Wednesday, January 1, 2014
Happy 2014!
We at Beyond Athletic Life Lessons wish you and your family a happy and healthy 2014. Have a BALL!
Thursday, November 21, 2013
Thanksgiving 2013
As we get closer to Thanksgiving, we tend to get more reflective. On behalf of BALL, I would like to would like to take this opportunity to thank all of the volunteers and supporters of BALL. We're looking forward to doing great things in 2014!
Wednesday, September 25, 2013
Stretching is BAD for you?!?
More fallacies debunked (click here)...
Did you know that static stretching can actually injure your youth athlete?
Saturday, September 14, 2013
Debunking Myths…Lactic Acid
Wooden said that to be successful, you must master 3 components: physical, mental, and emotional. Therefore, BALL has lessons dealing with each. The following is an example of the physical component...
For years, coaches have
been telling their players that lactic acid causes muscle soreness. Conventional coaching wisdom said that, to
get rid of such lactic acid, athletes need to run longer distances in an effort
to “flush” the lactic acid from the player’s sore area. We’ve even heard of some
trainers force-feeding unfortunate athletes with various bad-tasting concoctions
made up of stuff like baking soda to magically “flush” the system of the acid
more quickly.
Conventional wisdom is
wrong…and has been doing athletes a disservice since the late 1970’s.
This is particularly disconcerting
for athletes who need explosive quickness but not necessarily extended
endurance. In a nutshell, unless an
athlete needs to sustain a competitive pace for a long time, extended aerobic
exercise can do more harm than good.
Examples of these athletes are baseball pitchers, football position
players, wrestlers, etc.. While there is always a place in athletic
development for aerobic conditioning, running long distances actually decrease
a player’s ability to explode by suppressing the central nervous system’s
ability to fire fast twitch muscles. In
other words, it can retard athletic development. Want anecdotal proof? Look at the physical difference between an
Olympic sprinter versus a distance runner.
Way back in 2006, the
following article about the mythology of lactic acid generated heated
discussions in several coaching circles…yet for some reason, many coaches missed
it. This highlights the need for coaches
to be current in their education and not simply rely on training techniques
simply because “that’s the way it’s always been done”.
Lactic Acid
Is Not Muscles' Foe…It's Fuel
By
GINA KOLATA
Everyone who has even thought
about exercising has heard the warnings about lactic acid. It builds up in your
muscles. It is what makes your muscles burn. Its buildup is what makes your
muscles tire and give out.
Coaches and personal trainers
tell athletes and exercisers that they have to learn to work out at just below
their "lactic threshold," that point of diminishing returns when
lactic acid starts to accumulate. Some athletes even have blood tests to find
their personal lactic thresholds.
But that, it turns out, is all wrong. Lactic acid is actually a
fuel, not a caustic waste product. Muscles make it deliberately, producing it
from glucose, and they burn it to obtain energy. The reason trained athletes
can perform so hard and so long is because their intense training causes their
muscles to adapt so they more readily and efficiently absorb lactic acid.
The notion that lactic acid
was bad took hold more than a century ago, said George A. Brooks, a professor
in the department of integrative biology at the University of California,
Berkeley. It stuck because it seemed to make so much sense.
"It's one of the classic
mistakes in the history of science," Dr. Brooks said.
Its origins lie in a study by
a Nobel laureate, Otto Meyerhof, who in the early years of the 20th century cut
a frog in half and put its bottom half in a jar. The frog's muscles had no
circulation — no source of oxygen or energy.
Dr. Myerhoff gave the frog's
leg electric shocks to make the muscles contract, but after a few twitches, the
muscles stopped moving. Then, when Dr. Myerhoff examined the muscles, he
discovered that they were bathed in lactic acid.
A theory was born. Lack of
oxygen to muscles leads to lactic acid, leads to fatigue.
Athletes were told that they
should spend most of their effort exercising aerobically, using glucose as a
fuel. If they tried to spend too much time exercising harder, in the anaerobic
zone, they were told, they would pay a price, that lactic acid would accumulate
in the muscles, forcing them to stop.
Few scientists questioned
this view, Dr. Brooks said. But, he said, he became interested in it in the
1960's, when he was running track at Queens College and his coach told him that
his performance was limited by a buildup of lactic acid. When he graduated and began working on a
Ph.D. in exercise physiology, he decided to study the lactic acid hypothesis
for his dissertation.
"I gave rats radioactive
lactic acid, and I found that they burned it faster than anything else I could
give them," Dr. Brooks said.
