Currently Lena competing in both olympic weightlifting and sprinting is getting a lot of attention in the boards and I wish to make a couple of points. I first met Lena Berntsson last summer at the Sundsvall (Sweden) and she is obviously a quality short sprinter. Is there a relationship? Yes. Is it a relationship with everyone? No. Remember that some random women doing yoga in a New York studio has the same or better static flexibility as Usain Bolt and hundreds of college football players have better squats but who is faster? Speed is the rarest of all qualities because maximum performances are the rarest biomotor performances with only .001% being world class. Ray Stewart has one of the fastest 10m and we all know he wasn’t cleaning 1.5 times his bodyweight.
Generally speaking the more talented the athlete the less specific one needs to be and that’s why Charlie advocates his philosophy. Unfortunately most of us are not getting super talents that respond to anything and that’s why I am posting. You or your athletes are not that talented. Those wishing for the secrets are those needing secrets! What I do know is that the whole olympic weightlifters outperforming most sprinters in testing may be true in regards to the vertical jump but the 30m dash is technique and elasticity. Still, if I was a betting man the olympic weightlifter will more likely to transfer better to sprinting then a powerlifter and far more than a bodybuilder that uses isolation approaches.
What bothers many coaches is that people share stories of stupid training done by world class athletes and how they perform regardless of what they are doing. So what. They can be better and that is our job to get people better, even if it’s just by a little. Athletes that eat crap, train lazy and like morons are all over the place and do nothing in sport unless they have huge talent.
Then we have KISS….keep it simple stupid.
Stupid quote as groups of stupid people don’t build amazing skyscrapers or cure cancer. It requires thinking and hard work with a lot of time. Stupid people don’t do much but ruin things for the rest of us. If it was simple why isn’t everyone doing it right? Dwain Chambers is doing something right but we must look at what he has done over a career to see why he is running fast. If he is clean now great but he has benefited from career development. What about the previous ten years of training? Frosting on the cake at the end requires eggs and flour first.
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