LSD Kills

It's Sunday afternoon, and I'm taking a break from working on a big project for a high school PE curriculum to write this post.

The project I am working on is a year-long training program for an Advanced PE class. Needless to say, it can turn into a rather daunting task.

Given the goals of the class, along with the limited time and days available there are many questions that need to be answered.

What type of periodization scheme is best?
Which exercises should I include to maximize performance and injury prevention benefits, while still hitting all major movement patterns?

What do I do for multi-sport athletes who are inseason almost all year-round?

Are all students participating going to be experienced lifters?

These are just a few of the considerations I have to take into account, and none of those questions are easily answered or addressed.

As I am working I have the Yankee game on in the background and I overheard Al Leiter discussing training modalities for in-between starts. I heard him say how obvious the benefits are for running 30-45 minutes at a steady state to "flush the system" and get a "great workout for the legs."

This brings up the only question easily answered: How do I include "cardiovascular" conditioning into the program? Now, I use cardiovascular in quotation marks because I know most people reading this will immediately think of going out and pounding the pavement (or treadmill-yikes). My answer to this question was easy, simply because I will not be including any type of Long, Slow, distance training into this training program (or any other for that matter).

I don't consider myself anti-running as much as I am Pro-research. And the research is very one-sided. Any benefits you can gain from distance running can be accomplished with high-intensity interval type training. It sacrifices lean muscle-mass and therefore strength. Throw in the overuse injuries that invariably happen with distance running, and the subsequent time off from training (I love Mike Boyle's "distance runner conversation": Runner 1: Are you injured or training? Runner 2: I just got over _____itis and have started training again), and what argument is there left? I'd love to hear the other side of the argument, but the only defense seems to be, "it's what was always done," or "how bad can it really be?" If that's the best you can do when either designing a training program, or training yourself, do you think it's really worth the time?

The funny thing is, among trainers the argument is considered over. Yet throughout high school, college, and professional athletics (not to mention weekend warriors) running is still the status quo. Hopefully before you make your argument, whichever side you are on, you at least do your research first!

Who would you rather your athletes resemble?

Left Pic: Marathoner

Right Pic: Sprinter

I'm not sure what this picture has to do with this post, but when I typed in "Sprinter" into Google Images, it came up. So why not?

To sum up, sprint more, run less, and find a good strength training program and you're on the right track.

Love to hear your thoughts,
Jon