Loren's Blog
Coach Loren Seagrave founded Velocity Sports
Performance in 1999. Coach Seagrave's unique,
results-oriented coaching system brought him worldwide attention. High
demand for his proven methods led him to the private coaching arena,
where he helped world-class athletes achieve improvements in speed,
agility, power, and performance. A five-time, NCAA Track & Field
Champion coach, Coach's Seagrave's client list includes over 50 Olympic
medal winners, first round NFL draft picks, and professionals from
virtually every sport.
Here I Go Again...
By Loren SeagraveFebruary 07, 2008
I was fortunate to serve as the Head Women’s Track Coach at
LSU that year with a fantastic staff and many athletes who were big-time
over-achievers based on their past performance pedigrees. One of the differences with this team that
year was characterized by the sprints and hurdles group using almost
exclusively, an Active-Dynamic Warm-up protocol. Later, Howard Willman, former women’s editor
of Track and Field News, would remark, “You know there was just something
different about your women’s teams. For
one thing it was that warm-up. I’m
convinced that was one of the ingredients to their success.”
During the years before, we questioned the conventional “Jog
Two Laps and Stretch, Static-Passive Warm-up”, as not only counterproductive
when it came to performance in speed power events, but also down right deleterious
to performance.
We had no research data to back up these claims, only sound
scientific rationale, empirical evidence, the sentiments expressed by the
athletes and good old fashioned mother-wit.
Our thinking was as follows:
There was a preponderance of evidence pointing to the importance of stored
elastic energy and the utilization of the stretch-shortening cycle coming from
European researchers. The stretch-shortening
cycle employed not only the elastic loading of the visco-elastic components of
the muscle, but additionally relied on the myotatic reflex.
The neuron-physiological mechanism used to effect muscle
relaxation in long hold static stretching essentially desensitizes the stretch
receptor, housed in the intrafusal muscle fiber. By fiddling with the gamma efferent system in
this way, the athlete shuts down the nervous system.
In lecturers to coaches later that year, I began to espouse
the virtues of the Active-Dynamic Warm-up over the Static-Passive Warm-up. For the next five years, when I spoke on the
subject, traditionalists - and there
were many - looked at me like I had
three heads. I remember while lecturing
in Narabeen in New South Wales, Australia, at the invitation of Keith Connor, I
was openly challenged, in a professional way, by Ken Graham, the exercise
physiologist at the NSW Academy located at Narabeen. On several issues, Ken said that he would do
the studies and prove me wrong.
Ken took sprint cyclists, some of the best in the world who were
Australian during that era, and had them either perform a static stretching protocol
for warm-up then ride a power test, or they would jump straight onto the bike
and ride the power test. Ken
communicated with me that the rider in the no warm-up situation out performed himself
following the static stretching situation.
At about the same time, on the other side of the world, unbeknownst
to me, Paul Doyle, a master’s student at the University
of Massachusetts – Amherst, was conducting a study that looked
at classic vertical jump performance both with no warm-up and with a static stretching
protocol prior to jumping. Doyle’s
Master’s Thesis substantiated our claims.
If you static stretch prior to jumping, the reduced result is
significant. It was ironic that several
years later, Paul began coaching my future wife, Sharon Couch, in Atlanta, and
he and I were to become coaching colleagues, amalgamating our groups for
several years leading up to the Olympic Games in Sydney.
Over time, and with more and more researchers validating our
hypothesis, the Active-Dynamic Warm-Up, or a warm up protocol that uses the
same principles but called something else, is now the main stream and accepted
as superior at the highest levels of sports competition.
Recently, two other colleagues, Dennis Landin and Irving “Boo” Schexnayder
at Louisiana State Universiy in the Department of Kinesiology, have published in the January 2008 issue of the
National Strength and Conditioning Association’s Journal of Strength and
Conditioning Research, an article again validating our claims of 20 years
ago. Using a balance group of eleven
males and eleven females, who compete at the Division I level of the NCAA,
Jason Winchester, the contact for the paper, and his team of researchers
demonstrated that even doing a dynamic warm-up followed by a static stretching
prior to maximum intensity sprinting produces significantly inhibited
performance in a 40-meter sprint with an intermediate time taken at 20-meters.
This particular issue of the NSCA Journal of Strength and
Conditioning Research has several well-written studies on the deleterious
effects of long hold static stretching before speed-power activities.
In the words of Whitesnake, “I don’t know where I’m going, but, I sure know where I’ve been.” It has been a fabulous, albeit rocky at some
times, journey, with a handful of others, trying to lead the way to new
frontiers in sports performance training.
The Active-Dynamic Warm-up is here to stay. Now the task is to take the message to the
youth leagues where moms and dads, who are butchers, bakers and candle stick makers
by day, are giving it their all to help their children and the children of
others enjoy sports by performing better.
Driving by high school, middle school and recreation league sports
fields across the country, I still see “right over left and left over right”
starting out practices.
“An’ here I go
again on my own. Goin’ down the only
road I’ve ever known.” I know I won’t be
the only one out there, because you will be out there spreading the word right
with me.