Here’s a quick thought for you:
âIf youâre sailing across the ocean and your goal is to avoid weather and waves, then why are you sailing?… Thatâs the game youâve decided to be in. If your goal is to make it easier and simpler, then donât get in the boat.â – Andrew Stanton (from Creativity, Inc.)
Accomplishing greatness comes with a cost. There are risks and consequences to your choices and actions.
That often means youâre going to go through pain and suffering.
Itâs only up to you to decide if what’s on the other side is worth it.
If you think it is, then get in the boat.
âDoes this body fat make me look injured?â
Title: Preseason Body Composition Is Associated With In-season Player Availability in Elite Male Australian Footballers. Authors: McCaskie, Callum J.; Sim, Marc; Newton, Robert U; Heasman, Jarryd; Rogalski, Brent; Hart, Nicolas H
What is it?
An observational study looking at whether thereâs a relationship between body composition and game day availability in professional Australian football players (n= 60, all dudes between 18 and 34 years old).
Why does it matter?
âYour best ability is your availability.â
Injured athletes arenât very athletic. (Injured athletes usually arenât too happy either.)
Any logical hypothesis on how we can keep athletes healthy and on the field is a worthy endeavor.
What did they find?
Athletes with less than 12.1% body fat were available 9% more often.
Athletes with higher relative fat-mass were 333% more likely to miss at least one game to injury and 350% more likely to miss at least two games.
When height, age, and playing experience are accounted for, players with higher percentages of lean mass (>84.3%) were 68% less likely to miss two or more games to injury.
What was the process?
Body comp was measured via DXA scan at the end of the pre-season.
Player availability was determined by the sports medicine staff designating each player âavailableâ or âunavailableâ for injury or illness reasons. Simple enough.
They split the athletes into higher fat-mass and lower fat-mass groups based on the median (12.1% was the median-split, which means these dudes were yoked).
My thoughts.
Body composition is a Goldilocks game.
– Too much fat mass can result in more injuries.
– Too little fat mass can screw up your physiology and result in more injuries.
– Too little muscle mass can result in more injuries.
Additionally, Australian football is a mix between soccer and âmerican football. You need incredible endurance, but you also need to be able to handle intense collisions.
The unique qualities of the sport might make the âhigh muscle mass, low fat massâ demand more notable than other sports.
How can you use it?
1. Optimize body composition during the off-season. Gain muscle mass and drop fat mass (but donât go too lean, 2% body fat isnât healthy in the long run).
When VBT meets sled sprints.
Title: Effects of Moderate-to-Heavy Sled Training Using Different Magnitudes of Velocity Loss in Professional Soccer Players. Authors: Grazioli, Rafael; Loturco, Irineu; Lopez, Pedro; Setuain, Igor; Goulart, Jean; Veeck, Filipe; InĂĄcio, Martinho; Izquierdo, Mikel; Pinto, Ronei S; Cadore, Eduardo L.
What is it?
A quasi-experimental study comparing 11-week velocity-based heavy sled sprinting programs, where one group was stopped after their velocity dropped by 10% during a session (G10) and the other group was stopped after their velocity dropped by 20% (G20).
There were 17 male professional soccer players (age 25.8 ± 4.3 years).
The outcomes they looked at were: vertical jump, 10m sprint, 20m sprint, isometric and isokinetic hamstring/quad strength, and body composition.
Why does it matter?
Speed kills & we want to know everything and anything that can give us an edge in getting our athletes faster.
Resisted sprinting is dope (as Iâve talked about âhereâ).
But, the best ways to apply resisted sprinting are still up in the air.
Velocity-based training (VBT) has shown a lot of promise in the weight room, could some of those principles transfer over to sled sprints?
What did they find?
Both groups maybe, possibly, kinda, sorta had improvements in their 10 and 20 meter sprint times? With the G10 group being slightly better.
Vertical jump measurements decreased for both groups.
The G10 group performed 31% less sprint reps than the G20 group.
What was the process?
Pre & post testing:
– Measure body comp via DXA
– Jump test & sprint test.
– Squat jump and countermovement jump on JustJump Mat.
– 10m sprint and 20m tests measured via Speed-Test photocells. They started from a standing position, 1 meter behind the starting line/initial photocell.
– Strength testing
– Maximal isometric and isokinetic hamstring and quadriceps peak torque, as well as isometric rate of torque development were measured with an isokinetic dynamometer.
The training:
– 11 weeks of sled sprinting with 1 training session per week
– Itâs important to note that this was performed up to 7 weeks into the season.
– Initial sled load was 45% of body weight
– Each session, the load increased by 5% of body weight
– After the fifth week, loads of 65% body weight were reached and loads did not increase for the remainder of the study.
– After a warm-up, the athletes sled sprinted until their velocity (as measured via radar gun) dropped below 10% or 20% of the maximum velocity reached in the first 2 to 4 sprints of the day.
– Athletes were given 30 seconds rest between sprints.
My thoughts.
Iâm really not sure why any outcome measures besides sprint times were included in this study. How do squat jumps, countermovement jumps, body composition scans, and isokinetic tests even fit in here?
Also, the whole purpose of using a velocity-based approach is to preserve high quality, high-speed reps. That objective is almost completely upended by only allowing 30 seconds rest between sprints. Thatâs exhausting just thinking about it.
There was no control group, which you canât blame the researchers for. It sounds like they wanted to have one, but the soccer club didnât want to take a chance of withholding any potential benefits from their athletes.
While the athleteâs vertical jumps got worse throughout the training, the authors definitely didnât lose the ability to jump to conclusions with statements like: âit should be emphasized that these improvements are maximized when the resisted sprint training volume is adjusted based on the new-found velocity-based approach presented herein.â
I agree with the premise that minimizing velocity loss with repeated resisted sprints probably produces faster athletes, but this study doesnât really prove anything.
How can you use it?
1. Prioritize high quality sprint reps. When things start to look like crap, cut it.
That’s all for this issue.
Best,
Zach
Dr. Zach Guiser, PT, DPT, CSCS