , right . Our lactic work is using lactic acid to create ATP .

Our alactic work is using creatine phosphate , the creatine-phosphate system , to create your ATP , right , and then your aerobic is using oxygen as your fuel . Okay , so let's start a little bit with the aerobic .

So I think one of the things that's happened over the course of time is we've kind of pooh-poohed the aerobic work because we started to look at sport specificity and say , well , I don't play an aerobic sport , right , gymnastics is not an aerobic sport . Well , correct , the routines might not necessarily have a huge aerobic demand .

There's a lot of big benefits that come from the aerobic system , because the aerobic system is your recovery system , right . It actually is required to replenish the other anaerobic systems as well as to flush out metabolites that you're building from your actual strenuous work , right ? So imagine you do like a crazy hard

circuit . Everything's burning . You're like , wow , like I'm about to tap out right now . Right , that's a lot of metabolite stress , that's kind of going into your system . Well , your aerobic system is actually responsible for flushing a lot of that out , and having a really good aerobic system is going to allow you to be a little bit more resistant to that fatigue .

That kind of comes in from the really like hard grip work , right .

And then the other thing too is even from like a session to session or or a week to week standpoint , um , how much of an aerobic threshold you have or how big of an aerobic base you have allows you to be better recovered from one session to the next , um , and even from one set to the next , right , if we're really breaking it down .

So the aerobic system is not simply just looking at do we have an aerobic activity that requires a lot of oxygen and fat utilization , but it's also looking at the full picture and saying what else can the aerobic system provide for us ? Right , and you know we go way into it .

It really is kind of looking at the whole Krebs cycle where we talk about , you know , creating 32 ATP for for every substrate and stuff like that . It kind of reminds us that the aerobic system is able to well handle long sustained activity and long sustained stress . It's just not the best for building power , okay , or expressing power , or expressing high force .

So then we ask the question well , what is a good way to display good force output and power output ? And that's your anaerobic system , right . So our anaerobic lactic system is going to be your really tough work .

That kind of goes up to like two ish minutes where you're using lactic acid as our energy source , right , per cycle it's going to create less ATP , but you can create a little bit more frequently , right . But the issue with this is it creates a lot of metabolic stress within the system , so you can't keep using it over and over again .

And that's this like burning feeling that you get , that your body starts to basically shut you down , saying , hey , let's not keep doing more of this because it's not super efficient , right , the oxygen utilization is super efficient because you can just keep redoing the grub cycle over and over and over again until you're like , truly out of every bit of energy that

you have . Um , whereas the a lactic I'm sorry , the anaerobic lactic system , there is a cutoff point because your , your system , can't handle all the metabolic stress . Okay , and then the third one is our anaerobic a lactic , that's our creatine phosphate system .

Um , that allows us to create rapid utilization of energy really fast , but it takes a long time to recover , right ? So we can only create ATP for an X amount of time , and then it takes a while to replenish all that . So we can't keep using it for repeat bouts of effort , right ? So think of this as like your , your vault , where you , you sprint .

So think of this as like your vault where you sprint , right , you get on the table , you flip , you land , like that takes what ? Four seconds a day , five seconds , right , you exhausted everything that you had , that's primarily using the creatine phosphate system , your anaerobic alactic system , but you've kind of tapped that out , right ?

So now you've got to fully replenish and recover . Now let's bring this back to the aerobicobic . So guess what recovers the anaerobic alactic system ? It's your aerobic base , right ? You have to be in an aerobic situation where your heart rate is low enough for your system to actually replenish that creatine phosphate .

Okay , so this is where the aerobic kind of comes in as like the base for our conditioning . Yep , okay , yeah , so I think , with having that established , um , I think the the thing to talk about is now how do we use aerobic training in a in an impactful way , but also in a way where we save our athletes from undue stress , right , right ?

And for those that are , you know , maybe a little like not exercise physiology relevant , I think I always explain and bucket these things kind of like Duesh said , which is like the , you know , the anaerobic , alactic and lactic is very much the driver of individual turns skill combinations , doing parts , learning skills , performing skills , doing routines right , like the

actual gymnastics part itself is like drills , skills , routines , putting routines together . That really is repeated sprint quote unquote , you know whole body sprint type , energy system terms is repeat sprint ability of doing high quality turns with maximal output .

