The hammer throw involves making no less than four high speed 360 degree turns in a seven foot circle while holding onto a sixteen pound ball connected to a four foot wire. Just watching it is a lesson in physics and when done well it is mesmerizing. Declan was having some difficulty mastering the depth and rhythm of the four turns during his throw. So with heads full of ideas we made our way over to the local Radio Shack to see what kind of electrical components we could find to improve his technique.
As the clerk put the nine volt battery and connector, buzzer device, and alligator clips into the bag the excitement grew. Next we headed over to the stationary store and bought two thin metal rulers with holes on the end of each and then we rummaged around our apartments for some small nuts and bolts, tape, and elastic wraps. Declan and I spent the afternoon building a biofeedback device that would beep when he dropped to the desired depth during each turn of his throw. We joined the rulers together with a nut and bolt, and aligned it on the side of his leg with the hinge in line with the center of his knee joint. We placed elastic wraps on his thigh and calf to hold the hinged apparatus in place. This was no small feat given that Declan had the biggest, strongest legs that I had ever seen. Finally, we secured the battery and buzzer to one of the rulers with tape and the electrical wires attached to alligator clips which could be positioned along the rulers to make contact with each other at any depth or angle. We were so excited about our invention that we immediately raced out to the throwing circle. The first time Declan threw with it on we heard nothing on the first turn and then, “Beep, beeep, beeeeeep” on the next three turns. The transformation within several throws was amazing. By the tenth throw we heard a sharp, “Beep, beep, beep, beep” in perfect timing. Within several weeks of using the makeshift device, Declan had one of the leading throws in the world! Awareness is the key. Knowing where you are in space by feeling, hearing, or touching is the secret to perfecting your technique.
REACTION TIME & SPEED
In the world of sport, speed is king. If you are fast you will go a long way on that ability alone. Consider that fortunes are made or lost on a forty yard time during the NFL Combine where the best collegiate football players across the country come to prove their athletic prowess to NFL teams. A wide-receiver who runs a 4.60 second forty-yard time is probably not going to play in the NFL but a receiver who runs a 4.50 second forty-yard time has a good chance. If that same player runs just one-tenth of a second faster, 4.40 seconds, he will probably become a top NFL draft pick and sign with a team for millions of dollars. One-tenth of a second! Take a hand held stop watch and try to start and stop it with your thumb or forefinger as fast as you can. Maybe three tenths of a second? Consider that you were not able to move your finger less than a sixteenth of an inch in three tenths of a second and yet entire careers are determined by one-or two-tenths of a second! The good news is that you can easily drop a tenth of a second, the bad news is you can just as easily add one if you don’t know what you are doing.
A player doesn’t need to look past the first six feet of his forty yard sprint to drop a tenth. Most players in a three point stance start position will push off with one leg and step with the other rather than initially pushing off with both legs. They will also tend to stand up too soon rather than firing straight out. They will also tend to pick up their hand too soon which starts the clock running rather than keeping their support hand on the ground as long as possible while they push off with both legs. These subtle differences will easily save a tenth of a second and possibly millions of dollars!
Technique, however, is only part of the solution to becoming really fast. Your body only moves as fast as your mind wills it. To demonstrate, try snapping your finger fast one time now. No, I mean really fast. Try it one more time as you say, “Go!” You were probably faster than the first time but you have more to give. Pinch your cheeks, wake up, bring up as much energy as you can muster. Imagine a loud alarm has just sounded. Try snapping your finger as fast as you can again but be aware that you have been most likely waiting for the whole “Go!” to come out before moving. This time listen carefully and try to snap your finger on the first utterance of the “g” sound, “guh.” Ready? Go! Guaranteed that was faster than both the other tries. Ask yourself, “Why didn’t I snap it that fast the first time?” You might say, “Well, I didn’t really know you meant that fast or I didn’t know that I could even move that fast.” Combining great technique with mental quickness is the secret to maximizing your speed.
STRENGTH—MENTAL AND PHYSICAL
If world-class speed has a mental component then so does strength. I have demonstrated this fact hundreds of times at presentations around the country but on one of those occasions something happened that scared me. Usually I ask for a volunteer to come up on stage to demonstrate how feats of peak performance strength can occur. Typically a young athletic male or female will jump up and volunteer but one time, before I knew what was happening, an eighty year old woman came up to the stage. Everyone applauded and I thought, “This should be interesting.” Her name was Gertrude and I asked her to extend her arm straight out in front of her with her palm facing up and then to make a tight fist. I told Gertrude, “I’m going to try to bend your arm and I want you to try and stop me from doing it.” I placed my left forearm against her biceps (front upper arm) just above the elbow joint, grabbed her wrist with my right hand, and began pushing down with my forearm and up with my hand, trying to move her forearm upwards. It didn’t take much force before her forearm began to move. I kept moving her arm until her elbow was at about a ninety degree angle. I congratulated her on her effort but it was apparent to the audience that her arm gave way fairly easily.
