Do you even need size or Strength?
Hopefully, this word “Periodization” doesn't scare you too much, but it is crucial to understand your long-term athlete development. With all these traits (strength, hypertrophy, and RFD), they need to be trained at the right times. With most athletes in the United States who are on a yearly plan, this is an organization of training to maximize physiological adaptations. The goal of training is to create adaptations to help elevate performance. A bro way of saying this is we are training to make gains and get better, year after year.
With that definition out of the way, this is one specific question most of you will have and one major problem. Most people will ask, why don't we just do everything at once? We train heavy, we train fast, and we train to get big.
When you first started lifting or taking training for your sport seriously, You got bigger, stronger, and got better at your sport all at the same time. This is because you were a novice/beginner and not well developed. This is a fun time of training, as you improve at everything at the same time. However, when you are a decade into your training, this will not be the case.
If you try to do this as a qualified athlete, you will not get better or marginally better if you're lucky at these qualities. This is because you are generating too much fatigue improving your fitness qualities and won’t be able to do enough challenging training or overload to improve these fitness qualities at the same time.
Each training phase within an annual plan needs to have enough training to improve the athletic quality/fitness trait you are trying to improve. For example, significant hypertrophy will not improve in a four-week plan. But string those four-week plans together into something like 12-16 weeks, Hypertrophy can occur. During this plan, however, you are not training for Strength/Power. You are training this Hypertrophy quality because your athlete needs this to improve the next year in their performance. Trying to improve on all these traits at the same time will result in very little progress and most likely known at all.
However, maintenance of training qualities is very minimal. Maintaining Muscle mass requires around 1/3rd the volume as it does to improve these qualities. What does this mean? It means you can do a strength cycle and not be worried that your muscle mass will be going anywhere. Or during a season, it requires very little work to maintain muscle mass/strength as your main goal is to perform in your events.
As we layer these different qualities, we can maintain some fitness qualities while doing enough volume and intensity and ultimately overload to improve the quality we care about at that time. While easily argue the other attributes that are important for sports performance. This is important because we can train the qualities we care about with the optimal volume/intensity and overload to see improvements.
First, let's start with an elite athlete periodization and then move to a young athlete development cycle. This will be highly theoretical, with a general basis of training, but individual differences need to be taken. For example, as an Athlete develops, usual differences can change dramatically as they have specific needs they need to improve.
An elite Athlete who has followed a full athletic development cycle might be 10-20 years into their training development. If they have emphasized liftin,g they most likely have hypertrophied to a certain degree and are also most likely strong. (will help answer the question of strong enough later in this article). This means they do not need to spend 16 weeks doing a Hypertrophy mesocycle then move into an eight-week strength cycle. This would most likely be a waste of their time. Instead, they might do an eight-week hypertrophy cycle to gain mass they might have lost during the season, and this could even be shorter. Then maybe a four-week strength cycle to get back to all-time strength/force levels. Then spend the most time working on higher velocity movements and, if it is the skilled sport, focusing a lot of their time on sporting practice. Such as Hitting your wedges, if this needs to be addressed after a needs analysis. Why does this matter?
Let's say we have a theoretical Elite golfer on the PGA Tour. He/she is number 2 on time in driving distance, 50th in accuracy and 100 in Wedge play accuracy. If he/she spends half the year improving force output and rate of force development and gains, let's say, 3 yards to their drive. They will have a minor improvement in strokes gained per round, which would most likely be insignificant. More importantly, this took time and training time to perform. You can’t train for 16 hours a day, mentally and physically. However, if they spent most of their training on wedge play, they might be able to move up to 75th or top 50 in wedge play. This would have a substantial difference in strokes gained per round.
Here is a real-world example to better understand the relationship of what to focus on. Here we have Bryson Dechambeau’s data from his 2021 season. OTT is how close you’re to the green after your tee shot on a par four or par 5; as you can see because of his distance/accuracy off the tee, he is leading the field in OTT. Here a couple of questions to ask before you decided what to focus your training on:
What are his biggest strengths? Off the tee, he is leading the field.
Is this something he needs to improve? Objectively, no, because he is leading the field.
Will this be a pronounced gain in performance? If he improved significantly, he could take even more strokes off his score.
Is that doable? Since he has one of the highest Club head speeds in the PGA tour, this would take heaven and earth to improve and would likely result in other metrics decreasing or not improving.
What are his weaknesses? App- Approach shots on Par 4’s and 5’s and ARG- shoots within 30 yards of the green. He isn't cracking the top 50.
Will this improve results? Yes, significantly after getting better at these shots.
Is this doable? Yes, since he isn't cracking the top 50, it will be theoretically much more comfortable to improve as he has a lot of room to get better.
As you can see, answering these basic questions gives you a better idea of where to put your efforts. Spending hours in the weight room and specific exercises to increase clubhead speed would take time, effort and be very hard to improve. It will also not raise his/her performance as much as getting better at metrics he struggles with. Don’t just try to get bigger, faster, and stronger forever, as improvements will not increase performance as you think they might.
For younger Athlete, they need to improve every aspect of their game to make the PGA tour. They are most likely small/weak compared to elite athletes resulting in a slow clubhead speed. Hypertrophy training, let’s say a 16-week block and then an eight-week strength block, and repeat this process. Each time they are adding mass and improving force out-put to see results in clubhead speed. This could last years and then transition into more RFD work.
What is significant about this is that strength/hypertrophy can take years to develop to an elite level for your specific sport. You will not add 200 pounds to your deadlift in 10 weeks or gain 30 pounds of lean body mass in a 12-week cycle. This means that if you're an elite athlete and see this as an issue, you must be careful in how you periodize your training. This will take years and need to stay on the professional level, and this training takes a lot of energy and time away from specific work. In the short term, this could have a detrimental outcome for your sports performance, and you might not have the resources to let that happen. Doing good strength/hypertrophy work early is imperative to your athletic journey.