And on top of that , you have to remember that individual skills are oftentimes maximal body contraction , right , yes , you have to remember that individual skills are oftentimes maximal body contraction , right , yes , you're using your arms but your entire body is squeezing every muscle that you have to maintain good shapes and good form .

So that's why turns and practices that have lots of volume of skills in them are tiring , because you're doing like repeated sub maximal to maximal skill work to try to get into routine construction mode and then the actual routine itself is anywhere from , like you said , a four-second vault to maybe a 70-second , 80-second , 90-second actual combination of skills that

have a little bit of work , a little bit of break , a little bit of work , a little bit of break , and I view that all as like the meat and the potatoes of gymnastics .

But the ability to handle a lot of high workload which is what a lot of people are looking for in preseason to be able to do multiple routines across a practice , right , do multiple back-to-back days of very hard , intense practice , along with lifting and strength conditioning days right ?

Like that , is where I see the role of aerobic base work and high chronic workload , because we know from research that we've done and others that have done the goal is to get a very high chronic workload of routines to be ready for season , right , that is kind of like the most suggested .

Research says that to be good at gymnastics you need to build up a lot of routine volume , right , because it's specific to the metabolic constraints of your sport . So , like to do well at a meet , you have to have a high workload of floor routines and all that stuff . Floor is the most metabolically demanding of all of the events for most people .

So building up to a high chronic workload of floor routines is really the goal , right .

But when your hair keeled over , hands and knees dying right , breathing super duper heavy , and you have to do two more floor routines or then go to do four beam routines or then go to do a ring routine , what do you think is replenishing a lot of that stuff , the aerobic system , and then vice versa .

You know you practice five days in a row that are hard . You got to wake in the morning and lift weights . What do you think all that recovery happens from ? Of course it's fueling well and sleeping and stuff .

But a better aerobic base theoretically does help you recover from individual routines , individual practices , individual days to build up a high chronic workload . Um , so you can perform on the season . And I had a back and forth long discussion with a few people online about you know , questioning maybe why do we have anyone ?

Why is there any aerobic work at all that you're recommending for a gymnast in the off season ? Um , because floor routines is really the only thing that matters . More floor routines is the thing that eventually gets somebody to have a better metabolic capacity to hit floor routines and I was like , yes , but one .

You can't just do floor routines and not expect people to get hurt . And two , you know these are going to be uh delicate situations to approach when you have a whole six month off season . You're trying to figure out how to keep somebody aerobically fit to have them handle lots of routine volume .

So yeah , that's my kind of spiel on top of your thoughts , I think as well .

anything that we do . You look at even like bar routines and stuff like that , like it's not just going max effort at every single second .

So here's the advantage of the aerobic system if you have a really robust energy system in the aerobic sense , um , when you have that like down period , even if it's like your two seconds or whatever , if in that down period , if you can have your heart rate actually come down slightly , it means that you can actually sustain your activity for a little bit longer .

Right , that's this like heroic threshold that we talk about . The the most , the most successful and the most advantageous athletes have the ability to not get tired while everyone else would typically be tired in that scenario . Right , like it's to not get tired while everyone else would typically be tired in that scenario .

Right , like it's this concept called fatigue resistant . If you can make yourself fatigue resistant when you're not having to work maximally , you're going to have an advantage over a competitor , right , it's as simple as that , right ? We use the same concept for soccer .

We use the same concept for all of our other field sports , like if you're running out in the field and if you're able to maintain a low heart rate but stay , still maintain that same speed as your competitor , let's say , right , you're running out in the field .

And if you're able to maintain a low heart rate but still maintain that same speed as your competitor , let's say , right , you're not spiking your heart rate while they're spiked up super high in their heart rate . Well , who has the advantage to last longer in the game and perform when the game's kind of coming towards the end ? Right ?

Who's going to have higher outputs left because they didn't get to a high heart rate and sustain that high heart rate ? The person with the bigger aerobic threshold , right ? So I think I think it's time to kind of get past this point of like , only looking at it from . Is this specific enough ? Should I do it ? Right , it's .

It's this general base that needs to be built , because there is a lot of ramifications from the recovery aspect , like the both of us talked about , and from the competitive edge ramifications that I just mentioned about and from the competitive edge ramifications that I just mentioned , I think there is quite a bit of an advantage that you can gain from just becoming

more fatigue resistant .

