100% agree
Okay.
Well we worked a lot with tennis players along the way as the former head of tennis canada was interested in working with Charlie post 1988 when no one else had the hair to go near him. I was forever grateful as you might imagine. Fast forward to this summer when one of the young jr. female tennis players coached by this former tennis canada coach beat Serena Williams for her breakthrough moment as a Sr. player. Why that was of particular interest to me was we ran a training camp out of our house for the entire summer in 2009 for 4 different jr tennis players on the request of this coach. The young woman who beat Serena this summer had been one of the players staying with us in 2009. She is currently ranked #1 in Britain in tennis.
The first thing we did was get them on the bike doing tempo and in the pool doing tempo and swimming as they were not very lean and one had issues with her foot. We also changed the diet, did routine hot and colds and did massage and made sure they were doing a track style warm up before the tennis began. One of the things we noticed that despite all MG ( the coach ) had learned from all the sessions with us every minute of their training was with the racket and the ball. The warm up was a slow version of tennis and the duration was not much. IT was difficult to do much actual tempo on grass as they were already spending tons and tons of time on their feet.( too much time on their feet In our not so humble opinion) So the bike and the pool were magic for all of the players who stayed with us. We also did EMS to balance off some of their issues regarding hamstring tightness and poor muscle balance due to injury.
If you play and train soccer on the pitch every day (specific activity) what is the need and/or role for strength training (general activity)? And how do the two interplay,and what are the costs and benefits of such an interplay,if it has to happen? This is where I wanted to stimulate discussion towards years ago,and still well may do!
These are leading questions as we know for sure some people have been successful doing only their sport and some people in Athletics we know barely lifted weights like Merlene Ottey.
At the very highest level do we know for sure what exactly is going on?
Well I am only able to speak about what I saw regarding how Charlie did things and what I know for sure is so many people over do so much of the wrong work.
The wrong work for sprinting is almost always too much Weights and the actual sprinting takes too little of a priority and strong seems to rule as it’s the popular thing to have big muscles and anyone can really have big muscles but not just anyone can be fast.
And then we fail to discuss too much about regeneration because what’s up with a bunch of water and healing or acupuncture or complete rest and how the heck does that really translate into getting fast and maintaining speed performance?