Fitness

So lets start at the ground floor and work our way up.

I am thinking I might have to have a few goes at this to make it all hang together from start to finish but I think it might ‘work’ best as in be understood as a narrative.

Fitness Testing/Assessment

I tend to call it both but basically to me the terms are interchangeable. Most importantly I want to explain to you what fitness testing and fitness assessment mean to me.

To start with…if I was to ask you what your fitness was like what would you say? What about if I asked you what you bench press, squat or deadlift? The reason I ask this is because usually when I ask people what they bench they tell me what their PB is…that is…what their Personal Best is. If you asked me what my PB is I’d tell you 200kg’s. That is the most I’ve ever benched and it was achieved when all I was doing was training to bench because I wanted to bench 200kgs just to see if I could do it. When I think about it now I probably haven’t bench pressed in certainly more that 5 years and I absolutely have no idea what I’d bench now…maybe half that…maybe a little more…but then again maybe when I go to the gym tonight to give it a crack I’ll be shocked how little it is. It would be like asking me about how fit I am and me telling you what my PB for 5km or 10km is even though those PB’s would be from the early 1990’s and these days I might struggle to match them on a bicycle. Anyway…my point is…your PB’s are irrelevant and what I need to know with regards your fitness is where are you now.

If you’re not assessing you are guessing.

If you know me or you’ve ever been coached by me you will have either heard me say that a lot of have seen my write it. For me if you don’t want to test and assess then I don’t want to coach you. I say that because without some way to measure your progress or lack of it…we are both wasting our time.

The reason I became an amazing coach I put down to fitness testing and assessment. In that fitness testing and assessment was the reason I could say I was better than everyone else. Let me explain….when I started out in my career I had a few things going for me 1. I studied Sport, Health and Exercise Science…this is a good grounding…and it also meant I spent a lot of time around others that shared my interests. 2. I wasn’t a great athlete…this meant that I had to work harder and smarter than others to be not quite as good as my peers. There is nothing quite as motivating as being a disgruntled athlete to motivate you to be a great coach. 3. I was surrounded by some of the best coaches in the world who were willing to share their time and experience with me. They were also super happy to ridicule and humiliate me when I did things coaching wise they knew to be idiotic. 4. Now this is the most important part. I had right from the outset of my coaching career 50 plus athletes to coach and very quickly that increased to around 150. I was responsible for writing and implementing their programs but the catch was…I didn’t test them….someone else did. I knew every 8-12 weeks depending on the athletes cycle whether my athletes got better, got worse or stayed the same. I knew this because someone who didn’t care about whether I kept my job or not….someone who had no idea what these athletes previous scores were tested all my athletes and these results were seen by the athletes themselves, me, my fellow coaches and our bosses. There was nowhere to hide. This constant and ongoing feedback meant that I was able to examine what I did and how I did it to see what worked and what didn’t.

Now let’s have a real look at what that meant.

1. Training programs as a whole or by component either work or they don’t and the results will clearly demonstrate that.
2. As a coach you have to know and you have to be able to explain to athletes and managers or perhaps if you are a Personal Trainer to clients what tests matter and what don’t and why.
3. What’s the end result you are looking for? Gains don’t keep accruing forever. For example in rugby I always used the example say with a bench press…I could get any decent rugby player to be able to bench 1.5 times their body weight in 6 to 12 months without having any impact on their actual rugby performance or training but to get a player to bench 2 times their body weight it might take 12 months plus and they’d have to pretty much let their rugby suffer to chase it. It all comes back to what result you are looking for….how much strength is enough. We will talk more about this with regards ‘fitness’ because different people have different goals but I am very much a believer in having a baseline…more on that later.
4. How much is a reasonable amount of improvement and how fast should you attain it. What are the risks associated in this pursuit?
5. Is it ever acceptable to stay the same or go backwards? You really better know what you are talking about to explain this away. The answer to this is yes, of course it is…more on this later.

So what tests do I use and why do I use them?

