2007 ACSM Annual Meeting - Training

[Guest guest]

Further excerpts provided:

Betaine, Hyperventilation, Hyperimmune Egg Protein and Other

Novelties for Performance at the 2007 ACSM Annual Meeting

http://sportsci.org/2007/wghACSM.htm

Will G Hopkins

Training

Priscilla son gave a great opening president's lecture on muscle

soreness. Main points: we're still not sure what causes it; acute

and chronic stretching don't help; massage has some effect, but

there's little evidence for benefit of cryotherapy (cooling); NSAIDs

work to some extent, but there are side effects; megadoses of

vitamin C but not vitamin E reduce it, and other sources of anti-

oxidants in fruit and berries might help; but the reactive oxygen

species (ROS) in inflammation have a positive role in adaptation, so,

for example, vitamin C delays recovery of strength. She concluded

with a call for more attention to individual differences in the

response to and treatments for muscle-damaging exercise.

Carl , Romain Meeusen and Jack Raglin brought us up to date

with a tutorial lecture on overtraining. We learned that it`s

difficult to do original research on this topic, so researchers

resort to writing reviews and defining new terms to describe old

phenomena. Pushing athletes so hard that their performance starts to

fail–defined this year as functional over-reaching–is the usual way

to prepare for important competitions, because a taper produces

supercompensation. When the athlete doesn't bounce back, it's now

known as non-functional over-reaching. Is that the same as

staleness, under-recovery, prolonged maladaptation, and indeed

overtraining? Probably, although Meeusen thinks there might be some

subtle but as yet unclear differences (see Meeusen et al., 2006, for

more). Raglin told us that the Holy Grail (not his words) is a

predictor of staleness that is quickly and easily administered

without an exhausting exercise test and that gives an immediate

result. I would add that it has to be sensitive and specific. We

don't have one as yet, but the closest thing is a downturn in mood

state, especially in the depression dimension. Various hormones of

the hypothalamic-pituitary axis sometimes show dysfunction in

overtraining. For example, the normal increases in growth hormone,

adrenocorticotrophic hormone (ACTH), and prolactin following exercise

are suppressed, especially after a second VO2max test on the same

day. Overtrained athletes also show the same depletion of brain

serotonin as patients with post-traumatic stress disorder–hard

training takes on a whole new meaning

….My conclusion: good coaches will know their athletes well enough

to read the psychological symptoms of incipient overtraining and will

cut back the training load before it's too late. Training logs that

include psychological state might help. But I know of one coach of

Olympic medal-winners who effectively uses overtraining to filter out

athletes who can't adapt to the severe training program……

Forced repetitions have now helped another nationally ranked junior

powerlifter to get past a plateau, this year for the squat rather

than the bench press [1780; compare with last year's 1837]. It would

be nice to see a study with a sample next year....

Sixteen weeks of traditional weight training with 7+7 junior elite

cyclists in what must have been a base training phase had an effect

similar to that of usual endurance training on 5-min endurance power

(~4%) [2416]. The effect on 45-min power was stated as

a " significant " 8% for the weights group, whereas the effect in the

control group was " not significant " and no value was stated. But the

effect in the control group turned out to be ~7%, when I read it off

the graph on the poster! These results fit with other research and

reviews showing that traditional weight training has little benefit

for endurance athletes (e.g., Paton and Hopkins, 2004), whereas high-

resistance interval training produces spectacular gains, even in the

competitive phase (Paton and Hopkins, 2005).

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Carruthers

Wakefield, UK