Aaron King (00:00):

Welcome back to the modern old school training podcast. I'm Aaron King joined today again by coach Bob King. And today's topic is about your training and how it leads up to or correlates with game day. And so we were talking a little bit about this earlier about how you have your, your game day is a hundred percent effort. And so it's kind of just like a really intense workout. And so, but we, we treat it like this. I almost put too much hype around it. Cause I know myself personally when I was playing, I tried so much to save it for the game that I had dead legs. I had like just, I felt heavy and it was kind of, I just stayed almost in the intensity, in the buildup.

Coach Bob King (00:39):

Well, there's one thing we know from the beginning and that is athletes' warm-up before they play. Well, the reason for that is muscle works better at a higher temperature. And when I was coaching, I used to always tell my guys let's get a little grease pumping and that just meant let's break a sweat because that way, you know, the internal temperatures where it needs to be, and you're going to work better after you've practiced and trained at offseason and throughout the week, your body is ready for it. Extended about an extended amount of effort. And so just real quick, like you said, when we designed training programs in season, we can't, as the competition is a hundred percent of effort. So when we're counting out workouts, there's a max effort. What that does now is leading us to the question about, well, when's the last day of the week I should work out before my event, my competition.

Coach Bob King (01:25):

Well, we say whenever, whenever time we'll allow you to work out and get to where you have to go. If you have to travel or anything like that. So it started off with I'm going to play tomorrow. I don't want to work out today. Well, we had to go through the process of saying that's, that's not a hundred percent true. And a lot of it had to do with language, not just the actual workout itself. So when athletes would come in, we'd say, look, we're going to work out today because you're going to be in competition. You may be traveling like with baseball and Tennessee is on extended trips. We don't want the last workout and the next workout to be six, seven, eight days away from each other. So by working out the day of travel before the game, we connect it to the next workout as well.

Coach Bob King (02:08):

That's one item. The second item is how do we explain it to the athletes? So they understand this is not going to mess you up. So we came up with the concept or phrasing of non-adaptive training. You go to the weight room or you go to the track and you're going to work out at a high enough level to cause the body to have to adapt. That's going to require rest. So if I work out today on the way, so I'm not going to come back for two days and unless I have a split routine and work out while I recover, we don't do that before the competition. So to tie the day before and the day of competition together, we say non-adaptive training. For example, if we do a, say a rotation of six exercises, three sets, eight to 10 repetitions, well on a non-adaptive we're going to do two rounds, two sets, eight to 10 repetitions, maybe 10 or 15 pounds less than what you would work out with. Your body's familiar with it. It doesn't have to recover. It doesn't have to go through the shock phase. And so what you're doing is Lincoln workouts together, keeping the muscle tone and strength level where you want it and you go compete.

Aaron King (03:11):

Yeah.  I think it's the day before is the big thing, but then it's also the day of, so we S I started shifting my schedule a lot, and I've seen a lot of different guys, you know, tinker with different things. I mean, there are some freaks out there they're, they're hitting the weights, but it might be light to them. It looks heavy to me. But the day before was the big thing, not being too, not resting too much. And the day of now, this is where it's interesting to see. I, you know, I was a long snapper football, so it's not like I didn't have that much to do during the game. I still stood around a lot. That was tiring, but it's tough now, but I basically stopped warming up when you get to the field. And I saved it, like, just for pregame, because I noticed I was getting too much of a workout in, in a warmup.

Aaron King (03:50):

And I go to the locker room down and I came out just, just tired. But I saw guys like when we played Memphis D Angela Williams, he ran, I don't know how many miles around the football field and then went off for about two 50 to 60 against us, that net that day. So you see some guys that have that kind of aerobic capacity. I was more, you know, obviously short stuff. Yeah. So, it impacts you differently. And that's kind of where I really want, I tell athletes to pay attention to their warm up, not to get too much in before the game, and then cooling down. So can you touch on kind of how to approach the pregame?

Coach Bob King (04:28):

No, your body knows what you can do and you know, and that's, you have to because we all have as coaches, a general warm-up session, everybody lines up and we go through the stretch and all that, and you just learn things. And so I know that I was with the Dallas Burton major league soccer team for a number of years, and I had lots of players from all over the world, you know, international. And so what I've found is I knew I had to come up with something to answer concerns of like, Bob, we do not stretch enough. I go, yes, we do. And so what I did is I went through my, you know, we'd do our, our a jog, a long jog actually. And then I take them through a, you know, straight scripted stretch. And then just because all these players had their thing, I would say, OD, you got three minutes to do what you think you need to do.

Coach Bob King (05:13):

And that way everybody was happy, but everybody was different. And so if you go through sport to sport and go to most of them, especially the major league games, and when I say games, I don't care if it's football, baseball it's football season here now. And so for the game, you see wide receivers and quarterbacks, and running routes and throwing balls will save it. No, they're, they're high-level athletes used to a lot of volumes. And in the fact that a game, if they go three and out, there's not much to do. And they already know ahead of time. We're probably going to, let's say, run 85 plays. Not all of those are past plays, so they know how to quantify how much they can do before it becomes a distraction.

Aaron King (05:56):

Okay. So that's before, what about the guys that are well, there's two, some guys at the bench players getting a workout during soccer specifically. But then the guys getting a workout after the game, both the bench players and some starters there was just talking the other day and were showing some footage. Jalen hurts getting it in after he went off for like 500 yards. So the guy's getting workouts after a game.