It looked as if lactic acid
was there for a reason. It was a source of energy.
Dr. Brooks said he published
the finding in the late 70's. Other researchers challenged him at meetings and
in print.
"I had huge fights, I
had terrible trouble getting my grants funded, I had my papers rejected,"
Dr. Brooks recalled. But he soldiered on, conducting more elaborate studies
with rats and, years later, moving on to humans. Every time, with every study,
his results were consistent with his radical idea.
Eventually, other researchers
confirmed the work. And gradually, the thinking among exercise physiologists
began to change. "The evidence has continued to mount," said L. Bruce
Gladden, a professor of health and human performance at Auburn University.
"It became clear that it is not so simple as to say, Lactic acid is a bad
thing and it causes fatigue."
As for the idea that lactic
acid causes muscle soreness, Dr. Gladden said, that never made sense.
"Lactic acid will be
gone from your muscles within an hour of exercise," he said. "You get
sore one to three days later. The time frame is not consistent, and the
mechanisms have not been found."
The understanding now is that
muscle cells convert glucose or glycogen to lactic acid. The lactic acid is
taken up and used as a fuel by mitochondria, the energy factories in muscle
cells.
Mitochondria even have a
special transporter protein to move the substance into them, Dr. Brooks found.
Intense training makes a difference, he said, because it can make double the
mitochondrial mass.
It is clear that the old
lactic acid theory cannot explain what is happening to muscles, Dr. Brooks and
others said.
Yet, Dr. Brooks said, even
though coaches often believed in the myth of the lactic acid threshold, often they
ended up training athletes in the best way possible to increase their
mitochondria. "Some coaches have understood things the scientists
didn't," he said.
Through trial and error,
coaches learned that, in endurance-based team ports such as football,
basketball, and soccer, athletic performance improved when athletes worked on
endurance - running longer and longer distances, for example. That, it turns
out, increased the mass of their muscle mitochondria, letting them burn more
lactic acid and allowing the muscles to work harder and longer.
But when a sport calls almost
exclusively for explosiveness, this is simply not the case. Modern coaches in these sports often tell
athletes to train very hard in brief spurts.
That extra stress increases the mitochondria mass even more, Dr. Brooks
said, and is the key reason for improved performance.
And the scientists?
They took much longer to
figure it out.
"They said, 'You're
anaerobic, you need more oxygen,' " Dr. Brooks said. "The scientists
were stuck in 1920."
Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
Saturday, June 29, 2013
In defense of high schools with "bad" high school coaches
As a college coach who recruits high school and JuCo athletes, I have a pretty broad net cast in search of those special players that could possibly play for my university. That also gives me a unique view from the "other side" of recruiting kids that I can share with parents.
VUSC is a NAIA DI school - equivalent to mid/high-level NCAA DII. The NAIA allows a maximum of 10 1/2 possible full ride scholarships for a baseball team. Most universities, however, don't allocate every one of those 10 1/2 scholarships. In fact, one school I know allocates only two. The point is this: Athletic scholarships don't grow on trees, and many schools have less than you think.
So with this in mind, one of the east coast parents I correspond with wanted to know about any non-high school baseball travel program to have his kid.
For the Fall? Summer?...
"Nope. The Spring, as a replacement for our local school's team", he responded. "The coach is an abusive clown who can't judge talent correctly."
Yikes...I see this more and more. Apparently, high school athletic directors are now going out of their way to hire bafoon, abusive clowns as high school baseball coaches.
Now, I have no problem with parents wanting to make sure their athlete gets proper training and the right "experience" in order to get to that "next level". But obviously, many are being conditioned to think that the local high school coach is an idiot. And, anecdotally, I've noticed that much of it seems comes from fall and summer travel ball or private coaches who parents pay to coach a travel team.
While it's true that some high schools have less experienced coaches, it is the exception, not the rule. And blatantly abusive coaches might fool people during the job interview, but they typically get weeded out over the long haul.
Which brings me to the painfully tedious point of this post. While a bit wordy, this is is about how I, as a coach scouting your kid, look at kids who choose not to play for their high school team, then expect to be recruited by guys like me at showcases or travel team events.
I use showcase events/travel teams to *validate* a high school player's career, not replace it. Note: while this is baseball-specific, it also applies to softball and football. I can't speak for the recruiting process for other major sports like basketball, soccer, etc.