Fitness – Speed, Agility, Anaerobic Capacity and Endurance

I have always used the spider test, the modified t-test or whatever else you want to call it. Here are a few examples below for you to look at before we discuss it in detail.

So…above firstly we have a single person being tested….and secondly we have a team being tested/training as a group.

What exactly are we looking at I hear you ask?

The test…irrespective of it’s modality is the same…it is 6 30 second efforts with 30 second recoveries where the work done or the distance covered is measured and recorded for each effort and the instruction is given to the participant to go as hard as possible on each effort.

Most people who know me will have seen me have people do this test on the C2 rower as well with the drag set to 10.

Now before we get into the details of the test…I don’t tend to care how, where or on what you do the test so long as you always do the test the same way and in the same place…with tennis players I did it on court…a start line and a cone 5 m or and a cone 5 metres each side of it…hence the name T-test…at IP we had a cone another 5 metres out…i.e 10 metres out and then 2 cones 5 metres either side of it….it really doesn’t matter…so long as it’s consistent and repeatable. They would start on the starting line…on the whistle…sprint out 5 and back 5 and then out and to the left and back and then out and to the right and back….they’d be going flat out for 30 seconds and we’d round back down to whatever that last cone they’d past in their 30 second effort….does that make sense? In their 30 second recovery they’d walk back to the start line…and get set to go again and they’d do it 6 times. The test can be programmed into a C2 rower….so that it automatically records the distance covered in each 30 second effort.

So what does this test give us?

1. The first effort gives you a fantastic indication of outright speed and power…this is super valuable…as all else being equal…speed kills. It will pretty much ALWAYS tell you what you already knew when it comes to team sports in that whoever your fastest or most explosive player is….they’ll have the highest/best score on this effort.
2. The total of all 6 efforts will give you an indication of your players/athletes/clients (can you tell that I am struggling with this…I hope if I say player or athlete or client interchangeably you’ll be able to follow) endurance….this usually won’t surprise you either….the ‘fittest’ person will have the best total score.
3. The other thing I look at is the person’s anaerobic capacity…their ability to maintain high level efforts over multiple efforts…that is how many high level efforts they can maintain.

I am going to go do a test tomorrow on the rower (I already know I am going to regret it) and I’ll post my results (if that’s what they can be called) and we can talk about them in detail.

So this is what I do to test ‘fitness’ and this is the test I use whether you play AFL, Football, GAA, Tennis, Hockey or a personal training client. Whether the results are good, bad or indifferent it doesn’t matter. Do the test and record the result.

Strength

This is more straightforward for most people.

Lower Body Strength

I would let people choose their poison here to enable athletes in particular do what they were most comfortable with and what they were technically best at. I never coached powerlifters and don’t and have never professed to be as technically expert as some. Unless you are a powerlifter…no one really gives a shit what your personal best is….as sad as that may make some of you. We will talk more about my views on exercise selection later on but for now…you will know whether you feel more comfortable squatting or deadlifting. No matter which it is…once you can do 2 x your body weight of either you are strong enough and chasing greater or higher numbers you are doing so at your own risk. This is where I tell you from my experience I haven’t seen increases in speed and power with regards athletic performance from pushing past 2 times bodyweight but I have seen problems such as increased rates of injury and reduction in other performance criteria. I know people will want to argue…but just read on and argue later.

Lower Body Power

Standing Broad Jump – I think this test is easier to administer and more reliable than a vertical jump.

Lower Body Power

Bodyweight Squat – Your body weight rounded up to the nearest 5kg and done to a depth below parallel for repetitions.

Upper Body Strength

Bench Press…as with above…once you can bench 1.5 times you bodyweight…you are plenty strong enough and investing more time and effort in chasing a bigger bench in my opinion is a waste of time.

Pull Ups…I love weighted vests…and I personally used to test peoples 3 RM. It takes some time to get accustomed to it…but if you have the time and inclination I think it’s worth it.

Upper Body Strength Endurance

Bench Press with body weight for repetitions. Simple. I round it down to closest 5kg interval at a max weight of 100kg. Once you can do 15 repetitions…I am happy.

