One size certainly does not fit all when it comes to training
IN the space of a fortnight between late May and early June, over 10,000 people signed up to Slimming World. That’s far from surprising. Around that time, a King’s College London and Ipsos MORI study surveyed 2,254 people across Britain. A total of 48% of respondents said they had put on weight during lockdown, and 29% claimed they were drinking more alcohol.
As a letter to a newspaper proclaimed at the height of lockdown: “Open the pubs before we all become alcoholics!”
It wasn’t all one way, though. While many struggled with the effects of collective gym sessions, swimming pools and team sports closing down, others discovered the joys of solitary exercise.
Whatsapp groups became hubs of conversation regarding 5k times and once that initial craze passed, more and more fell for the charms of long-distance stuff.
With more time on my hands, I rediscovered the humble pushbike and the more pedalling I did, the more I delved into the science. A gym-owner friend of mine opened my eyes to the world of Eastern European Periodisation Training.
It’s basically exercising at a ‘Zone Two’ heart-rate level for long periods of time. You burn calories but your heart rate is comfortable. All the while, you are building a big engine for endurance.
The trouble with this is that it takes patience. Most people do not feel they have exercised hard enough unless they are sprawled on the floor of a gym in a pool of sweat like a chalk outline.
It goes some way to explaining the popularity of six-week body transformation packages promised by some gyms and personal trainers. Six weeks is a sweet spot between the immediate effect of the exercise — and no doubt a diet that is cleaned up — and the point at which you reach a plateau and the body doesn’t respond as immediately.
In Gaelic games, this hell for leather training is still the most widely practiced. When you are in a group, doing the same thing together feeds the sense of collective. It builds team spirit and mental resolve to come through a tough session, so while the exercises and the emphasis will continually develop and refine, the basics still remain.
From that culture, there is little wonder that hundreds of club players are now picking up muscular injuries three weeks into the Return To Play.
An excellent interview by Irish Independent writer Vincent Hogan with Dr Liam Hennessy last weekend came as a stark reminder that our thinking around training has become hopelessly stagnant. The former Director of Fitness with the IRFU and onetime Olympic hopeful was recalling his time with the Tipperary hurlers in 1991.
Phil Conway had already pushed the Tipp hurlers and their manager Babs Keating down a road of individualised training. Hennessy would take it to an extreme.
“We had 59 collective sessions in total to win an All-ireland in ’91,” Hennessy said in the piece.
“That’s from the previous November, right through to September. Nobody else was that low. But, behind that, there was a whole load of individual sessions.”
And thinking smart. Declan Ryan was a big man, but he was placed on a diet of between 1,200-1,500 calories. That’s peasant rations. But as long as Ryan could maintain that and do the collective sessions, he would be fine.
Pat Fox’s knees were never right, so he didn’t do the collective sessions.
His strength work was pulling engines out of cars.
Before they played their Munster Championship opener, word came back to Keating that opponents Limerick had already banked over 100 sessions. He got jumpy with Hennessy, but fully bought in after the result of the game — Tipperary 2-18 Limerick 0-10.
That was almost 30 years ago, and still the culture of Gaelic games is one size fits all.
Jim Mcguinness performed the greatest coaching job of the last decade in bringing an All-ireland to Donegal in 2012. So many of his ideas were ground-breaking, but he had a blue-collar sensibility to bond the team from the outset.
He recounted the story of meeting a man outside a hardware shop in Cresslough soon after he took the job, who asked: “Jim — what are you going to do?”
Nodding in the direction of the shop, he replied: “It’s very simple. I’m going to get three feet of Wavin pipe and I’m going to beat them around the back of the legs.”
It was a great joke, a good line, but there were times on the pitch in Convoy and over dunes when his players that winter would have preferred the Wavin pipe to yet another run.
There is a sense — finally — that things have to change. Over lockdown, that has grown. Last weekend, Tyrone goalkeeper Niall Morgan asked what the point was in him driving 45 minutes to do a 45-minute conditioning session, only to then drive 45 minutes home.
And there is no logical answer to that.