CONCURRENT TRAINING

Now one of the first things you will learn from newcastle personal trainers is the concept of focusing your efforts on a particular adaptation ie. 8 week hypertrophy phases followed by a strength phase and then into power etc. This is a great idea for most people as we only have so much training time and recovery abilities. The problem comes from people thinking that this means that you don’t train the other physical qualities in this time at all. Think about this, you just came off your off season, your body is already a little detrained, you haven’t done any high power work since your last game and now you’re going to spend 16 weeks just developing the muscles to be bigger and stronger through high load, slow speed lifting. Now you will definitely increase power but not at the rate you could be. In this time you essentially are building your ability to recruit all muscle fibre into an effort but you always have plenty of time to recruit them. If you want to be fast we need to train the nervous system to recruit muscle fibre quickly and the best way of doing that is training some aspect of power throughout the whole training cycle. Now this isn’t max effort sprints year round but some simple med ball throws and low impact jump variations will help complement the main focus of the training cycle and help facilitate better results when the focus shifts more towards the power later in the training cycle. This idea is known as concurrent training where multiple physiological qualities are trained throughout the training cycle. We still train a focus quality with the most amount of volume applied to it, but we make sure to still stimulate the other systems to keep them from detraining throughout the training cycle.

WHAT TRAINING METHODS DO WE USE?

The core foundational pieces of Newcastle Strength Training for our athletes comes down to a few major influences including triphasic training popularized by Cal Dietz, principles from the High/Low method from Charlie Francis and the conjugate method from Louie Simmons. From there our core exercise modalities include sprints, jumps and throws, strongman, powerlifting, weightlifting, gymnastics and bodybuilding. Instead of making people fit one method our focus is building the program around which of these modalities are required by the athlete most to build upon their athletic foundations to set themselves up for success once they take the park in their sport.

TRIPHASIC TRAINING

Triphasic training popularised by Cal Dietz is a training method that involves focusing a training cycle on a targeted contraction type. This can look like spending 2-4 weeks on eccentric focused work followed by 2-4 weeks on isometric work and then finally transitioning towards a dynamic concentric contraction. The intention behind triphasic training in our programs is as a means of facilitating development of connective tissue to reduce risk of injuries while also working on active mobility and teaching proper mechanics by slowing down the movements. The huge added benefit though of the triphasic training method comes in its ability to reduce neural inhibition on high output movements meaning athletes are able to express their full potential. This comes from increasing the eccentric and isometric strength which allows the body to absorb and redirect force more efficiently and allows the brain to essentially take the brakes off that it uses to protect itself from injury. By focusing on developing the eccentric strength we have seen many of our athletes improve their speed and power with minimal work spent on speed and power in that time.