Sometimes circuits are like conditioning circuits 40 on , 20 , off for 20 minutes or plyo circuits , where they have like a bunch of just jumping and kind of like squat jumps and panel mats and stuff . But a lot of people just use running as their like main aerobic base . And so I ask people you can like well , why do you do this ? Like what's the point ?

Like what are your thoughts ? Like what do you do this ? Like what's the point ? Like what are your thoughts ? Like what do you do ? It's like well , it's hard , the kids are working hard and it seems like it's the easiest thing for us to do with a large group of people . You know we have like 15 , 20 athletes working together .

It seems like you know doing a mile run or like , what is the goal or the point of these conditioning circuits ? Like , what is the goal you're trying to achieve ?

If the goal is to increase metabolic capacity , like aerobic metabolic capacity , which then becomes , you know , as we're talking , eventually the ability to be fitter or set an anaerobic base to do that kind of work on .

I don't know if a mile run is the best way to do that , you know , like I just don't think conceptually that's great because the metabolic base you're trying to develop is context specific to the sport . So if you're a runner , a mile runner , probably good to do mile runs or some sort of interval work , right .

But gymnastics is whole body , upper body , lower body , core . So you're getting your legs conditioned to buffer the fatigue of running . But you're not going to run on bars , you're going to do bar routines , right .

So if that's the line of thinking , it's like , okay , well , maybe running is not the best because we have , you know , maybe not the best crossover effect or transfer effects comma , it's just hopping on one leg .

You're taking kids who already have a lot of impact volume shins , ankles , whatever and you're just going to make them do a lot of extra mileage , oftentimes on pavement , um , to run outside or something like that , with your shoes .

So it's like , okay , well , that's kind of not a great line of argument to have , which leads to the next one which is like , well , we want to increase their tolerance to plyometrics or their tolerance to some of these impacts , like , okay , well , if that's the line of thinking , there's a very specific way to train power in plyo and hopping on one leg for 10

minutes , is not it right ? There's like a whole discussion around med balls and plyometric volume and hurdles and whatever . So that's not really a great leg to stand on either . And third is oftentimes like they like the mental team grind , like we're all working through this , hustling together , we're all trained together . I love the idea .

Again , the tool in which you're using to do that . I don't know if that's great . So unfortunately , I personally don't really recommend longer distance running to anybody anymore . Like in the summer I don't really do any . This is someone who gave kids mile runs right , like when I was little , like it was a coach .

But I don't offer anybody long distance running as any solution in their summer training or their preseason training . I'm not sure if you feel the same way .

So if you look at all the research , if you look at all the work from the Chris Henshaws , the Joel Jamesons that are these experts in conditioning right , they've now talked about for numerous years of how aerobic conditioning should not be this grit and grind like right off the ground .

Aerobic conditioning is this very , very targeted heart rate zone of somewhere between 120 to 150 . Right , it's your or you can think of it as like your subjective 70 percent effort . Or you can think of it as like the threshold , to the point where you can maintain only nasal breathing . You don't have to use mouth breathing to make this activity happen .

To the point where you can maintain only nasal breathing , you don't have to use mouth breathing to make this activity happen . And then the other thing is for you to actually build this system .

You need to have a sustained amount of time spent in this system and a mile run , even if you're really freaking slow , you can get it done in 12 minutes and that's like you're pretty slow . It takes minimum of 25 minutes spent at 120 to 150 heart rate to actually improve and push the needle for your aerobic condition .

But now , if you think about this , 150 is not super high heart rate , 120 is not that high . So it's not hard work that we need to push these athletes to do to improve their aerobic base . It's precise work that we need to push these athletes to do to improve their aerobic base .

It's precise work that we need to push these athletes to do to improve their aerobic base . So what I've been doing super recently is I'll put kids on an assault bike , I'll throw a heart rate monitor on them , I'll tell them I need you to stay in this little number zone and it shows on a little graph too .

So like kids like it visually , they think it's like a fun little game . And then I'll also say I need you to go through this entire circuit with only breathing through your nose .

But it needs to be effort where you would say all right , it would be easier to make this activity happen if I were to use mouth breathing , but I can definitely do it with just breathing through my nose , right . So using those two as a combination .