Then I directed her attention to a corner of the ball room ceiling and had her stretch out her arm in the same way except it was pointed at that spot on the ceiling with her hand opened rather than in a fist. I said, “Gertrude, imagine that you see smoke coming out of the ceiling. There is a fire raging behind the panels and it is ready to burst out. Picture a fire hose in action and the immense power of the water shooting out through the nozzle. Imagine your arm is the hose, with hundreds of pounds of pressure rocketing the water through it onto the ceiling.” I moved my hand along the length of her arm, wrist, and hand several times in the direction of the “fire” and I repeated, “hundreds of pounds of pressure, hundreds of pounds of pressure. See the fire. Keep focused on the fire, keep the water on it.” Gertrude was completely absorbed in putting out the fire. While I continue to repeat the words, “Hundreds of pounds of pressure, hundreds of pounds of pressure,” I placed my left forearm on her biceps and right hand on her wrist and began to push.
I gradually applied pressure in ever increasing amounts until I was pushing with all of my might. But Gertrude’s arm didn’t budge an inch. I was shaking as I applied full pressure to her arm and wrist in an attempt to bend her arm at the elbow. This is when I got scared. I suddenly became aware that I was applying an incredible amount of force to an eighty year old woman’s arm and that at any second one of her bones might snap in half! I stopped instantly, relieved that Gertrude’s upper arm was still in one piece. The audience looked in amazement as I asked Gertrude, “Could you feel how hard I was pressing?” She said, “Yes, but it really didn’t seem to matter. I was trying to put out the fire!” I continued, “But how did you do it? How did you suddenly get so much stronger?” Gertrude wasn’t sure how she had done it, but obviously, something happened. It was Gertrude’s arm in both cases, the same bones and muscles. The answer, in part, is that she helped bend her own arm the first time.
By trying to stop me from bending her arm Gertrude inadvertently contracted all of her arm muscles including her biceps which is the primary muscle group used to flex or bend an arm. However, the second time Gertrude was not distracted or concerned about her arm being bent because she was intent on putting out the fire. She did two things that led to her peak performance. She was completely focused on the task at hand, and she
only used the muscles, her triceps, necessary to lock out her arm. The combination of being absorbed in the details, better known as being “in the zone,” and contracting only the muscles necessary for the task resulted in her amazing performance. If Gertrude could demonstrate this kind of Herculean strength, what are you capable of doing?
Aside from the mental aspects of strength are the physiological factors that determine the force and power of your movements. Athletic strength is not just a matter of going into the gym and lifting huge amounts of weight. Although the strongest people in the world can lift very heavy weights, that does not always make them the best or strongest athlete on the field. The secret is not in the absolute weight you can lift but in how fast you can generate the force necessary for the task at hand. If you can only squat 250 pounds and your competitor can squat over 500 pounds it would seem that he has the advantage. However, if jumping for a rebound requires generating 250 pounds of force in 0.2 seconds and you can generate it in 0.1 seconds while your stronger competitor can only generate the same 250 pounds of force in 0.3 seconds, you will win every time. You can gain this advantage by incorporating strength and power drills that require very short ground contact times in your training.
The way you ensure that you will maximize your strength, power, flexibility, and technique is by using a periodized training program. That means the type of work you do is varied over time so that it culminates with a period that enables you to perform at your very best during the peak of your season. For example, if you do the same number of set and reps for the bench press and continually try to increase the weight every time you lift, you will plateau and become stale. Instead of repeating 3 sets of 10 reps indefinitely, you might do three weeks at 5 sets of 8 reps, then three weeks at 5 sets of 5 reps, then three weeks at 5 sets of 3 reps, and then two weeks at 3 sets of 3 reps. Each week you vary the weight lifted along a heavy, medium, light format that is also varied (i.e., week one: light, medium, heavy; week two: medium, light, heavy; week three: light, heavy, medium; etc.). Each week you will notice that you are able to lift more weight on your heavy day. In this way you will continually get stronger and see your performance improve from week to week. Periodized training is the foundation of every Olympian and world-class athlete’s top performance and it is the only way to go if you want to ensure that your time in the gym is well spent.
PREPARATION & TRAINING FOR PEAK PERFORMANCE
If you are not improving in some way each day there is something wrong with what you are doing. Many athletes go to practice each day and, without realizing it, go through the motions of practicing a skill without ever getting any better at it. This is a waste of time that can easily be eliminated by knowing in detail what you are trying to improve and then focusing on the skills necessary to master it. Instead of an NFL wide receiver running route after route and catching eight out of ten balls, he should be asking, “Why am I not catching the ninth or tenth?” You might say, “Well, isn’t that normal? After all, he is only human. He is going to drop some balls every once and awhile.” Of course that is true but he should be trying to minimize the number of balls he drops, not just accepting that a dropped ball is inevitable.
