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Planet Field Hockey

Sean Campbell is a member of the Canadian National field hockey team. He participated at the 2000 Olympics in Sydney.

Sean will be writing a series of training articles, outlining theories, techniques and sample programs, for PlanetFieldHockey

Qualifications:
-BSc Honours in Kinesiology, MSc P.E.
-Former Certified Strength and Conditioning Specialist who has worked as a conditioning coach and athletic therapist for both recreational and elite athletes involved in many sports including cycling, rugby, ice hockey, soccer, running, and field hockey


Basic Principles of Training

Physical preparation for sport has become one of the key components for readying athletes for competition.

The goal of physical training is to increase on-field performance through bolstered physical prowess. However, before we discuss the basic principles of physiological training it is important to be cognoscente that physiology is only one of many components that influence performance.

The model put forward by Dr. H. A. Wenger best illustrates this. He considers performance to be influenced by individuals’ psychology, physiology, environment, equipment, tactics, and skill level. For example, an individual may possess high levels of fitness and skill but put forward a poor result or have a bad game because of family trouble or inappropriate footwear for the field.

Similarly the physiology or fitness of the individual can be impacted by a variety of factors including travel, training load, health (injury, sickness), amount of rest (mental, sleep, time off), nutrition and fatigue (physical, mental).


Like performance, physical fitness needs to be thought of as interplay of many smaller components. The main components of fitness include body composition, flexibility, strength, aerobic (endurance) fitness and anaerobic (power/speed) fitness.
All of these components are required for field hockey in some degree.

However, positional demands and level of competition will determine to what extent each of the fitness components will need to be developed. For example, would a bodybuilder and swimmer train the same way for their sports? The answer of course is no. Each trains according to the demands of their respective sports.

Consequently, when training for field hockey (or any sport for that matter) the demands of the game (including position and level of competition) must be analyzed and programmed for accordingly.

It is also important to recognize that each individual responds to the same training in different ways and at different rates. An individual’s genetics, age, current health, level of training and state of fatigue all impact on how he or she will respond to training. Consequently, developing fitness for field hockey is more complicated than it appears on the surface.


Training for sport is a complicated process. However, there are several basic training principles that, if followed, make training less complex. These include the overload, rest, optimization, and maintenance principles.


Overload Principle

The overload principle is the basis behind all physical training. It states that in order for the body to adapt to a higher level, it must be loaded beyond what it is normally required to do. For example, in order to get stronger heavier weights than normally used must be lifted.

Similarly, in order to build greater endurance, a pace above what is currently being run must be employed. Once an adaptation to one load has occurred, a higher load must be used in order to elicit further adaptation.

It is important to note that each individual has a genetic limit for improvements in a given component of fitness. Initially large improvements may occur early in training. As the level of fitness reaches the individual’s limit, improvement will become smaller and smaller.

It is important that the overload applied is of a progressive nature (small increases in load every 2-4 weeks in training). This will limit the chance of injury and overtraining.

A good way to conceptualize this principle is with the “bomb and wall” model. The wall represents your muscles and body and exercise is the bomb. When you overload your body you drop the bomb on the wall. It explodes and knocks some of the bricks off the wall. Engineers spend the next hours repairing the wall. They know that the last bomb blew up the wall, therefore they put more bricks in the wall and make it stronger (adaptation). Later when the same bomb hits the wall again no bricks are displaced. As a result a more powerful bomb (larger load) is used that again knocks bricks out of the wall. The engineers rebuild the wall again and the process continues until there are no more bricks to build the wall any stronger (genetic limit).


Rest Principle

This takes us back to the bomb and wall model. It takes the engineers time after the bomb has exploded to repair the wall. The greater the damage to the wall, the longer it will take to repair and rebuild the wall.

The same is true for the body. A body system that is overloaded will exhibit breakdown during exercise. Following exercise the body rebuilds the stressed system back to a higher level. The larger the load or more intense the exercise placed on that body system, the longer it takes the body to rebuild that system. For lighter loads such as those encountered with typical aerobic training (longer running, cycling, stair climber etc.) the rebuilding process typically takes 8-24 hours while it can take up to 48 or 72 hours for strength training or power training.

Therefore, low intensity training can be performed on subsequent days while more intense strength or power training should be performed on alternate days.


Maintenance Principle

Because fitness for field hockey is multi-dimensional, it requires the development of many of the components of fitness. Consequently, training of the various components will occur at different intervals in the training program.

However, if we stop training a fitness component entirely, the training effect or adaptations created from overload will begin to be lost (adapt to a lower level of fitness). Therefore the training effect must be maintained. This can be achieved by reducing the frequency (number of training sessions for that fitness component) to 1/3.

However, it is important that the duration (length of training session) and intensity of the training session be maintained. For example, if you run 6x week for 30min at 70% maximum heart rate you would need to run 2x week for 30min at 70% max heart rate to maintain that level of aerobic conditioning. This principle is especially important to maintain fitness levels during extended touring or vacations.

Optimization Principle

Unlike sports such as swimming or running, field hockey is a sport in where factors such as skill, tactics, strength, aerobic/anaerobic fitness, environment and mental state influence performance.

It is not necessary to develop any one of these individual factors maximally. Instead only an optimum level of development to meet the demands of field hockey are required.

By not developing each of these factors to their maximum levels but instead to levels optimum for performance in field hockey, time is made available for developing other factors.

Recall the example of the genetic limit of individuals. As training pushes you closer to your genetic limit, less improvement occurs with increased amounts of overload.

Therefore, in order to develop maximal strength an athlete would be required to spend many hours in the gym. As a result, less time would be available for the athlete to develop on field skills, tactics, and aerobic/anaerobic fitness, and increase flexibility and performance would suffer.

It is therefore important to define the optimal levels of development required for each contributing component prior to the start of training and allot the appropriate amount of time to develop each component accordingly.


Elite Hockey - Sean Campbell

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