If we go to a showcase game or a travel game, usually it's to see a player that we are already interested in. And it's usually a pitcher or catcher, because that's where he will be getting meaningful reps outside of high school games. A position player getting a few at-bats is tougher to judge because of the randomness of the game.
This is an important consideration. I can't afford to go to see the same team more than once or twice because there are so many prospects. We only need three or four freshman per year. Almost NONE of them get a scholarship because only front line difference makers (i.e., top 5-6 pitchers, starting catcher, and top 3 or 4 starting position players) get them. And most of them are already on the team.
The *new* kids that get scholarships are usually JuCo transfers (see this article to see why coaches think like this). This holds true even if the freshman kids are solid players, and even if they could be starters the next season.
That last point is HUGE.
We rarely pursue a high school kid unless he is a huge scholarship prospect. And those guys are usually pitchers and beast catchers. The rest contact us and a jillion other colleges, fishing for a spot.
So as for the rest of the players who get attention, it all comes down to "screens".
We, as coaches, have to filter the several hundreds of high school players that contact us each year and weed it down to maybe 25-30 kids that we'll track in their senior year of high school. And, as stated earlier, we pursue immediate difference makers more zealously that future difference makers. On a team of 25, there's very little room for non-contributing freshman players. And there are always a few kids that magically show up during the summer/fall after another college reduced a scholarship offer (or for a zillion other reasons).
So, in this context, as sad as this sounds, not playing for your high school team definitely raises a red flag with guys like me simply because we don't have time to investigate whether a high school coach is a clown or the parents are simply overzealous.
Guess which way we typically lean?
So follow this scenario: If the high school coach really IS is a clown, and the kid shines anyway, suppose I have a choice to make between him and a travel ball-only kid who didn't play for his high school for the same reason. He thinks the coach is a clown.
So I'm left with two kids:
Not being able to play for a coach for whatever reason in high school immediately raises eyebrows as to the motivations of the *parent*. By osmosis, we have to assume that it trickles down to the kid. There are simply too many me-first players out there with the same story.
So, all things being equal, we track the player who plays for the clown coach, then plays travel during the summer or fall. I know it's not fair, and it might not be accurate...but it is what it is. Incidentally, that's another reason why I also rank two sport athletes higher than single sport players if both appear equally gifted on the baseball field.
If you choose to have your athlete forego the high school team, please note that I am *not* saying that you or your son are one of "those" parents or "those" me-first kids. But unless the kid is projectable, playing on an official MLB "scout" team, and slotted for a draft position by an MLB team (i.e., NCAA DI full scholarship caliber), it's an uphill battle for a potential freshman college player to fight.
VUSC is a NAIA DI school - equivalent to mid/high-level NCAA DII. The NAIA allows a maximum of 10 1/2 possible full ride scholarships for a baseball team. Most universities, however, don't allocate every one of those 10 1/2 scholarships. In fact, one school I know allocates only two. The point is this: Athletic scholarships don't grow on trees, and many schools have less than you think.
So with this in mind, one of the east coast parents I correspond with wanted to know about any non-high school baseball travel program to have his kid.
For the Fall? Summer?...
"Nope. The Spring, as a replacement for our local school's team", he responded. "The coach is an abusive clown who can't judge talent correctly."
Yikes...I see this more and more. Apparently, high school athletic directors are now going out of their way to hire bafoon, abusive clowns as high school baseball coaches.
Now, I have no problem with parents wanting to make sure their athlete gets proper training and the right "experience" in order to get to that "next level". But obviously, many are being conditioned to think that the local high school coach is an idiot. And, anecdotally, I've noticed that much of it seems comes from fall and summer travel ball or private coaches who parents pay to coach a travel team.
While it's true that some high schools have less experienced coaches, it is the exception, not the rule. And blatantly abusive coaches might fool people during the job interview, but they typically get weeded out over the long haul.
Which brings me to the painfully tedious point of this post. While a bit wordy, this is is about how I, as a coach scouting your kid, look at kids who choose not to play for their high school team, then expect to be recruited by guys like me at showcases or travel team events.
I use showcase events/travel teams to *validate* a high school player's career, not replace it. Note: while this is baseball-specific, it also applies to softball and football. I can't speak for the recruiting process for other major sports like basketball, soccer, etc.
If we go to a showcase game or a travel game, usually it's to see a player that we are already interested in. And it's usually a pitcher or catcher, because that's where he will be getting meaningful reps outside of high school games. A position player getting a few at-bats is tougher to judge because of the randomness of the game.
