The path to peak performance is something that changes from person to person, and for each person, from year to year.
Developing young athletic talent further complicates the issue. Asking for too much too soon from teenagers can lead to injury or burnout that diminishes what they will accomplish in adult athletic careers, should they even get to have one.
Older professional athletes see the stakes in maintaining their health, and optimizing athletic performance for as long as possible is directly tied to their earning capacity. Elite NBA athletes have been losing body mass, something that will improve their games now and may extend their careers.
In between are critical transition phases where maturing athletes jump competition levels, prompting a new, tougher range of stresses that trigger adaptions and, somtimes, injuries. The only sure thing is that some number less than 100% will succeed in the transition, whether it is from high school to college, or from college to professional.
All of this inter- and intra-person variability leads to lots of voices dispensing all kinds of advice. It is probably too much information for most athletes to make decisions about their bodies, and for most coaches to make decisions about their athletes. I don’t know if anyone has boiled down the information to what stands for common sense, but let me try.
Strength and fitness prepare an athlete for competition and they prevent injuries but it’s possible to overdo it, so be careful.
I constructed the sentence but the rationale comes from Dr. Timothy Hewitt and his recommendations on a recent Elitefts podcast. His research has found that over 90% of the root cause of ACL tears are subject to preventive measures, and that the work to take those preventive measures makes for better overall athletes and for better prepared teams.
You can also see the tradeoff that comes with increasing body mass that comes when athletes seek to increase their power output. According to Hewitt, athletes risk ACL tears when they have shifted their center of mass away from their core. Athletes who have piled up mass on their shoulders and extremities and attempt a “discount-double check”, they put their connective tissues at risk.
Evidence is also coming in that pure power will sometimes get in the way of sport-specific athleticism, as this short report from Sparta Performance shows. It’s another reminder that sports performance is complicated so, you know, be careful.
The Best Things I Read Last Week:
- Vanguard After The Revolution NBC SportsWorld … Bill James uses his stature to call out the bullshit that has resulted from the increase in sports analysis, public and private.
- SSE #136 USING NUTRITION AND MOLECULAR BIOLOGY TO MAXIMIZE CONCURRENT TRAINING Gatorade Sports Science Institute … These reports on nutrition, hydrarion and athlete performance are authoritative but I don’t like that Gatorade does not provide a publication date for the material.
- This is why flying on a plane makes you feel terrible Vox … Travel-induced wear and tear makes intuitive sense, and this in-depth, evidence-filled report describes how and why.
- Understanding the Mechanics of Fatigue The Science of Running blog … You can make the case that athlete performance varies second-to-second, as fatigue dictates what someone is capable of.
- Harder, faster, stronger – creating tomorrow’s footballer BBC Sport … Sports psychology for athlete development is catching on in the UK.
- Proteus Digital Health quietly launches consumer-facing wearable for athletes Mobihealth News … Proteus has soft-launced its Recover product, a sensor stick-on patch that provides physiologic data on athlete recovery and ongoing work load.