I continue to be amazed at the ease at which coaches and administrators (and sometimes even the media) brush away and trivialize the insidius impacts of over training.
Meanwhile, the atheltes who have been flogged in training get whipped in the media because they are under-performing. The decision makers responsible for the over-training seek to deny this possibility, and sometimes even the press are used to support them.
Here are three examples of this:
1. 2006: A team playing at national league level begins to decline rapidly in performance. They are apparently being flogged in training to the extent that the players begin to make comments about their predicament. In response, their concerns are not only denied by the club officials involved, the media comes on board with articles calling the atheltes gutless!
2. 2007: A national team struggling, experiencing performance decrement. When the possibilty of over-training is put to the coach, his response is quoted as: "...the notion of overtraining, iId like to know what the definition of that is... some people link that (recent losses) to injuries and workloads. i find that commentary unhelpful. injuries occur in sport, simple as that..." (Badel, P., 2007, Warne told to butt out, The Sunday Mail, p 102, Feb 18, 2007)
3. 2007: A once proud sporting team playing internationally at provincial level has achieved some forgettable milestones, continuing a downward trend that has been going on for a decade or so. Not only have they come last in their annual competition, they finished the season with a record loss. A media representative interviews the most powerful board member, during which he lists some of the things the incumbent coach has been accused of. One of them was training the team too hard.
To which the administrator is quoted as replying: "A wise man said 'No one ever drowned in his own sweat, so discount the first [this] accusation...." (Tucker, J., 2007, The grill, The Courier-Mail, Brisbane, May 9 2007, p. 103)
4. 2007 - The above mentioned team lost mroe than 50% of its playing roster to varying forms of injury that cost one or more games played, during this season. When over-training was put to the coach of this team as a possible reason for the massive injury tool, the coach argued that the bulk of the absences have been caused by contact injuries, saying "we've only lost one injury through training, apart from (Chris Latham), Caleb Brown to a hamstring. They're not soft tissue injuries. It's not the training parameters; it's the contact injuries during the game." (Sportal.com.au, 2007, Jones assesses injuries, Monday, 12 March 2007 @ 2:21 PM)
Over-trained? It can't be!
(Why? Because that would mean I would have to admit that I or the person I employed to do the job stuffed up. That's not going to work - better blame the athlete's...or maybe the 'curse'...)
I remember over a decade ago, leading up to one of the Olympics. A female track athlete was saying as part of her preparation she wanted "washboard" abs and was doing 500 situps a day. Even with my limited knowlege I was still in disbelief. By the time of the Olympics I saw her at the start of a 200m sprint. Her whole abdominal area was taped up because of a muscle tear. HELLO !!!!
Of course she lost.
Posted by: bumble | May 19, 2007 at 05:43 PM