Just recently I attended the Level 3 Australian Strength & Conditioning Association (ASCA) course with 7 other top strength & conditioning (S & C) coaches.  The best part of this course was that Australia is blessed with world leaders in S & C and nutrition.  The next best part of it all was that we had access to them (and other experts from the United States) for 5 days of “training & nutrition nerdism”.  Here are just a few of the things I picked up:

• Professor Jeremy Sheppard (who is probably THE world's leading expert on getting people to jump higher and also happens to be my thesis supervisor) elaborated on how bike training decreases vertical jump.  He also made a great point in how we get caught up on all the latest recovery practices like compression garments and cold baths etc. but if we are not taking care of at least 8 hours sleep each night and eating well; you are missing the forest for the trees.

• Dan Baker PhD has been the strength coach at the Brisbane Broncos NRL for over 15 years and is a bona fide strength expert (no matter how he tries to convince you otherwise).  Besides giving us his breakdown of his training systems and the why's, he also detailed a study conducted by the Auckland Blues that looked at dehydration and soft tissue injury.  Basically almost all soft tissue injuries occurred when the players had been dehydrated in the previous 3 days so monitoring hydration levels is crucial for any contact sport.

• Former AIS dietician Dr. Gary Slater PhD hit us all with a few home truths on sports nutrition.  Basically all the energy balance equations (i.e. after accounting for exercise and lean body mass, you need a certain amount of calories per kg of bodyweight per day) do not matter due to the variability in everyone’s metabolism.  For instance, two 65kg females may eat exactly the same calories per day but one may lose fat on it and the other may put on weight.  He bases everything off previous energy intake and previous changes in body composition.

• Jay Dawes PhD from Texas A & M was kind enough to lecture to us and he drew us to the fact that if you want to get faster, you either need to increase stride length or stride frequency.  Besides getting stringer in the gym, you should use resisted sprints (i.e. sled sprints, weighted vests) if you have issues with stride length and you should use assisted sprints (e.g. bungees, downhill running) to increase stride frequency.  You just have to be careful here because using these methods should only really be used with advanced athletes and it can mess with their biomechanics.  Because of this, using no more than a 5% extra load or accepting no more than a 5% reduction in times is a good place to start with using these methods.

• Dean Robinson who has had premiership winning teams with Geelong in AFL and Manly in the NRL gave a lecture on athlete assessment and also injury management.  He declared that you need to rehabilitate the muscle (especially if you are trying to return athletes to full running) based on it’s fiber type.  For example if you rehabbing the soleus, which is predominately a slow twitch muscle, you would increase the volume of work (i.e. run further) rather than increase the intensity (i.e. run faster).  This is something that I have believed in for years in terms of rehabbing injuries with strength exercises so it was nice to feel validated and also to see it applied to a different mode of exercise. 

• One of the biggest names in field sports repeated sprint performance and a premiership winning S & C coach with West Coast Eagles, Stuart Cormack PhD showed us that the latest research all points to active recovery hindering phosphocreatine (PCr) resynthesis.  PCr is one of our body’s best forms of energy for high intensity efforts (which is why people get so many performance benefits from using creatine) so it does not make sense to slow it’s restoration in the body.  This means that if you get subbed off in a game of league or AFL, you should just rest rather than walking around or sitting on a stationary bike (which is what the leaguies are fond of).  Although he did suggest that if you wanted to train this system to perform better in states of fatigue, you would use active recovery between efforts in training BUT just make sure recovery is passive during competition.