I can now keep athletes in a very , very specific window of heart rate and breathing rate where I'm actually affecting the , the aerobic system , and I'll put it on 30 seconds on , 30 seconds off . I need the 30 seconds on to be a little bit more work . Just , it's a little more exciting , right .

And then 30 seconds off is now a lower , so I might give you 60 RPMs on the salt bike for your on time . I'm going to give you 35 RPMs on your off time and you're just going to go there for 25 to 45 minutes .

Yep , right , but it's not I'm trying to kill you , right , and I'll walk over , like I've seen my athletes trying to destroy themselves on this bike . I'll walk over and be like all right , you're taking the next two off because your heart rate's like too high , right ?

I actually don't want you to work as hard or goal to make you fatigue resistant by improving your ability to sustain a moderate heart rate for an extended period of time without the aerobic base , right , and I agree there .

Based on like their ability to access 20 right assault bikes for like their whole team . So if you're in the situation where you're like a college elite , you have the tools , you have the whatever and the kids are older , that is someone who can do the .

You know , drive to planet fitness , do my strength workout and then sit there for a half hour and do my interval type work . So the college programs that ask me stuff , I often say you know , pending you have the backdrop of the team's all going to grind a bit in the summer and do two days of kind of off season training along with

gymnastics . It looks like a two day lift followed by maybe some sort of longer metabolic , um , aerobic base work . So yeah , they're on . You know , planet fitness they have a that 30 , 30 for a half hour , whatever . The reality of club is that you probably don't have that and that's where circuits are beneficial , right .

So that's where we do have a lot of kids who will do one day , um , uh , 30 , 30 minutes of 40 on , 20 off between a bunch of stations , and maybe it's not this solid , steady state bike but it's like , you know , leg , arm , core , and you're rotating kids through a 30 minute .

You know again , can , can breathe , I'm not dying , I'm not killing myself , but I'm moderately working the whole time . But that's such a large like frame of reference shift for coaches is that we're not going to be killing people and just getting super hot and super sweaty and doing 65 squat jumps in 40 seconds , right , just to get somebody buried .

It's about the goal of increasing overall fitness , right , and cardiovascular endurance so that we can then do really hard anaerobic preseason work , right . So in the gym for clubs I would say it's a circuit with a bunch of stations , two kids per station .

You can easily get 25 to 30 kids through a small floor circuit where they're moderately working , kind of out of breath but not too hard , and get the same parallel training effect as maybe the person who does have .

You know the college girls that come home with us and they're training with us , who have the 30 minutes or the 45 minutes to spend on the bike or between stuff like that .

For looking outside of gymnastics like you might play a sport that might require you to be on the field for 90 minutes . Right , that means your aerobic zone needs to be way bigger . Your sorry , your base needs to be way bigger .

So you might need to do sustained activity for an hour and a half , right , but for gymnastics like you really don't need that crazy big a base , like what you mentioned , of two 15-minute circuits totaling up to 30 minutes , where the entire time your heart rate is elevated and you're not going at maximal pace . That's amazing .

That's all you need to build fitness .

You can do that one to two times a week and then you can spend the other days working on a little bit more of the anaerobic system which we can get into and , you know , actually start using the more specific needs or improving the specific needs for your sport , while still really taking care of your base work and making yourself a little bit more fatigue

resistant .

That not only is in line with the physiology and the research that we know around aerobic base work , which then becomes , you know , anaerobic stuff , but also you have eliminated 10,000 impacts on that athlete's lower body over the course of a summer .

10,000 impacts on that athlete's lower body over the course of a summer Because if every day or every two days you have them run miles and you test them and stuff , I understand the thought process , that it's helpful , it's cool , you think you're getting a lot done and maybe the mile time as a team is cool because you can have something to work for .

I understand the perception , but like you've added so much volume of impact onto the athletes in the process of doing that , that you might be , you know , metaphorically and physically shooting yourself in the foot when you get into the preseason and your shin splints hurt or whatever .

So the recommendation I had to these couple of colleges is like okay , well , let's change the circuits and maybe some aerobic base work and then if you do want to have something that's a fun test to track and do , do a two minute bike test , do a half mile or a three quarter mile bike , watt , wattage , sprint test as your thing of a time you want your team

to get , because you'll work super hard . It's not going to drain you of your entire training model , but you can still have a common group chat thing to talk about that . You're all like biking in this kind of whatever it is .

