Transfer of Training Part 1 - Muscle Contractions

The point of training ion the gym is to prepare our bodies for the rigors of training and playing.

Strength training is vital for Aussie Rules but still  it's a distant 3rd in your priority of training behind training and actual playing.

So if depending on your time constraints, here's your football activity pyramid for a lack of better term:

Priority 1 - Playing

Priority 2 - Football Training

Priority 3 - Outside fitness.strength training

Of course being able to do all 3 of these will give you the greatest chance of success, 2 of these options is solid but not a deal breaker and just playing without any other prep type work during the week is a recipe for disaster if you want to stay injury free!

Anyway I want to talk about strength training and how we can best use it to actually prepare us for the types of contractions used during high velocity activity thus hopefully actually transferring over to our performance on the ground.

In this installment we'll simply list the different contraction types / rep varieties you can use in the gym starting with the big 3:

Eccentric - generally the lowering portion of the exercise where the muscle lengthens (arms straight to bar on the chest during bench presses, standing to bottom squat position etc)

Isometric - the portion of the lift between the lowering and lifting phases where the muscle is help a certain length. Regardless of if you purposefully hold a certain range of motion or not, there is always an isometric portion, it's just a matter of how long it lasts (bar on the chest during bench presses, very bottom portion of a squat etc)

Concentric - generally the lifting portion of the exercise where the muscle shortens (arms push up from chest to straight in a bench press, you push up from the bottom position to a standing position during a squat etc)

These are the 3 contractions you use pretty much 100% of the time which is what happens when you run and sprint, but you need to find a way to use a rep speed similar to running and sprinting to actually provide football specific benefits.

The usual 2 - 3secs down and push straight back up is fine for working the muscles but it's not anywhere near training or game specific speed.

I've posted about the force / velocity curve before and this is where this can handy for choosing your exercises:

With locomotion (running action) being the dominant movement on footy, let's look at how it fits into the force / velocity curve (FVC).

Maximal Strength - as you can see it entails high amounts of force but little velocity. This essential in initial acceleration such as starting a sprint from a standing start as you need great force to overcome inertia (your own bodyweight) to get moving in a certain direction as fast as possible. Without maximal strength you'd look like you are stuck in the mud. Contact time is relatively long which means you have more time to generate forward momentum and muscle tension is at it's highest, which is like a strength exercise in the gym (think heavy squat).

Power - as you can see it lies in the middle of the FVC and it requires close to a half dosage of maximal strength and speed. This is essential in the transitional stage from initial acceleration to max velocity so we're talking say 5m to 20m in the lead from a standing start from above. Contact time has decreased so you now have less time to generate forward momentum but you begin to use elastic properties such as tendons to gather top end speed.

Speed - top speed requires great velocity but not as much as force as now contact time is so fast that there is no time to generate strength and now all your speed is generated by your tendons and the relaxation rate of your muscles. The ability to contract your muscles with great force in hundreds of a second upon ground contract followed by the ability to fully relax those muscles upon the swing phase of sprinting is what sets elite sprinters apart from the rest us (among other things).

The best way to get better at sprinting is to sprint, make no mistake about that, but sprinting is also the activity that fatigues the nervous system the most and thus needs the greatest recovery time.

To be able to train the element of speed more frequently, using alternative rep tempo and rep types can allow you to train speed without sprinting.