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Future stock

If you want your players to get big and fast, make sure you\'re not stuck in the past. The rules of strength training are changing - rapidly.
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IT WAS AS TRADITIONAL AS 10-CENT BEER NIGHTS AND double-headers. Before any baseball player stepped into the batter's box, he would put a weight on the end of his bat and take a few cuts, knowing it would make his swing more powerful, faster and increase his chances of popping one over the fence.

Then, guess what?

Researchers discovered that the once popular bat doughnuts not only didn't help baseball players become home run hitters, they actually hurt them.

"It slowed down their swing," says Bill Welle, general manager of Cris Carter's FAST Program in Boca Raton, Fla.

Now, instead of swinging weighted bats, baseball players swing small, light, whippy bats known as fungos.

Like 10-cent beer nights and double-headers, bat doughnuts are now all-but extinct. And, Welle and other strength coaches expect other traditional exercises and techniques will fall by the wayside in the next several years as scientists and researchers move closer and closer to understanding exactly how the human body works and how to make it more powerful.

During the next decade, Welle says he expects head coaches and strength coaches will have a lot of fungo moments where they'll look at each other, slap themselves on the forehead and say, "Oh man, I can't believe we were all doing that."

Look at the 1 1/2 mile run, says Boyd Eply, the director of strength training at the University of Nebraska who many consider the father of strength training. Ten years ago, it was routine. Now, coaches understand that no football player is going to run a mile and a half non-stop in a football game so there's no reason to train for it.

The buzzword these days in strength training is sport specific. And, strength coaches predict, the trend toward devising specific training programs for athletes based on their sport will only increase. The old routine of asking all athletes, whether they're shot putters, marathon runners or bowlers, to run for 12 minutes, drop and do 50 push-ups and 100 sit-ups and then bench press for 20 minutes is gone.

Today, strength coaches know that a one-size-fits-all approach doesn't work. Exercises and workouts have to be geared to the sport.

And, strength coaches say, it's not enough merely to craft programs that are sport specific. Work outs should be athlete specific, Welle says.

Standing in the 2,000-square-foot workout room in Boca while Carter and two college wide receivers work out, Welle says the reasons are clear. "You look at Cris Carter, he's 35 years old, he's been in the NFL for a long time. The two others are 23, and trying to get into the NFL. They're young. They're bodies will do different things. But even with them, one of them has hip problems so we have to deal with that."

While all play the same position and therefore need to do the same things well, the training they need to reach the top of their game is far different. Each has his own program to follow. Athletes who don't have strength coaches willing and able to tailor individual programs for them are quickly going to fall behind.

Welle and others say there is no doubt that the ever-advancing march of technology will also play a big role in the future of strength training. He, for instance, has a treadmill that reaches 28 miles per hour. No one, he says, has run that fast, although Vikings wide receiver Randy Moss has done 24 mph for six seconds, Carter has done 22 mph and two female high school soccer players have hit 21. Still, the existence of such a machine is relatively new. It wasn't needed until people began to realize how to train for speed.

Also, new machines have been developed that focus on resistance training. Eply, a longtime advocate of free weights, says he is impressed with reciprocal training machines that enable athletes to strengthen muscles by pushing and pulling.

But, he says, coaches should take a jaundiced view of machines and not become enamored with what are nothing more that bells and whistles. Be sure, he says, that the new - and inevitably expensive - machines actually do something more than what's already on the floor.

"I have a certain menu of core exercises and for something to get on the menu there has to be good reason for it to be on the menu," he says. "You can't just keep adding new machines. That will lead to over-training. If you're adding something, you have to subtract something. So, you have to know what you're getting"

Welle agrees that coaches shouldn't be blinded by the appearance of a machine and should instead focus on what it can help an athlete accomplish. For instance, the training program at Carter's facility, which he says combines the best of a variety of methods devised by top researchers throughout the country, makes regular use of elastic bands. The bands, strapped to athletes legs, waists or hips, mimic the kind of pressure athletes will have to deal with from opponents during the game and help build muscles that are needed for agility and stability. While the research behind the bands is sophisticated, the bands themselves are pretty low-tech.

Where technology is truly going to make a difference is for evaluation and testing, Welle says. Video cameras equipped with computers can instantly analyze a player and show what he is doing wrong and what he needs to work on. The beauty of the cameras is that they analyze an athlete while he is on the field, playing a game. It shows, for instance, that he puts more weight on one foot than the other or that he accelerates too quickly or that once he accelerates, he doesn't maintain it. That kind of specificity is key to developing a program that will help a player improve.

Testing is also going to become more computer driven, he says. Instead of players telling coaches how fast they can run a 40-yard dash, they will be able to produce a real time video that will document their exact time. In some cases, he admits, the technology might not be good for athlete who are fudging their numbers, but it will be good for coaches who are struggling with recruiting decisions.

Computers are also increasingly being used to improve safety in the weight room. Computer chips on some machines can sense that an athlete is struggling to lift a weight and automatically lift it off him.

Still, both said, while advances in research and technology will help build better, faster athletes, there's a limit to what science can do.

The motivation and desire of an athlete is still key to his or her success.

As Eply says, "Regardless of technology, 400 pounds is still 400 pounds and someone still has to put in the effort to lift it.






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