Pull Ups…again…once you can do 15 repetitions I’m happy.

Upper Body Endurance

Push Ups…does it get any simpler? Total number of push ups in 60 seconds. Personally if you can do 45 I am super happy with that.

Inverted Rows…total number in 60 seconds…if you can do 30 I am super happy with that.

Does that all make sense? Before we start talking training we need to talk testing and assessment.

It is so important and fundamental for me that one of the things I am considering is that anyone that records and uploads their fitness tests for I am thinking about coaching for free.

As a coach…watching someone test tells you so much and hopefully over time if people are will to test and upload their performance we can break it down and I will show you what I am talking about.

For the sake of consistency and continuity…here is me outlining pretty much exactly what I have listed above. I have used the testing protocol I have outline above since 1993.

So what comes next?

Well one of the problems that some people have when they are considering the topic of strength and conditioning or fitness or whatever term you want to use to label it is that they don’t really know what they are looking at. When they are looking at displays of what they think of as ‘fitness’ they don’t understand what it is they are trying to describe. When some people say a particular athlete is ‘fit’ some people are talking about the appearance of their physique…and even then some people are saying they are ‘fit’ because they are super lean and yet others because the person in question is jakt. Some people think of fitness as speed and power and yet others as endurance. So we need to ensure that we are properly defining the terms. I always get people asking me ‘How can I improve my fitness?’ and what they are after is always some attribute on the athletic spectrum with power on one end and endurance on the other and with things like speed, anaerobic power and repeatability along with strength in between. Sometimes what they are after is improvements in EVERYTHING which is fine as well.

To save some time and so people can bail on this post now if I’ve already bored the hell out of them…I will get to the ‘take home’ points right up front:

1. You can’t improve everything at once.

2. You need to ensure you are focussing and prioritising the attributes that are going to give you the greatest returns with regards your desires.

3. You need to know that as far as moving forward with your ‘fitness’ you need to have a base to build on…more about all of this later.

So where do we start?

Well we start with the ‘base’.

I’d break down most people as follows:
1. Too skinny and too weak.
2. Too fat and too weak.

I think generally we have really low standards as to what we think is ‘good’ regarding strength, speed and power.

Strength wins every single argument in sport and it wins a lot of those arguments in life…the reason that women don’t compete against men in contact sports is not due to a lack of technical ability it is just down to a lack of strength…pound for pound men are just stronger than women….it is the same reason that they have weight classes in fighting…lightweight fighters are not worse fighters technically than heavyweights…they just aren’t as strong.

How strong is strong enough…..I’m glad I asked….I think a reasonable standard for sport is to be able to do a 2 x bodyweight deadlift or squat, a 1.5 x bodyweight bench press, 1.5 x bodyweight pull up….these are all for a single rep. You should be able to do 15 reps with body weight on the squat and 10+ reps on the bench and pull ups with your body weight. You should also be able to do 45 press ups and 30+ inverted rows in 60 seconds.

So what does this mean….well if you are 100kg athlete and you are serious about your sport then you should be able to do the following:
Squat/Deadlift = 200kg+
Bench Press = 150kg+
Pull Up = 1 rep with 50kg load
Repetition Squat = 15+ reps with 100kg
Repetition Bench Press = 10+ reps with 100kg
Repetition Pull Ups = 10+ reps with bodyweight
Push Ups = 45+ in 60 seconds
Inverted Rows = 30+ in 60 seconds

This is what I think is a ‘good’ strength standard….if you can do all these things….then you can be working on increasing your power, speed, agility and most importantly your skill and technical ability. If you can’t…then I don’t want to hear you talking about snatching or clean and jerking or anything else for that matter….because you are just TOO WEAK.

Strength is the vessel….power is what you put into it…so if you have a tiny vessel (too weak) then you can do all the power work you like and it won’t amount to anything because life unlike fighting is not governed by weight classes….strength always trumps everything else when skill and technical ability are matched. So before you worry about anything else…worry about addressing your base.