While we are not even to the fall season yet (though
unbelievably close, where did summer go!) some athletes and their parents are
already looking ahead to the winter sports season. They are looking for a an
activity that will help them get in shape for basketball or hockey and they
think running cross country sounds like a great idea. The popular belief is
that by running for long distances you will build a base or reserve of
conditioning that will serve the athlete well heading into the winter.
Before I go any further it is important to note that if long
distance running is your main form of competition this does not apply to you at
least not completely. There must be some type of specificity when training for
any sport and for cross-country you have to be prepared mentally and physically
to run for long distances. Though developing young endurance athletes would be
well served to read on.
Let’s first consider the type of running that is involved in
cross country it demands a steady pace throughout the race with the exception
of the final kick where a runner may exceed that steady state to separate from
a competitor or to run a personal best time. The pace of running in cross
country is not at or beyond your limit if it were your body would shut down
from depletion of energy supply due to a lack of oxygen. The strategy is to
build tolerance to run as fast as you can over a given distance at just under
your limit. In other words you are training your body to run not to fast but
not to slow.
In team sports such as basketball and hockey that type of
training will get you beat! These sports demand quick and short bursts of
explosive speed that last mere seconds followed by a slow jog, walk, or
complete stop to recover for another short burst of speed. The running in most
team sports covers very shorts distances with multiple starts and stop with
change of directions. These short runs are at or beyond your maximal limit and
they occur frequently. Running at steady rate of speed below your limit in
straight line will not provide the conditioning you need.
Watch any football, soccer or basketball game and rarely
will an athlete run for more than 20 yards in a straight line and the duration
will be somewhere around 4 seconds or less. You will never hear a broadcaster
or a coach say that the athlete was so fast that they missed a play. On the
other hand you will often see and hear about an athlete that came up just short
because they couldn’t get their fast enough.
Soccer players typically run five to eight miles in the
course of a match and alter their direction or speed every 6 seconds. A study
of an English Premiership striker broke down that distance by type of activity.
In the course of running more than 10 miles, the player walked 4 1/2 miles,
jogged 3 1/2 miles, strode one mile, moved backward or sideways one mile and
sprinted about a 1/2 mile. In all these athletes spend around 60% of their time
walking or standing and though they may have jogged (steady state like cross
country) 3 ½ miles it was not consecutively. [1]
In the NFL the average plays lasts only 4 seconds and the ratio
of action to inaction is approximately 10 to 1. The average game has 11 minutes
of action with players’ standing/milling around for 67 minutes. [2] Running in
a straight line for 3-4 miles isn’t going to prepare you for the demands of
this sport either.
There are three types of skeletal muscle fibers (slow,
intermediate, and fast) and although some muscles have predominance of one
fiber type, most contain a mixture of fiber types, which are most suitable to a
particular activity.
The slow muscle fibers are fatigue resistant and are best
utilized during endurance activities such as running a marathon or maintaining
our posture all day long. Fast muscle fibers fatigue quickly but are capable of
producing great force and speed such as jumping to dunk a basketball ball or
throwing a fastball. And the intermediate muscles fibers serve that middle
ground for activities that require a blend of speed and endurance such as
running a 200-meter dash.
Everyone’s muscles contain a mixture of the three fiber
types, though some people have relatively more of one variety. These
differences are genetically initiated but can also be modified through an athletes’
training. For example marathon runners have a high percentage of slow muscle
fibers (about 80%), while those of sprinters contain a high percentage of (about 60%) of fast fibers. *
I am sure you have heard this phrase before; what came first the chicken or the egg? Maybe
the athletes with a greater reliance on slow muscle fibers preferentially
choose endurance events because they excelled at it and quite possibly the
athletes with a predominance of fast fibers choose short burst activities like
team sports and sprints because their fibers are most suited for them.
But that middle ground those intermediate fibers can be
influenced through training particularly in pre-pubescence. It should also be noted that these
“swayable” fibers will revert to the prior status once the exercise stimulus
has been removed, so quite literally use them for speed or lose them to
mediocrity.
Speed is a commodity that allows for success in all sports
and it must be prioritized before any other form of conditioning. Once you have
the speed than you can work to build the endurance but the reverse is unlikely
to happen this is particularly so in regard to developing young athletes.
It should also be noted that children’s response to exercise
is mainly non-specific. Children will improve their endurance for example, just
by virtue of doing any type of exercise whether that is short burst activity or
steady state exercise like running a mile. So if you want a child to improve
their endurance you don’t necessarily have to have them run at a steady state
for a prolonged period of time. They will get just as much benefit and even
more through short burst activities like tag. Steady state is boring for many
kids and it doesn’t require the multi-directional speed and agility development
that must be developed in the skill hungry years. Endurance, like strength is a
fitness marker and can be developed and improved upon throughout most of the
life span. Speed must be developed early; you can’t catch up to it later.
Endurance is an important quality for any athlete but it’s
how you develop that endurance and when that is key. Young children should play
games like tag and capture the flag, lots of all out bursts of speed. For the
more mature kids that want more of a structured-conditioning program they
should focus on running sprints that cover short to moderate distances (10-60
yards). They should do so repeatedly with short rest periods and they should go
as long as they can maintain the quality of the work. For example one of my
favorite conditioning drills for athletes is to have them sprint for as long
and hard as they can for a defined period of time, say 7 seconds. After that
time elapses we mark the point they reached. They will walk back to the
starting line usually a 1:30-2:00 minute rest and then repeat (maximum of 10).
The workout ends when they can no longer make it to their marker within that
same defined time. Some kids may have a short conditioning workouts but there
are ways to make up for that (that’s another article in itself).
All that said, we should never discourage a child from
taking part in any type of physical activity in the rare case that a child does
enjoy running for long distances. However, just like we monitor their dietary
intake (just because they like apples with peanut butter they shouldn’t have
that for every meal) we have to ensure they experience a broad variety of
activities to develop a balanced movement foundation.
Reference:
[3] Marieb, Elaine Nicpon. Essentials of
Human Anatomy & Physiology. San Francisco: Pearson/Benjamin Cummings,
2006. Print.
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