Unless he gives his 100 percent he will never know. There is always a reason why a ball is dropped and in the case of an NFL wide receiver it isn’t because he can’t catch. Knowing what he did on every play is essential to catching the tenth ball. Is he seeing the ball in detail? Or does he see the ball as a blurry brown thing flying through the air, rather than seeing the details of seams and laces? Practice may start by holding a football in his hands and looking at the tip of the ball where the seams come together to form a cross. During practice or a game his desire to see the cross, will help him to see the ball better and make the catch. Perhaps he sees the ball in detail but doesn’t snap his head around fast enough to see the ball coming before it is on top of him? Or does his head sweep around blurring the image and lengthening the time before he sees the ball rather than instantly snapping it around as he plants to cut? It is the difference between him seeing a ball fifteen feet sooner or experiencing the shock of suddenly being hit in his face mask. Maybe he sees a ball in detail and his head snaps around but does he watch the ball until his fingers close in around it? Or does he watch the ball until it is about a foot away and then begin looking up field rather than watching the ball stick in his hands? You can catch a lot of balls with your peripheral vision but that is not how he will catch ten out of ten. Even if he does these three things he can still drop a ball if the ball has energy greater than his hands. If a ball is coming in at 60mph then he needs to take the ball with energy greater than 60mph otherwise there is a good chance that it will sail right through his hands. Often if a player waits for a fast ball to hit his outstretched hands, or tries to body catch it, he will drop the ball. During practice he can overcome this problem by “taking” the ball out of the air rather than passively waiting for it to hit him. Even if the receiver were able to master these four things, the next challenge would be to increase his mental and physical endurance to do it on every ball without fatiguing or losing focus.
BLOCKING OUT DISTRACTIONS
Leif Smith, an experienced sports psychologist, often talks about athletes and their mental rituals. Whether you want to call them mental rituals or cues or triggers, they are, in essence, techniques that help you get ready mentally for performing the task at hand. Dr. Smith points out that you can often see examples of these mental rituals in tennis tournaments. Between serves, many players bounce around on the balls of their feet with their hands on their rackets and appear to be adjusting the strings with their fingers. That action helps to keep their focus on the task at hand instead of allowing their minds to wander to such things as, “What will the next serve look like?” or “Where it will go and will I be able to return it?” Although focusing on fixing the strings on your racket isn’t necessarily preparing you to see the next ball, it is helping to block out all the distractions between points. To this end, Dr. Smith also suggests having a place or movement that allows you to regroup. He recommends that when players lose a particularly difficult point or become distracted that they go to their towel behind the baseline to renew and collect themselves. He believes that by doing this, players are conditioned to regain their focus quickly whenever they go to their towel.
Another simple technique that will also help you to block out distractions and perform at your best takes less than ten seconds. Any time you feel upset or agitated try thinking, “Oh God come to my assistance,” and center yourself. You can do this by taking in a full deep breath, holding it for a second or two, and then letting it out very slowly while feeling gravity pull your entire center of gravity toward to the floor. Over time you will become so proficient at it that you will be able to relax in the middle of a crowd and no one will know it, except you!
PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER
Have you ever said, “Oh! Wait, I wasn’t ready, “ or “Hey, that’s not suppose to happen,” or “I could’ve gotten that one if...” You might still be able to hear the lament of a childhood friend who cries out, “Do over!” Preparing for the unexpected is preparing for peak performance. Since you don’t know when the tipped ball will suddenly be within your grasp, the only way to ensure that you will be ready to catch it is by committing 100 percent of all your skill, talents, and abilities to the task at hand in the present moment. That includes using the physical attributes of strength, power, speed, and skill as well as the mental ability to become so absorbed in the details that time ceases to exist. Putting all of it together in a game or competition provides the opportunity for peak performance and the joy and wonder that comes from being part of something special.
For one NFL tight end the acronym PTASE, which I made up, was the key to unlocking many peak performances and becoming one of the best blocking tight ends in the game. Kyle Brady had signed with the Jacksonville Jaguars as the highest paid tight end in the NFL. Kyle was already considere
d a great blocking tight end but he was looking for something more. He wasn’t satisfied with being the best blocking tight end, he wanted to know that he was making the ultimate block on every play. Although it didn’t happen often, he would occasionally be out of position or miss a block. Others might have written them off as an anomaly but not Kyle. PTASE was the way he ensured that each block would be his best. It stands for: Play, Target, Action, Spot, and Energy.
“P” meant knowing every play instantaneously in the huddle. Think of how long it takes you to answer this question, “What’s your name?” That is how fast he came to recognize even the most complex plays including audibles at the line of scrimmage. “T” was knowing the player that he would have primary responsibility for blocking. “A” reminded him the direction the play would be running. This was particularly helpful when he had to go in motion and stop in front of the player he had to block. For instance if the play was running to the inside he knew to line up just a hair inside of the center line of the player to be blocked. This made all the difference in the world in his ability to quickly step to shield off the inside once the ball was snapped. “S” meant that instead of reacting with a pre-scripted movement or trying to take in all of the players gyrations and moves, Kyle would focus in great detail on one specific spot on the player’s jersey. That spot could never fake him out. “E” required playing with maximum intensity until the whistle blew. Instead of just one initial burst of energy that would gradually fade over the course of the play, Kyle’s blocking at the end of a play was indistinguishable from the way it began.
One particular instance shows the power of Kyle’s PTASE strategy. According to the Jacksonville Times-Union newspaper, the result was a peak performance against Peyton Manning’s Indianapolis Colts.
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