So like that's the recommendation is circuits and or bike based on the age , which leads us through the summer and then gets us to preseason , which we'll talk about , is like okay , now what do we need to be doing ? A hundred , a hundred yard sprints like repeat sprints in that , but anything else to add on kind of the off season aerobic base rationale .

Though , like the other negative to the whole , like mile run is like if you're using that to build fitness , remember you didn't spend time with your heart rate elevated for 25 plus minutes , so you never actually did aerobic work and you're like there's so that's our junk conditioning that we talked about .

You just put stress on the athlete for no real gain , right . Right , you didn't actually improve physiology by doing that .

And again , like dave mentioned , if you want to use it as a test , like we'd recommend a couple other things like the bike protocol that dave mentioned yeah , but if that's your , if you want to use it as a test , like we'd recommend a couple other things like the bike protocol that Dave mentioned .

But if that's your Ashland , and you want to test them twice a year , once at the beginning of the season and once at the end , as like a team builder kind of thing , like sure , if that's what you believe in and you value team culture a ton , I wouldn't fault you for that .

So , yeah , then the next layer of this conversation is that people , you know their line of thinking was we're using the mile in the summer to become a sprint work , doing repeated sprints outside or hill sprints or something , and our ability to get the whole team through 50 to a hundred yard sprints , whether it's from the strength coach or the coaches were having

them do that . That was the thought . Is that okay , well , this sprinting type volume is gonna correlate and transfer to a floor routine volume . So if we go on that line of thinking , we then go back to the same question Am I getting people tired or am I doing a metabolic training effect ?

So when you ask yourself , okay , well , if the goal is metabolic , technically anaerobic work , you're trying to increase someone's overall power output in that , whatever second interval you are , um , again , it's relevant to the , the vessel you're doing it in .

So if you are doing sprints , 10 rounds of sprints twice a week to increase someone's just straight up power for a metabolic effect , I don't know if that's going to transfer to a floor routine or a bar routine . Quite well , right , probably not . Um , if the goal is to increase someone's vault power to sprint as fast as they can .

Maybe , maybe , but maybe a 10 , maybe a 10 yard is better because it's only 70 feet , yeah , right . So like , there's that second line of thinking , like , okay , well , it's probably not in line with the aerobic power output for 90 second floor routine or bar routine , it's not going to transfer .

Well , there , it's probably not going to be the best tool to increase someone's vault speed , sprinting right Versus like traditional type sprint work or technique work . And then a lot of people also are saying that we're increasing plyometric or power , right , so , okay , Increasing plyometric , there's probably better exercises and tools to do that .

And also , many of the plyometrics you're looking for are vertical force displacement , not horizontal force displacement . So we need like depth jumps and box jumps and stuff like that . Um , and then , third again , that mental grind .

You know we like going outside as a team and doing our sprints , cause it's like a good grind at six in the morning , like that's the only one . I think I see the rationale of being like okay , but there's probably way more better ways to do that , for sure , right .

So unfortunately and this is like the conversation I was having with myself not to slight other people , but when I walked through that rationale for doing repeated sprints outside with my athletes , none of the four things I just listed really held any weight versus things we'll talk about .

Obviously that are better options , but that's how I view the preseason is how I was counseling these people away from just the sprint workouts or something like that . Maybe some hill work here for team building . I can understand that , but yeah , that's my approach to it .

And if you look at the demands of the sport again , like once we started getting into the more specific energy systems that are required for the sport , we can now start having a conversation of sports specificity . Last I checked , yes , on floor routine , the platform is not 100 yards long . We don't need to do a sustained 100-yard sprint .

We can do tempo sprints or shuttle runs if we want to do it via running . I do think there is an aspect of specific preparation . We call it SVP , specific physical preparation because it does involve being on your feet and running and jumping and hopping and bouncing and turning , being on your feet and running and jumping and hopping and bouncing and turning .

So I think it can be a good idea . But I think it's maybe a better usage of time to do like shuttle runs at a prescribed percentage of effort Because again , you make a turn on floor , you don't just keep doing it at a max effort with zero , zero milliseconds of break , right , you do a pass , you stand quick pause , right milliseconds of break .