This is an important consideration. I can't afford to go to see the same team more than once or twice because there are so many prospects. We only need three or four freshman per year. Almost NONE of them get a scholarship because only front line difference makers (i.e., top 5-6 pitchers, starting catcher, and top 3 or 4 starting position players) get them. And most of them are already on the team.
The *new* kids that get scholarships are usually JuCo transfers (see this article to see why coaches think like this). This holds true even if the freshman kids are solid players, and even if they could be starters the next season.
That last point is HUGE.
We rarely pursue a high school kid unless he is a huge scholarship prospect. And those guys are usually pitchers and beast catchers. The rest contact us and a jillion other colleges, fishing for a spot.
So as for the rest of the players who get attention, it all comes down to "screens".
We, as coaches, have to filter the several hundreds of high school players that contact us each year and weed it down to maybe 25-30 kids that we'll track in their senior year of high school. And, as stated earlier, we pursue immediate difference makers more zealously that future difference makers. On a team of 25, there's very little room for non-contributing freshman players. And there are always a few kids that magically show up during the summer/fall after another college reduced a scholarship offer (or for a zillion other reasons).
So, in this context, as sad as this sounds, not playing for your high school team definitely raises a red flag with guys like me simply because we don't have time to investigate whether a high school coach is a clown or the parents are simply overzealous.
Guess which way we typically lean?
So follow this scenario: If the high school coach really IS is a clown, and the kid shines anyway, suppose I have a choice to make between him and a travel ball-only kid who didn't play for his high school for the same reason. He thinks the coach is a clown.
So I'm left with two kids:
- One who shines with a clown coach, or
- One who skipped that high school team and played travel ball, shining there.
- Which kid do you think will stick it out at my school when he doesn't get a single at bat his freshman year and there is a sophomore or junior starting ahead of him?
- Which one will *typically* be mentally tougher when he finds out that getting good grades at a college is way tougher than at high school?
- Which one of them has the most untapped potential to improve by practicing with my squad and (supposedly) better coaches?
Not being able to play for a coach for whatever reason in high school immediately raises eyebrows as to the motivations of the *parent*. By osmosis, we have to assume that it trickles down to the kid. There are simply too many me-first players out there with the same story.
So, all things being equal, we track the player who plays for the clown coach, then plays travel during the summer or fall. I know it's not fair, and it might not be accurate...but it is what it is. Incidentally, that's another reason why I also rank two sport athletes higher than single sport players if both appear equally gifted on the baseball field.
If you choose to have your athlete forego the high school team, please note that I am *not* saying that you or your son are one of "those" parents or "those" me-first kids. But unless the kid is projectable, playing on an official MLB "scout" team, and slotted for a draft position by an MLB team (i.e., NCAA DI full scholarship caliber), it's an uphill battle for a potential freshman college player to fight.
Monday, June 10, 2013
On Perseverance...Of CP's record 15 2013 MLB draft picks, one story stands out.
Imagine you are a 15 year old kid in your dream scenario...
State Championship baseball game.Bottom of the last inning. Tying run on 3rd. You are up.
And you strike out looking.
Do you have the intestinal fortitude to come back?
Flash forward a few years to find out.
We are proud to be able to call Cressey Performance a Friend of BALL.
"This last Saturday afternoon, the 2013 MLB Draft wrapped up, with a record 15 Cressey Performance athletes having been taken over the three days. While I'm proud of them all, one story in particular stands out as a means of teaching many up-and-coming athletes lessons they need to learn for long-term success."
Check it out here.
And Eric, if you're reading this, thanks for training kids up the right way: physically, mentally, and emotionally strong.
State Championship baseball game.Bottom of the last inning. Tying run on 3rd. You are up.
And you strike out looking.
Do you have the intestinal fortitude to come back?
Flash forward a few years to find out.
We are proud to be able to call Cressey Performance a Friend of BALL.
"This last Saturday afternoon, the 2013 MLB Draft wrapped up, with a record 15 Cressey Performance athletes having been taken over the three days. While I'm proud of them all, one story in particular stands out as a means of teaching many up-and-coming athletes lessons they need to learn for long-term success."
Check it out here.
And Eric, if you're reading this, thanks for training kids up the right way: physically, mentally, and emotionally strong.
Monday, March 25, 2013
Wrestling inspiration...
BALL doesn't (yet) have a wresting module. We do, however, have a passion for all sports-related inspirational stories. HERE is one that Wooden would have loved...
"Don't let what you can't do, dictate what you CAN do."
- John Wooden
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