Training Talk With Vern Gambetta (Part 1) ? G. Martin Bingisser

Training expert Vern Gambetta

Several months ago I came across an audio interview with coach Vern Gambetta. Vern is not a throwing coach; instead is a training expert that has been called a jack of all trades. He started as a decathlete and multi-event coach, but has since coached athletes in every event group. He was a cofounder of the USATF coaching education program, has written several books, and serves on the editorial board for the IAAF technical journal. But a large chunk of his career was spent outside of track and field as a pioneer in the field of strength and conditioning with several professional teams in baseball, basketball, and other sports.

When I heard Vern talk, nearly everything he was saying rung true to what I have learned from Bondarchuk and others. But, as always, I had some additional questions and finally had the time to speak to him about training last weekend. Part one below discusses where throwers tend to be ahead of or behind other sports in terms of training. Part two will discuss the timely topic of off-season training and what scientific advances he sees on the horizon.

If you are interested in learning more about Vern?s ideas, pick up one of his books, read his blog, or follow him on Twitter.

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How do throwers stack up in the training department

Martin: Throughout your career you?ve worked with essentially every major sport and every track and field event. When you look at throwers as a whole, what things do you see that we do well? Where is our training lag behind others?

Vern: The way to get maximal power in training is to release the implement and throwers do well is incorporating releases of various forms into training. Some people have taken to calling this the multi-throw, but it is just ballistic training. If you take a heavy implement like the bench press, you are only accelerating that weight for a short period of time and then you have to decelerate it to stop it even if you are moving it fast. If you don?t release the implement, you won?t achieve maximum power production.

What I saw when I was training for decathlon in Santa Barbara and a lot of the Europeans would come over to train, they didn?t spend anywhere near the time we spent in the weight room. Now these were decathletes, but they could throw because they had the ballistic ability to really accelerate the implement. They would throw heavy implements like 20kg weight plates. That is one the things that, particularly European throwers, do very well going back several decades. And the hammer throwers showed us the way on that more than anyone else.

Throwers have a history of pioneering strength and weight training. If you look back at the 1950s and 1960s with Perry O?Brien and Otis Chandler, the records began to jump when they changed the technique and strength training. But as with anything, you can go too far down a path once you?ve started in one direction. Now, especially American throwers, get too focused on chasing numbers in the weight room. I remember George Woods talking at a clinic one time and he said every 20 or 25 pounds his bench press goes up, he could count on a certain number of extra inches or feet in his throw.

Regardless of the sport, you have to come back to the demands of the event. The unifying element of each of the throws is that you are trying to find optimum release velocity. When you look at a spectrum of strength and power training, you will emphasize different elements at different times, but it will always come back to speed. A mistake we make with young throwers is to add strength first. Let?s get really good coordination and refine their model by developing their strength and technique in parallel. For me, working on coordinative capacities is what the key is and there are a lot of throwers in the world who have done this: Andreas Thorkildsen, Jan Zelezny, Werner G?nth?r.

The role of drills

Martin: That relates to one of my other questions. On your blog you don?t recommend training for technique or strength; you focus on them both in parallel.? I agree and I see this separation not just in training, but also in drills where people will break the throw into parts. The hammer is about rhythm and connecting the turns together. If you just do the first turn, it means nothing with out the second turn, and that means nothing without the third, and so on. Bondarchuk has us do multi-throws, but when we pick up the hammer we throw. Are drills as prevalent in other events?

Vern: I see this with each event right now. I think it has to do something with what I call ?Internet training porn.? People can put up all these wacko drills on YouTube and try to impress each other. I am working on a presentation now and I?ve been putting together five of the dumbest drills I?ve seen like throwing the shot from your knees. Why? It makes no sense. Throw the shot. Throw a lighter shot. Throw a heavier shot. What are you working on? I just spent some time with Jerry Clayton, the throws coach at Auburn, after he came back from the World Championships. He said the only people you saw doing drills there were the American throwers. The drills break things into too many parts. Here again Bondarchuk opened my eyes.

A few years ago I was working with a post-collegiate elite heptathlete after her coach recommended she visit me for some training. The first day we are out with the shot put I just watched as she spent 15 minutes doing drills. I stopped her, gave her the shot, and told her to just throw the shot so that I could see what she could do. She had a drill for her wrist, a drill for everything and that?s the way her throw ended up looking. After that, we just worked on full throws to put it together.

That right now is killing us. It?s killing us in the sprints, the jumps, every event. Similar is not the same, that?s what we have to remember. Just because it looks like the event, the dynamics are different and we have to be acutely aware of that. As you can tell, I get pretty fired up about this because I?ve made those mistakes. It?s one of the lessons I learned when Tom Tellez invited me to come down and spend three days with him during my last year at Cal Berkeley. I watched Carl Lewis train and didn?t see three drills in three days. And then you cross reference to Bondarchuk and others. And if the drills are done for a specific purpose and they are not form drills, but rather special strength drills, then it is another story. It is not that you don?t do drills, but your range is very narrow and you have to make sure it doesn?t cause neural interference with your event.

Focus on movements, not muscles

Martin: One the principles you list as a Systemic Sport Development Principle is to train movements, not muscles. Is this related?

Vern: Sure. That point was first meant in terms of strength training. If you go back and look at the early strength training methodology used in track and field, there was a big bodybuilding influence. The brain doesn?t recognize individual muscles; it doesn?t break things into parts. It looks for muscle synergies, flow, rhythm, and tempo. If you look at all the throws, not just the hammer throw, there is a certain rhythm and tempo governed by the weight of the implement, size of the athlete, size of the circle, etc. You cannot have an undo focus just on parts.

Martin: When you were getting into working with baseball and basketball and other sports, you were one of the first people to take that type of position and got to develop a lot from scratch. Did you find it easier to implement the ?movements not muscles? mentality since they didn?t have methods that grew out of bodybuilding?

Vern: To a certain extent, but when you look at baseball, they tend to look at just the arm and shoulder. Luckily, parallel to the time I started to get involved, the biomechanist Dr. Chuck Dillman started doing biomechanical analysis of pitchers and explained the concept of the kinetic change to our coaches. They bought in. But that was just within our organization with the White Sox and the rest of baseball didn?t necessarily buy in.

When you are sailing uncharted waters people sometimes look at you like you have two heads, but when you start to have success they notice. The first thing we noticed is that the injuries just stopped and I?ve seen the same with applying this to swimming. Look at the kinetic change and see how effectively you are connecting the links. Then ask if you need to strengthen, lengthen, or make other changes to make the body more connected.

Martin: What are the elements of training this aspect? Is it just exercises and multi-throws in the case of a hammer thrower?

Vern: It?s the things I?ve read on your blog. It?s what Bondarchuk and Klaus Bartonietz talks about. I think it?s also throwing left handed, as you saw some of in the famous Werner G?nth?r training video.? That is something we even did with our pitchers the day after they threw for the cross-education effect.

I think there is still a lot of room in all of the throws for exploring general coordination. Tumbling, trampoline, and other types of general gymnastics moves can be used to improve body awareness and relationships. I do think the multi-throws, throwing various weighted implements, right and left handed throws, etc. help enhance connection. The current thinking about skill acquisition and motor learning would say that you shouldn?t do that. But my experience tells me that the more pathways I can open, the more connections I can make. Then when I get to my specific activity the better I will be at it. That?s how I would approach it.

Check back in a few days for Part Two, where we will discuss discuss the timely topic of off-season training and what scientific advances he sees on the horizon.

Source: http://www.mbingisser.com/2011/09/training-talk-with-vern-gambetta-part-1/

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