You do a pass , you stand , quick pause . There's no need for this continuous 100-yard max effort . Go and then repeat without recovery 10 more times . There's no demand in gymnastics for that .

I think we can just be a little bit more precise and say all right , we're going to start off with some tempo runs , some tempo sprints , we're maybe going to go shuttles , um , just 10 yards back and forth , and we're going to do

that for , let's say , 40 seconds and we're going to break for 40 or , sorry , break for 20 . Um , so that we have some incomplete recovery work and we're just going to operate at 80 to 85% for eight sets to start , and let's see if we can maybe build you up to 12 sets , 14 sets , 16 sets over the course of two months .

Yep , exactly Now , that's that's a lot more precise prescription of . I want to start now taking that aerobic base that we just built and start layering in a little bit more of this ability to handle this um , anaerobic lactic system and just get really good at buffering the lactate Right , cause that's what we're trying to work on here , right ?

Our goal for you again go back to the physiology is we're trying to make our athletes just better at buffering lactate , so that they don't have this feeling of like I'm done , right , I'm , I'm , I'm crapped out .

So I think there's just better ways and honestly , like even the , the , the circuit style that you mentioned , dave , for the aerobic point of view , I think we can , you know , use similar concepts of circuit work for this anaerobic lactic work , as well , yeah , yeah , I think there's .

I think a big risk that we have in gymnastics is that many of the athletes are younger but we go from the off season , where there's really no hard impacts or hard plyometric volume and skills , and floor routines , and if we go right into floor parts or half routines or floor routines , there is a huge differential between their metabolic capacity to handle a floor

routine with really high level skills and the risk of injury , right , all it takes is landing one double back short because you're gassed out on your last floor pass to crunch your ankles . You're out for eight weeks and that's the start of your preseason , right ?

So I think for me we need to do a better job in gymnastics and all sports honestly , of giving somebody a month or six weeks where we are training in the parameters in which a really hard routine will require of them 60 seconds of this , like really hard go , really stop back off two seconds . Really hard go , but with tools that are not risky .

Those tools are bikes and med balls and sleds and things that are like high force , high output . I feel like my lungs are on fire because I'm really getting into that high threshold heart rate . But I'm not going to hurt myself pushing a sled , I'm not going to hurt myself biking really hard , I'm not going to hurt myself doing med ball slams .

So I think there's this . First piece of it to remember is that if we do June , july , august , aerobic base work and we're starting to slowly prep somebody for a preseason , september into October is a great time to use these shuttle type runs approaches but then also do some interval work which is in like that 60 to 90 second .

Sell your soul to the bike , you know . But you know it's great team bonding too as well , but you're not hurting people .

And I think if you only go the route of parts to half routines , half routines to full routines , without any base work , of anaerobic window type work where someone's lungs are on fire they're standing in the corner before they go you just run the risk of having somebody get hurt and I think that's where a lot of people fall apart in the preseason .

They start to develop injuries because they're doing like back tucks in a row for their cardio conditioning or they're doing like tumble down routines on floor for their conditioning and they're just cracking their ankles over and over again , not being metabolically prepared .

There's a time and a place to do really hard floor routines and tumble down and stuff , but they have to be metabolically ready before they move into that part of the preseason . And the second piece of that is that oftentimes there is these things are happening in parallel .

You're building up someone's like parts to skills , to half routines , to floor routines , maybe over the eight week window of periodization , at the same time in which you're maybe in the strength room doing your gpp work and doing some power work and you're doing other stuff with a strength coach in the college setting or you're doing separate conditioning with the team

and the club team that has these circuits , so they're oftentimes together . You're doing like the routine build up over eight weeks . At the same time we can build up shuttle runs and circuits and we'll share some examples , but they're happening in tandem together to increase someone's overall capacity . That's how I usually recommend it to people .

Right , there is this , this meeting point , where skill and conditioning and fitness come together .

But if the issue is fitness , let's build the fitness separately , let's work on the skill separately , meaning the skill can't be done while tired , right , because we're trying to actually improve the quality , right , you can't build quality , you can't do anything at a high quality and build that quality if you're tired , right .

So let's build the quality separately , in a non-fatigue state . Let's slowly work on making you fatigue resistant by doing conditioning work and then , slowly , as we get closer to pre-season and season , let's have the two kind of meet together . Right , I think that's got to be a little bit more of our mindset .

