Takano Athletics

Training Week 2, Training Day 2

Back Squat: 77 lbs./35 kg/3 reps, 99:45/3, 121:55/3, 146:66.3/3, 156:70.8/3, 166:75.4/3, (157:70.8/3, 176:80/1)2 sets*

Snatch: 77:35/12, 77:35/3, 87:39.5/21, 87:39.5/21, 87:39.5/21, 87/3*

Clean & jerk: 99:45/4+1, (104:47.2/4+1)4*

Behind the neck Power Jerk: 99:45/3, (104:47.2/3)3*

* = personal record.  Some gains are being made.

Protoplasmic engineering

A few blogs back I wrote about a Pasquale character who wanted to become a weightlifting coach, and I gave some very general suggestions about how to get started.  A coach in Oregon named Nick Horton took up where I left off and provided some more concrete suggestions on how to embark on an educational course toward becoming a weightlifting coach.  One of the points that Nick stressed was to become more sophisticated in the math and science fields because these two disciplines develop the thought processes involved in coaching.  Thanks, Nick.  I couldn’t agree more.

I’d like to move ahead a little more in this realm and talk about a term I’ve used to describe myself and that is protoplasmic engineer. I coined the term back in the early 1990’s in a column in the old International Olympic Lifter magazine.  I was trying to describe what I was doing in the training of athletes at a sub-organismic level.

Protoplasm is a term given to living matter or living “stuff”.  The cells are the units of protoplasm and cells are composed of a variety of subcellular structures called organelles.  Each kind of organelle has specific and often unique functions within the cell  By applying appropriate stresses in appropriate amounts to the protoplasm, the cells will respond by changing the numerical proportions and the functional capabilities of the organelles.  In short the protoplasm is engineered to more effectively perform certain functions.

By applying the appropriate stressors (training stimuli such as reps per set or weight) in the appropriate doses (sets, number of training days, etc.), the tissue becomes capable of generating more force, contracting more rapidly, responding more efficiently to the body’s own hormones or any of a number of other functions that are beneficial in the performance of a sport activity.

Weightlifting coaches and strength and conditioning coaches and some sport coaches perform these transformations regularly up to a certain level.  Many do it without any great knowledge of how these changes in protoplasmic structure are effected.

Those that have had the appropriate physiological education can more accurately determine when the current training protocol is no longer effective and for what reason.  Furthermore they can determine how to modify the training stressors so that progress can continue to be made.  They can continue to engineer the protoplasm!

Those who are seriously interested in becoming a much better weightlifting coach (You need to be seriously interested because it is not going to happen accidentally) need to be knowledgeable and conversant in sports physiology.  Much of what you might learn in a good sports physiology course may seem too esoteric, or too theoretical, or too irrelevant to your coaching, but if you understand the methodologies by which the research is being conducted you will have a hint of how to begin perceiving the conditional changes in your athletes without doing a lot of actual testing.

When you are a coach you are conducting physiological research without much in the way of appropriate technology and if you are to develop the appropriate instincts you shouldn’t have to rely too much on technology because it will not be available to you in a split second when you are making decisions on the field of play.  If you trained an athlete in a certain manner to improve a certain factor in competition, you cannot accurately evaluate the effectiveness of the training until you are in a competitive environment at which point you will not have the luxury of using technology to make that assessment.

My recommendation is to get as much good education as you can in sports physiology.  Then spend two or three training cycles with a knowledgeable coach with a strong background in the sciences and see if his or her evaluations corroborate with your own observations.  This is a process that will take some repetition in order for it to become effective, but there is simply no way to shorten or abbreviate the process.

Enjoy the holidays!