3-7 Training System

[agapit]

I wouldn't trust anything on the USATF website. They are notoriously horrible about keeping it up to date and accurate.

well it is hard to maintain a big site. imagine how many updates they have to do.

[rainbowgirl28]

I wouldn't trust anything on the USATF website. They are notoriously horrible about keeping it up to date and accurate.

well it is hard to maintain a big site. imagine how many updates they have to do.

It's not THAT hard. They manage to be both completely incompetent and stubborn by refusing help from qualified people who have offered (such as Tom Borish of Trackshark.com).

Think about it... they actually paid someone to come up with what they have right now

[Carolina Extreme]

I wouldn't trust anything on the USATF website. They are notoriously horrible about keeping it up to date and accurate.

well it is hard to maintain a big site. imagine how many updates they have to do.

It's not THAT hard. They manage to be both completely incompetent and stubborn by refusing help from qualified people who have offered (such as Tom Borish of Trackshark.com).

Think about it... they actually paid someone to come up with what they have right now

I contacted them several years ago about a junior vault record that was way out of date. I got the impression that no one really cared if it was current. They said they would get to it at some point.

Nice meeting you today Agapit. Looking forward to chatting again next weekend as well. Perhaps we will have more time for "vaultosophy".

[agapit]

I wouldn't trust anything on the USATF website. They are notoriously horrible about keeping it up to date and accurate.

well it is hard to maintain a big site. imagine how many updates they have to do.

It's not THAT hard. They manage to be both completely incompetent and stubborn by refusing help from qualified people who have offered (such as Tom Borish of Trackshark.com).

Think about it... they actually paid someone to come up with what they have right now

I have tryed to approach them few year ago about automation. No answer.

[joep]

When can we expect the rest or more about the training system. Hope to read more soon. Very interesting articale.

[souleman]

So agapit, question I have is, how 'bout for us ol' farts? Does your program apply to us? Doug Sparks has been working with me via e-mail to get me ready to vault again after 30 some years. His focus for me is "easy does it" with my training and getting ready. I will admit though that after a couple of months of what I've been doing I can really tell a difference in how I feel. It would be nice if you "tuned in" to the Masters category and made some comments. I'm going to go over and start a thread on "what are you doing to get ready". Later.............Mike

[Lax PV]

So why is your coach telling you to run 6x200m instead of say 7x200m?

agapit

Research has shown that for any "Strength" type activities once should look to complete 4 to 6 reps. For Hypotrophy (increasing muscle mass) one should look at like 8 to 12... while Power should be limited to 3-5 reps.

No discredit to the system, it could be part of the basis of thinking too, but 6 just seems to fit the mold well...

what do you think agapit?

[agapit]

When can we expect the rest or more about the training system. Hope to read more soon. Very interesting articale.

Fair enough. I always have three perspectives for the athlete's development.

1. Maturity. It is the point where athlete achieves optimal technical skills and has to focus only on physical aspect of the preparation. The longest maturity program I have developed was 3 years or 6 seasons.
2. Annual goals. Including indoor and outdoor seasons.
3. Seasonal goals.

Obviously 3-7 system is a tactical tool, so it only applies in terms of a season or an annual program and has strong relevance to the technical development as well as pure physical development.

First, I analyze vaulter's needs in terms of Maturity development and usually I establish 8-10 long-term objectives. I would write them down and think for a considerable period of time about the validity of the objectives from the perspective of 6.40 Model. Some times I eliminate or combine objectives after analyzing them.

Second, I select 3 objectives for a year (two seasons). One cannot address more than three objectives in a year, due to the time limitations, and if one can, usually the objective are marginally important or can be combined or restated in a different way.

Third, I select 2 objectives for a season. One of the two is a dominating objective.

Here is a made up case study.

Let's say we are at the end of September and suppose I have a college athlete that has difficulty maintaining the correct posture through out the run up. Furthermore, I have determined that this is a lack of specific physical strength where athlete's muscle corset does not have enough endurance at the top speeds to maintain correct position. I identify several tools that we will use to address the problem. Let's say these tools are:
1. Long sprint (300m) posture run
2. Posture plyometrics 12-20 reps
3. Mid Sprint 150-80m posture run
4. Long Pole Sprint 100m-80m posture runs
5. Mid Pole Sprint 80m-60m posture runs with weight
6. Pole Run Imitations (run up length)

The actual list would be longer, but for the purpose of the case study this list is sufficient. Now we have to complete these exercises before our high intensity periods usually for the fall season the mid of November. As you can see we only have 5 weeks to do it. If you were going to use each of the 6 tools 4 times in the 5-week period, you would need 24 sessions. Let's say you can combine some of the tools in a single session such as Posture Plyometrics and Long Sprint, still you would require 20 session or 4 days a week devoted to just these exercises. You see how the time is slipping away. Knowing the athlete, I would assign 2-4 sessions to each tool. Sometimes, in the process if I determine that with 3 sessions we achieved CONSIDERABLE result with a tool we would move on to the next tool. We would never repeat the tool for more than 4 sessions except in extraordinary situations.

THIS PROCESS REQIRES TREMENDOUS DISCIPLINE AND SENSITIVITY FROM THE COACH.

How do I determine the number of repetitions per session? Again, because of different field conditions (rain, cold weather, athlete's recovery, etc.) I do not ever assign a specific number of repetitions for a session. I always use minimum and maximum. How do I determine minimum number? I know that my athlete will not be able to sustain 1x300m maintaining my posture requirements. So, based on how the athlete feels that day, I suggest 4-5 repetitions to catch the largest adaptation effect.

