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SubscribeContextualized Training
Fri, 11/19/2010 - 12:09pm by Scot Willingham
Twitter version:
Put reality back into training. Contextualize or situate training. Find a group ride.
Who’s it for?:
Anyone and everyone.
What it is:
“Skills and drills” training doesn’t reproduce all the demands of racing. By adding group rides during training, a more positive transfer of physiological improvements happens using a real world situation in response to imposed demands.
How it works:
A group ride presents the participant with almost all the elements of a race. This allows explicit work on elements in your training program (conscious, attended elements) to be implicitly incorporated while other demands impose on your attention. This implicit use of physiological techniques cannot be duplicated in a skills and drills type of exercise. Since consciously attending to technique doesn’t occur in racing, techniques must become automated. That requires practice that overloads attention.
For example, when doing a “skills and drills” sprint, the capacity to attend to how an athlete sprints is available. Typically, the athlete chooses a safe, distraction-less location allowing attention to details in what and how they perform. In a race, multiple variables create an overload of attentional demands, no attention remains for technique. Furthermore, smooth, expert performance degrades when consciously attended. So, what is sought is automatic and smooth responses without consciously attending.
All the boring explanation
In training, do you employ a contextual representative design similar to racing? Representative design? Context, say what? Enough of the academic-speak....
Compare a sprint training session with a race. This is the chosen example. This can also be applied to almost any element and training session.
Sprint Training
• Done alone or in a small cooperative group
• Typically scheduled after a rest day.
• The goal - to maximize power/effort or reduce the time of the sprint.
• Warm up takes 10 minutes
• One “opener” (a 5-7 min. effort slightly below the aerobic/anaerobic breakpoint)
• Some high cadence light pedaling for 5 min.
• 5 to 10 sprint repeats.
• The repeats with 3 minutes of recovery in between last approximately 30- 40 minutes.
• Smooth, undisturbed acceleration up to sprinting speed
• Complete focus and concentrating on body mechanics and power output
• No distractions as the location chosen is empty.
• In a group, everyone respects the line of other participants.
• The cool-down takes 5 minutes.
• A 65 minute training session.
• Most of the session occurs using a low effort level.
Race with a field sprint
• Includes over-stimulated and aggressively competitive participants.
• Typically, done the day after another race.
• The goal – to win.
• woke late and almost missed registration, rushed.
• Any “opener” occurs in the first lap as the field accelerates.
• No time to attend to any warmup or high spin to shake out the legs
• Fatigue becomes an issue with all the attacks and bike handling.
• 5 miles from the finish, positioning and holding position become important. More fatigue.
• In positioning, braking and re-accelerating occur. More fatigue
• Focus isn’t on your body mechanics.
• Finally, after all the elbowing and pushing, you get boxed in
• Miss the final sprint
• 60 minutes of hell
• Most of the effort above tempo level and many maximal efforts (“matches”)
Sprint training is the “skills and drills” way of working on fitness. Eliminate as many of the distracting contextual performance elements allowing focused, explicit, conscious work on skills or physiological issues. Yet, according to new research, all of that occurs in an unauthentic way. While allowing for quantification and attention to the elements of the skill....….the contextual demands of racing is not represented in this training session.
The above comparison highlights the differences between sprint training with a race field sprint.
So, what can be done?
Put the context, and it’s resultant demands back into training.
How? Situated learning.
Group rides: A group ride, especially a competitive ride, duplicates the context and demands of racing. While differences exist, such as fully duplicating arousal and anxiety levels for an actual race, the pace, the demands of group riding, cornering, tactics, eating and drinking, pack riding stress and weather conditions are present. If using one as a sprint workout, it duplicates more elements of a race prior to that maximum effort or sprint.
But, ...and there is always a but ... if your physiology (endurance or maximal effort) needs work, then use a focused training session. As Johnson & French say, “one’s ability to execute skills constrains decision making.” Meaning that if a ride would challenge you endurance-wise or your top end isn’t up to the local competition, you would not choose or be able to engage in the final sprint. If physiologically fit for those demands, then that tactic would be a part of your repertoire and choices.
So, the athlete may require a physiologically focused session. Yet, even in a focused session, duplicating the energy use required prior to sprinting could be designed and included. Instead of simply working on power/effort with adequate recovery:
• add race-typical efforts for 20 minutes, creating fatigue and then, sprint.
• Recover and repeat twice.
• Typically, the 3rd rep will be the beginning of the end in maximal efforts.
• If you can do more and hit the same numbers, you may want to re-visit the sound bite:
“Most people don’t go hard enough when they go hard and don’t go easy enough when they go easy.” (unknown).
If pressed for time, reduce the 20 minute phase and recovery time.
Training decisions involve considering ALL of the task demands in relationship to your capabilities and what needs addressing. By using only skills and drills in isolation, one ignores and doesn’t train specifically for the demands of your sport.
Consider adding context into training. Many implicitly learned elements are acquired in contextualized training without one’s attention. Training in context places automatic and unconscious perceptual and motor demands below threshold. But, they are then learned and applied unconsciously. Which is the ultimate element of expert performances. Practice within the performance environment allows for these implicit, but essential processes to entrain.
And, in the final mix, that may be what is missing from your training program.
Scot Willingham, MA, ACSM, CSCS, USAC is a neuromuscular re-educator that coaches cyclists and other endurance athletes while working as a strength and conditioning rehabilitation expert in NYC. His degree is from Teachers College, Columbia University's Motor Learning department. Motor Learning is researches human motor control and applies these principles as the foundation for pedagogical decisions in physical education, sports coaching, movement teaching and rehabilitation.
Gentile, A. M. (1998). Implicit and explicit processes during acquisition of functional skills. Scandinavian Journal of Occupational Therapy, 5, 7-16.
Lave, J. & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated Learning. Legitimate peripheral participation. Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press.
Siedentop, D., Hastie, P. A., & van der Mars, H. (2005). Sport Education. Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics.
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Comments
Add a commentare you for real?
CCNS helped me reach a whole new level of riding and racing with the coaching
Will Gimbels and Rocket Ride be the new weekly world championships, now that riding & racing in NYC has gone the way of strip joints in Times Square?
No, not "ride with people." The article describes two 'ride with people' sessions. The first a sprint training ride, the second a race. The training ride is not like races.
I would argue the 20 minutes race-speed before the sprint. 10 at most. But those 10 have to be max effort. We all know some who will hold back just a little to do well on a training ride.
I'm sorry is this whole article just a verbose way of saying "ride with people"??
A friend of mine heard that sound bite from stephen roche during a training camp one year
oh, so now gimbel's is good training?
Is it new year's ride time already???
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