And then the eventually , the the more general preparation starts to get a little bit more specific , a little bit more specific , the skill stuff starts to layer itself a little bit more into a little bit more competition based , and then now eventually the two meet and then on competition days , when it really should be coming together or let's say like and in the

in the collegiate setting , you have inner squads where obviously you have to perform and stuff but like , yeah , inner squads and competitions are really the the only times where , like , all of that needs to perfectly , perfectly come together . Everything else it really does not .

You're you're working on improving fitness and you're working on developing skill and they'll have overlap , but it only needs to come fully , fully together for competition or inner squads . The way that I see it , you can tell me if I'm a little off .

So in the first six weeks of september and maybe the start of october is kind of what we're talking about , which is maybe it's shuttle runs , maybe it's just all skills and combinations and you're getting like , okay , what routine , what construction , what , what are we going to do to build up ?

And maybe you get to the point where you're doing three skill combinations . But in that six week window is these uh , is like obviously your skill type , stuff keeps going . But that is where we're using the shutter run intervals or stuff like that .

That's where we're using 20 seconds of max effort biking 10 second transition , max effort , med ball slams 20 second transition , 20 seconds jump floor handstands or suitcase carries or sled . That is working the bits and the pieces , like you said , of that 60 second of misery .

But you're doing that in tandem over six weeks and building up how hard that is and then right around October , in the middle of it , like all right , we have a inner squad right around Thanksgiving for most people , or we're doing a mock in-house meet November , december .

Let's transition our focus towards a little more in the half routine full routine bucket and taper just a little bit off the really hard metabolic conditioning to give more back to the ability to do routines . That's how I counsel people on . It is like that first six weeks you're doing this with a strength coach or on your own .

As you move closer to inner squads it's more routine volume as you're building up high chronic workload , slowly but surely getting a couple of meets or a couple of routines in a row . That way you're giving a little bit more of that conditioning benefit to the routine situation .

And then , of course , specificity wise , you have to do routines to get better at routines . So it gives you a four week window where you just train routines to get ready for an inner squad and no one's inner squad . They want to be as performative as championships , right , and then you break for a holiday .

Then you have all the way up through January to keep doing more of perfection of routines and getting a lineup and that kind of stuff , and it allows you to use your your three month of preseason , in line with great metabolic research , stripping away all the excess of plyos and power you would get from just having someone do a sprinting and a running program to

give more towards the season health . And then also you still get that mental grind , that team camaraderie , that culture type stuff . And then season starts in January and you switch yourself into just like all right now we're working , we're resting to hit routines , kind of build up our overall capacity .

But that three month off season , three month in season is how you get to a high chronic workload of routine volume safely . Right . In my mind that's the best approach that I think we have right now .

So , yeah , hopefully the end point of our message , which is like , maybe reconsider running you know the mile run in your sprint type training in the preseason reconsider why you're doing them and maybe move away from them . You know I personally don't do any at all , but consider why we're saying it .

You know we're not saying like don't run because it's bad Right , and we're also not saying like the pendulum of either like no run , no aerobic ever , or like only aerobic . You know both those things are not true

. But if you're a coach , if you're a strength coach , if you're having these these summer meetings , just take what we say with a grain of salt and think about this with your own conversation about like all right , like well , make sense .

Maybe the mile run test and the sprint hundred yard sprints are not really for us , but there's value in the energy system domain in which we're trying to train . What can we do realistically in our setting ? That's going to apply the best we can .

It doesn't have to be perfect , but like , how can we get some of those circuits in the summer and then transition to a 90 second window ? How can we get some of this uh , routine type progression at the same time as we're doing some conditioning work ?

And I think that people would find that they're they just don't have a bunch of athletes there as as uh , cranky injury , wise , shin splint , achilles issues , you know , back pain type stuff , but also they're still going to get to the approach of it's really hard and we're training and we're grinding and it's it's hustle on it .

Right , you're still , you're still working really hard , but you're just eliminating some of the extra side effects with a little bit more efficiency . That's how I view it .

But if you are someone that , let's say , believes in running , right , you really like it for a multitude of reasons . Again , just be a little bit more precise with how you prescribe it .