Note: as you can imagine this is a gross simplification of the process. If I would try to record the decision process just for the Long Sprint 300m Posture Run it may take 20 typed pages, however I hope you get the idea. Also, this exercise is used to achieve complex technical objective and numbers shown would not be correct if for example our objective was physical development of internal functions, such as muscle recovery, cardio recovery, etc. In those cases perhaps larger numbers of repetitions would be required.

Let's look at the pure physical objective and how it relates to the 3-7 system. Let's look at the very important physical component such as anaerobic recovery process. This is crucial for maximizing athlete's performance.

In 1997 Lawrence Johnson participated in the One-on-One competition that was design for Michael Johnson and Donovan Bailey in Toronto. In pole vault there were two competitors, Lawrence and Ockert Britz. Ockert won the competition with 5.90m. Here is what we have learned from this. The whole competition took about 15 minutes. Lawrence was opening and missed first attempt at 5.70m (18'8”) where Ockert cleared it. Next came 2nd and 3rd attempts, where 3rd attempt was a clearance. This attempts followed within 2 minutes of each other due to the worldwide television schedule for the event and by the time Lawrence got to 5.90m he could hardly reach the take off mark on his first 5.90 attempt. Next two attempts followed in 6 minutes as you can imagine doing 6 max intensity vaults in 15 minutes was not realistic. This is a prime example of the anaerobic exposition. Where anaerobic activities were followed to close to each other, before recovery was achieved.

The same thing happens in a regular competitions in particular when only 2 or 3 vaulters are participating at any height. We have learned with Ockert, the hard way, that you can kill competition by letting them vault alone at any height and we used this experience many times. To perform at the higher level, one would need to seriously address this type of recovery.

The example of an exercise that could help with this would be running 40m full speed with 90 sec. recovery. The question is how many times do you run? The 3-7 system does not apply here in the direct way. The guide will be the physical ability of an athlete. However, there are similarities. If during the first session you observed that the athlete was able to maintain speed for 4x40m and than the speed dropped, I would use 3-4 “slowed” attempts as a stressor for training of the anaerobic endurance. A world-class sprinter may do this exercise 10-12x40 where 8-9 of them would be maintaining or even increasing the speed and the last 3-4 “slowed” for training purposes.

Now, I hope it is more obvious why I called this system 3-7. You can test it and you will find that the maximum adaptation changes are achieved between 3 and 7 repetitions. In most cases you will achieve 80% of your objective after only 3 sessions. I usually leave it to inertia to carry the other 20%.

As I said earlier, to achieve 21'/18' performance athletes would have to come up with a exercise management systems similar to the one I described. It does not seem that traditional macro and micro cycles are time efficient methods. I would not speculate on the details, but Petrov and Bubka had their own 3 and 4 day cycles that at the time seemed unconventional.

[agapit]

So agapit, question I have is, how 'bout for us ol' farts? Does your program apply to us? Doug Sparks has been working with me via e-mail to get me ready to vault again after 30 some years. His focus for me is "easy does it" with my training and getting ready. I will admit though that after a couple of months of what I've been doing I can really tell a difference in how I feel. It would be nice if you "tuned in" to the Masters category and made some comments. I'm going to go over and start a thread on "what are you doing to get ready". Later.............Mike

I do not think that this program involves age discrimination

[cstary]

Agapit - Interesting post.

However, I would submit that while you may ultimately be correct in your 4-is-too-much training regime, I'm sure you would agree that there are multiple factors that are involved in making advances in the vault. For instance, purely technical advances likely involve adaptations in neural response and proprioceptive control, whereas physical gains occur at the intracellular, cellular, and systems levels. In fact, it has been established that a single bout of eccentric exercise can induce massive changes in intracellular and structural homeostasis in skeletal muscle (check out http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/quer ... s=12641640 ).

My point is that there is a lot going on with the different aspects of adaptive training - if you have seen more success with your system then my ears are open, but I would hesistate to suggest a putative mechanism for your apparent success. That would avoid blanket generalizations and unneccesary confusion about training efficacy.

Creed

[agapit]

Agapit - Interesting post.

However, I would submit that while you may ultimately be correct in your 4-is-too-much training regime, I'm sure you would agree that there are multiple factors that are involved in making advances in the vault. For instance, purely technical advances likely involve adaptations in neural response and proprioceptive control, whereas physical gains occur at the intracellular, cellular, and systems levels. In fact, it has been established that a single bout of eccentric exercise can induce massive changes in intracellular and structural homeostasis in skeletal muscle (check out http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/quer ... s=12641640 ).

My point is that there is a lot going on with the different aspects of adaptive training - if you have seen more success with your system then my ears are open, but I would hesistate to suggest a putative mechanism for your apparent success. That would avoid blanket generalizations and unneccesary confusion about training efficacy.

Creed

The purpose of my post was not to say that this approach is the best approach. The purpose of my article was to point attention to the fact that time in training process is limited recourse and that new training methods are emerging to address training management process in order to achieve record performance. I hope the post raised awareness to training methods adaptation behavior. That was my goal anyway.

I also did not equate the physiological and psychological adaptation in the post there are different approaches, but you must agree that after a number of repetition the benefit from the exercise, mental or physical, is marginalized.

The effect of physiological and psychological response inertia is present as well, so the post hinted on a way to maximize the inertia effect and achieve benefit without spending any additional time or excessive time with an exercise. This alone could save 10% to 20% of time in training process.

[cstary]

Thanks for the clarification. Keeping a fresh perspective on training is a useful tool, and your post serves to raise awareness. I think the most often overlooked aspect of overtraining is mental fatigue, which your system addresses. I agree . . . change things up . . . there are plenty of aspects of the vault to work on . . . that's why some of the best vaulters in the world don't peak until their early 30's . . . my age

creed