Today I am continuing to share our NFL Combine Training system. Today's email builds off of last week's, so if you've missed it I included a link below to catch up.
Let’s dive in…
Part 1: Profiling
Last week, I talked about the main focus of Combine training: to maximize performance at the event and to improve health.
There are two parts to this: profiling & monitoring.
I gave an overview of profiling last week, which you can catch up on here.
Now...
Part 2: Monitoring
Our entire goal of monitoring is to maximize the readiness to perform each day.
3 levels to this:
First, we have preparation which is essentially all the work that we’re doing.
Speed work, strength work, temp work, skill work, etc.
Next is preparedness, which is over time a level of preparedness for each of those things.
For example, the athletes' level of preparedness for the combine drills (5-10-5 and L) is going to be very low because we haven’t done it.
I don’t spend a lot of time doing that. It takes two weeks to teach, try to be very good at it. So we’ll typically spend about 2 weeks on that.
Our level of preparedness for the start however is very, very, very high. We’re doing that a lot. We’re repping it and getting very good at it.
Third, is readiness for that day. For example, we could have a very high readiness and the next day you don’t sleep or you go out and drink. The next day, readiness is going to be low.
So even though preparedness is high, even though you’ve done all the right things in preparation, if you get a bad night's sleep your readiness will plummet.
You can think of readiness as the acute preparedness. It’s where you are right now.
The next thing we’ll look at is our load equation.
In our training process, we have external load which is the training stress from that day.
We have internal load, which is a stress experience from the external load.
For example, if we run 7,000 yards, the internal load is how I’m feeling. This could be RPE, could be from whoop, heart rate monitor, etc but it’s the stress experienced from the 7,000 yards that I ran.
Put those together, that equals the training load.
From this training load, I get my external response, which is my training outcome.
The following image should help explain:
The negative impact of training stress on the athlete’s system immediately following training.
My training load, or the 7,000 yards from the example above is that orange section.
I then have fatigue, which is the depth of that stress, before it switches over to recovery.
This is the internal response.
So my reaction and adaptation to that training load.
And then based on that internal response, I’ll either have a positive training outcome or a negative training outcome.
Here are some examples of training outcomes:
Functional overreaching is closest to what we look for at combine. There are two peaks.
We beat you up for a while, have a big recovery and performance at our mock combine.
Then I beat you up a little bit more and we have our actual combine.
This isn’t the easiest to do outside of combine training, but since I’m controlling all the variables, sleep, diet, massage, and everything, it’s typically what we see.
Positive adaptation is when you’re just positively going up. Training session, recovery, training session, recovery, and so on.
Frequency of training has to be pretty high to do this.
Overtraining could mean multiple things. It could be that you’re not leaving enough time to recover in between. Could mean you’re not sleeping, not eating, or not doing the things you have to do, so you recover actually worse.
You start better then get worse.
Finally, non-optimal recovery basically means you’re just flat. So either the frequency of training is too low, you’re not stressing enough, or you’re not recovering enough.
Obviously the top 2 are the targets, and top left is closest in line to what we do when training for Combine.
Finally, this leads us into our Dose model:
We monitor external lode with GPS.
Internal load, we primarily use RPE.
And then for level 1, I’m counting the number of starts they do every day as well as the number of hard runs they do.
After this it starts to get a little more technical, so I’ve included the recording from the webinar below where I continue to talk through the Dose model:
The Does model starts around the 27 minute mark.
In next week's email, I'll talk about how this ties into a report that I use daily and how this data effects the training.
LET'S BUILD.