A mile run as fast as you can not valuable , but you can convince your team to go out on a 25 minute jog and you , you coach them how to go out on that jog , so you're actually building aerobic fitness . That's , that's fine , right , because you will adapt to that stress .

There's lots of people that can run miles and miles and miles and they're not going to get hurt from it . It's not that we hate running , it's just that we we wish the running was prescribed a little bit more precisely , yeah , right . And then I think same thing for the other energy systems as well . I think the precision is really what's important .

So we kind of mentioned the shuttle run idea for the lactic work , for the alactic work , and to me , like this is direct crossover between , like true alactic work so you're creating a phosphate system versus your actual power development work .

I would say just build the actual power and really build a high ceiling of it so that when you need to use it for your passes it's there right , you have the ability and the capacity to do so . So I would say separate them out . Don't try to make your power work conditioning . Have a separate power section where you're working on max effort .

Let's say , box jumps , depth jumps , pogo jumps , um , but do that with appropriate um prescription . So , like three sets of four max effort box jumps right . If you want to build lower body vertical power , right . Three sets of 10 max effort pogo jumps where you're really fast off the ground , high in the air , and that's it right .

You've now built your ceiling for having higher outputs for power and being able to display power . And then when you actually need that for your competition or for your routine , because you built the energy systems on the back end , the two will come together right , and because you worked on the skill required within the actual sport , it will come together .

I'm not trying to hurt your feelings or say I you know someone who did some crazy panel mat lines myself , but think about like , what's the goal of this ? Is it a metabolic conditioning ? Well , 30 minutes of stairs is definitely not relevant for a floor routine , right ? But also , is it plyometric ?

It's concrete , uphill , downhill , concrete on their Achilles and on their shins . Don't know if that's the best thing for athletes . Mental grind definitely checks the box , get up early , get that hustle in . But I think there's other ways to do it and in this program that I worked with who is wonderful and I love their coaching staff I was like I get it .

Guys , you can still wake up at six , bring out five med balls and bring out some shuttle cones and whatever and do interval work . Just do 40 , 20s , you know , for 25 minutes in that slow heart rate outside in the middle of football stadiums . It's epic and it's iconic .

I get it , it's a tradition you have , but instead of running the stairs with concrete , just bring out a couple sets of equipment and have the whole team do a 6.30 AM circuit outside in the football lights , with the sun's coming up and you're hustling together . Same cultural impact . Very , very different metabolic and plyometric side effects .

I think it's for us to be like wow , like I kicked her , I kicked her butt . To be like wow , like I kicked her , I kicked her butt , like yeah , I had them like keeled over and like dying , so that it makes us feel good , like we're we're able to impart such hard work on them . That's not the goal .

Like our goal is to make our athletes more fatigue resistant , more powerful , faster , more healthy . Right , like it's not us , it's not for us to make ourselves feel better about prescribing really hard workouts . Like that's not the goal . And I say that with so much love because I've been there .

Right , like I've prescribed the hard workouts where I'm like wow , like that was good , that was tough , like what ? Like taking a step back , like what did I actually accomplish ? Did I actually improve their physiology ? If the answer is no , it really shouldn't exist .

Yeah , aside from the like what Dave mentioned of like building mental toughness and some team camaraderie stuff , like sure that can happen every now and then , I would suggest maximum twice a year . I think more than that , but that's my last thoughts on that whole thing .

Between PT and between fitness , we are seeing arguably some of the highest volume of a variety of programs and colleges and ages and injuries from everywhere , right ? So we see a bunch of college kids , a bunch of high school kids from different clubs , and this is what seems to work across a large variety of people . So that's why we offer these things .

We made some mistakes , we've seen some things go not the best way , and also , I think we have a nice sample size of people that it does seem to work for . And the second piece of that is that we're trying our best to make sure we offer solutions that are easy , practical and don't require bald plates , don't require these crazy sensors .

Right , like this is easily done for everyone . But just listen to the podcast , take a moment , step back and be like all right , like let me have a sit down with my team and talk through this through and figure out like where can we maybe pivot a little bit ?

Cause I was once there , man , I was once doing these crazy mile interval type stuffs and the hard kill somebody just to kill somebody , like it's just junk mileage . You know , back to the thing it's just getting kids hot and sweaty but no physiological benefit .