Fitness 101 by Paul Bodenbach

FITNESS 101

Paul Bodenbach MA., FAFS, FMR, GPS Competitorsedge@msn.com (859) 802-2235

Every time the Winter Olympics come around I reflect on my time as the athletic trainer for the United States Speed Skating Team. I think of the great athletes I worked with and how they were trained. It’s interesting to me that training issues we dealt with back then still exist in training today. Those issues create detrimental performance and injury. However, most of them are easily rectified.

I began working with the speed skaters a few years after Eric Heiden won five gold medals in one Olympics. I had met Eric a few years before that Olympics and he told me that part of his training was squatting 250 pounds up to 500 times per day. He was special in his ability to train at exceptionally high levels and even through injury and still enhance his performance. So his method became the benchmark for training. Unfortunately, it created fatigue, burnout and chronic injury for those who followed him. Those of us on the medical staff were able to prove the athletes were overtrained and once the methods changed from more is better to quality of training is better we saw a resurgence of U.S. speed skating with Janson and Blair.

I see those same overtraining issues with young athletes today. The first problem is specializing at a very young age. As a product of specialization athletes play for their schools and club teams. They get no break from training. Studies have proven that this causes a high incidence of injury and burnout. In addition I see coaches who continue to adopt the more is better method of training. Please believe me, as a coach I’ve worked my athletes harder than they ever thought they could and there is a place for that. However, it needs to be followed by active rest training for recovery quality technique training for performance enhancement.

So, if your athlete suffers from decreased athletic performance, changes in attitude or sleep patterns or changes in appetite they may be suffering from overtraining. They should be seen by their physician. At the very least a couple weeks off from their sports training is much better than suffering a career ending injury or quitting their sport because of burnout.