When do you know that you are strong enough? While there is no exact way, here a few different ways to get that done.
The first is not very practical; as this data is hard to collect, we can use the ESD equation. ESD(%)=1009fMM-Fm)/Fmm. Fmm is0- the highest among the maximal forces obtained in the most beneficial condition and Fm is the maximal force reached in a given condition. However, as we remember that explosive movements’ speed is so quick, the maximal force will not be generated. So if you keep on increasing strength, you might not generate any more force on your sporting movements as there is not enough time. That's why we train at higher velocities to increase that %.
The simplest way is to track workouts in the weight room and the golf course/Let’s say you complete a 12-week hypertrophy program with an eight-week strength cycle. If you know your past lifting performances and strength data, you can define how much bodyweight you added (a surrogate for LBM gained); you also should know how much strength on certain lifts you gained. Hopefully, these all progressed. You can then, over a week, let's say, track all of your driving distances. If this number did not increase or had insignificant gains, it’s probably a good idea to re-evaluate your periodization. This system might lose some accuracy but is great for athletes on a budget that don’t have access to other equipment. I would also highly suggest not maxing in a lift as an athlete; instead, use your 4-6 RM. As we have already seen in Alex Ehlert Quantitative Analysis (1), there is a moderate correlation between Clubhead speed and squat strength, and upper body strength.
You can also do the same strength/hypertrophy assessment, but if you have access to a Rhapsodo, Trackman, or any other tracking device, you will be able to get your swing speed. This is great because you take the effect of other factors that contribute to tests that aren’t affected by strength. You will then be able to understand better if your strength gains contributed to a faster swing speed.
Another assessment is to use force plates; while these have a downside of being very expensive, they are very accurate in accessing lower body power. We know that lower body power/strength contributes to Clubhead speed (1). We can get many metrics with force plates, but the net force is what we are looking at while doing a Isometric Mid-Thigh Pull. In which Dr. Stone has correlated with force and athletes’ performance (5,6). By doing this, if our force has increased while our club head speed has not, it's time to switch to a velocity based program/more specific training.
We are not novice athletes anymore and need to have specific goals for each training phase to see yearly improvements. Else performance will not improve optimally.
Thanks for reading this, and hopefully, this next little bit will create a light bulb moment and tie this together. There are apparent sports-specific needs of an athlete, but that’s for another day.
The main point of this is that you might not need to continue to get bigger and stronger indefinitely as this will have a diminishing of returns, and you might want to focus on other aspects of your game.
Citations
1. Alex Ehlert (2020): The correlations between physical attributes and golf club head speed: a systematic review with quantitative analyses, European Journal of Sport Science, DOI: 10.1080/17461391.2020.1829081
2. Institute of Sport and Recreation Research New Zealand, School of Sport and Recreation, Auckland University of Technology, Auckland, New Zealand; and 2 Centre of Physical Education Across the Lifespan, School of Exercise Science, Australian Catholic University, Melbourne Campus, Fitzroy, Victoria, Australia
3. Lovera and Keogh. “The Anthropometric Profile of Powerlifters: Differences as a Function of Bodyweight Class and Competitive Success.” The Journal of Sports Medicine and Physical Fitness. (2015).
4. Brechue and Abe. “The Role of FFM Accumulation and Muscle Architecture in Powerlifting Performance.” European Journal of Applied Physiology. (2002).
5. Stone, Michael & O’Bryant, et al. “Using the Isometric Mid-thigh Pull in the Monitoring of Weightlifters: 25+ Years of Experience”
6. Stone, Michael & O’Bryant, et al. (2019). “Using the Isometric Mid-Thigh Pull in the Monitoring of Weightlifters: 25+ Years of Experience”. 19-26.
8. School of Health Sciences, Deakin University, Victoria, Australia. 2Department of Epidemiology and Preventive Medicine, Monash University, Victoria, Australia. 3NSW Injury Risk Manag
9. Hellström, J. (2008). The Relation between Physical Tests, Measures, and Clubhead Speed in Elite Golfers. International Journal of Sports Science & Coaching, 3(1_suppl), 85–92. doi:10.1260/174795408785024207
10. Elizabeth J. Bradshaw, Justin W.L. Keogh, Patria A. Hume, Peter S. Maulder, Jacques Nortje & Michel Marnewick (2009) The Effect of Biological Movement Variability on the Performance of the Golf Swing in High- and Low-Handicapped Players, Research Quarterly for Exercise and Sport, 80:2, 185-196, DOI: 10.1080/02701367.2009.10599552
11. Keogh, J. W., Marnewick, M. C., Maulder, P. S., Nortje, J. P., Hume, P. A., & Bradshaw, E. J. (2009). Are Anthropometric, Flexibility, Muscular Strength, and Endurance Variables Related To Clubhead Velocity in Low- And High-Handicap Golfers? Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, 23(6), 1841–1850. doi:10.1519/jsc.0b013e3181b73cb3
12. “Zatsiorsky, V.M. (1992). Intensity of strength training facts and theory: Russian and Eastern European approach. National Strength and Conditioning Association Journal, 14 (5). 46-57.” States that there are two mechanisms to becoming strong:
13. Oranchuk, D. J., Mannerberg, J. M., Robinson, T. L., & Nelson, M. C. (2018). Eight Weeks of Strength and Power Training Improves Club Head Speed in Collegiate Golfers. Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, 1. doi:10.1519/jsc.0000000000002505
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