Ed Coan's

[qb0708]

@James_Smith

Your thoughts and vernacular seem to echo many of my own with a degree of precision. How bout some credit (wink wink)

As for the “minimum”, there is in fact a very manageable means of monitoring this value just as there is in the medical community.

Your statement regarding the need to know the maximum, in order to prescribe a minimum, is incorrect because every subject has his/her own tolerances. For this reason, every subject has different optimal dose requirements and, on the other end of the spectrum, tolerances for excess.

No different than in the clinical environment, a degree of trial and error must be practiced and it is unarguably in the interest of athletes and patients alike for their coaches/doctors to seek the minimum dose necessary to solve the problem.

In the case of the novice athlete, it just so happens that a large dose, of lower concentration (ergo intensity), is required to set the foundational atmosphere for that athlete generating a high apex of sport results later in life (when it counts)

conversely, athletes of very high preparation require carefully managed large doses of high concentration in order to further the already very high percentage of their performance limits at which they are already operating.

The large doses of high concentration that are far too often administered to novice athletes is a grave mistake because the earlier the intensification the shorter the apex and long term development is hindered. While a degree of overdose clearly advances the development of athletes in the low and middle zones of development this must not be viewed in synonym with what is optimal.

As for the management of the types of training stress that is most optimal for the sprinter of low to middle qualification, the nature of the intensity of the various components must be individually measured due to factors already eluded to (morpho-biomechanics, CNS stress tolerance, and etcetera). The only constant is that speed work of some type must be maintained throughout in order that advancements in morphology and strength/power potential occur harmoniously with running mechanics.

Yeah; I’d say you’ve had a substantial influence on how I view sport training.

All I was trying to get across was what you alluded too; that you must do a degree of trial and error through an organic process and there is no clear cut and dry or explicit amount of training (in terms of low or high amounts) that is needed to obtain results; only that beginners need more breadth and elite need more height.

The context that tb2010 used ‘minimum’ suggested that all individuals need only develop a minimal amount of work capacity, whereas in contrast a wide base must be laid at the beginning of PASM in order to reach the pinnacle (as you alluded too).

What I meant by ‘maximum’ was that their is not a predetermined amount of volume (albeit in any unit used across all means) for all individuals to be achieved (in order to achieve the highest results) because everybody has a finite amount of adaptation energy and some are genetically programmed to have more or less and this is what ultimately defines what amount of load the individual organism can adapt too.

If a maximum was determined, then a minimum in reference to this maximum could also be determined (in order to lay the base for further intensification of the training load), which would mean that training was much more mechanistic and algorithmic.

I suppose this could be done by collecting data on a large amount of individuals across their entire career and seeing what amount of training was done throughout each period of the training process thus allowing one to make predictive models and a range for the total load of training of the years.