Coach Bob King (06:16):

Well, what we don't fully know. I mean, we kind of do, but scientifically we don't know where's your limit, you know, unless you just push it to the limit, to where you're, you know, you can't take another step. Most athletes work out at a high level, hard enough that the game is easier, you know? That's what offseason is all about. We're going to make, you know, winter workouts and football, such a grind that practice and games are easy. And I know when I played in the seventies at tech, we had, we had spring workouts and fall workouts. It's like anything after this is going to be easy. And so they've already built that into the system. And so when they go out and back to the pro game when Mavericks were not getting 20 minutes on the court, in the game, you're with me after the game.

Coach Bob King (07:04):

And then we had one in once in a while, a starter would come out and he might not have the minutes he wanted. So he would get extra, they want to be ready to play beyond what they're used to playing. Do you know? So there's always overtime possibilities. There's always like you know, if, if I'm so good that I make you go three and out and football all the time, I'm going to get all the reps. So we don't want to play or condition to a point of, okay, this many games, this many reps or plays or minutes of the game, we want to play beyond that. And so over time, no problem,

Aaron King (07:37):

NBA fascinates me because the schedule is so different than the NFL, or just football and basketball are just so different football. It's you have a very, you know, weekly, it's a routine, you know, you know what your Tuesdays and Thursdays are kinds of going to look like traveling is a very variable there, but the NBA, you have the 82 games, and that's where you have to kind of, you gotta manage the middle of the season, get ready to, you know, get ready for the playoffs. So how do you, how do you balance that over the course of you have these little cycles off, we might have back to backs, we have travel. But then we also have several months that we have to sustain.

Coach Bob King (08:13):

It's very difficult. I know that my biggest challenge was the bench players. My first five or six guys, they're going to, they're going to have minutes. When we travel to the NBA, we can't always be sure that the visiting city is going to have a weight room. We need to maintain strength. And so that was always a huge challenge. So hopefully when we got home for a lengthy homestand, I got my bench players going as much as I could. I mean, we ran before practice. We'd have usually team conditioning. And so we just kept them moving because the road was a killer in the NBA because everybody knows the third-day rule. He wakes up, goes to the hotel drawer and finds Gideon's Bible, and says, welcome to San. Okay. That's where we are tonight. And so it was, it's always really tough to do that. Cause you play, go to the airport, fly to the next city, get up. And hopefully, you're in a city where there is a facility. I can run my programs with the players.

Aaron King (09:09):

Look, I think that those are starting to pick up. Now some of the new facilities that are, that are popping up every day. So the next thing now, any parent, who's hearing this thinking, well, I need to run my kid before or after everything we're talking about is kind of pro-level maybe college, but now let's apply it to the youth athlete where you can have burnout and over-training, and those things that kind of can kick into a developing athlete.

Coach Bob King (09:34):

Well,  we've always borrowed from other sports. So in track and field, they have training called quality versus quantity. So if I'm coaching 1,630, 200-meter runners, we're going to go out and run 30, 40, maybe 50 minutes and get that quantity. And then speed days. We want to get the quality, good reps of speed and, and technique and things. Well, you take that principle of quality versus quantity to the lower levels. It's really about quality, you know, because if you want to say, practice makes permanent, then you can't just go out and run to run and hope that, you know, things are going well because techniques break down and become permanently bad until they're corrected, of course, but with the younger ones, get them I know I always recommend doing like a time to the man of practice or training.

Coach Bob King (10:23):

You have 30 minutes and at the end of 30 minutes, you're done. And that way with kids, what I have done is like, from up to up to, let's say junior high, maybe seventh grade, whatever middle school you might be in up to that point, we're just getting exposed to training and running and lifting and, and liking it. And then in middle school, now that you're in a competition you're not playing anymore because they're keeping score and they're starters and non-starters, and there are coaches and coaches move on as opposed to youth leagues where everybody plays the parents or the coaches, things change in the middle school, that kind of academic structure. So what we want them to do is get into middle school now say, okay you're not in a formal off-season in the summer, but if you want to come to work out and lift and run, we can do that.

Coach Bob King (11:13):

Now you move up to high school, all options are off. You will work out, you will lift weights and you will condition and you will work hard. And so there's a graduated approach to how this does to keep the mind interested and keep the body from being worn out. Because in my career I've seen just enough, 13, 12 to 14, let's say year olds with overuse injuries, from whatever sport they're doing or that a parent, multiple sports well, and that becomes a big problem. And so they go from one to the next, there needs to be an offseason downtime. It's a real fine line because some of the best athletes in the world played multiple sports up through high school, which I recommend. But at some point in this culture today, there's no offseason. Every sport's got 365 days now. I mean, you can play, just pick one baseball and you have your baseball season and you have fall ball and you have showcased and you have summer camp and it goes and goes and goes. There is no break. There needs to be a break.

Aaron King (12:13):

All right, well, if you have any research or questions or anything, please leave a comment below. If you're on YouTube you can reach out to us on Twitter, Instagram, he's @CoachBobKing, I'm @DeepSnap go to KingSportsTraining.com to get workouts courses, all sorts of content that supports kind of what we're doing here for one application to get training. But again we, I can't, I cannot urge this enough if you are a researcher or a doctor and, you know something technical that we maybe should've mentioned or didn't mention, we always want to know the latest studies or anything. So we'd love to hear that. So reach out to us. You can always email us as well but just go to Kingsportstraining.com, check it out. But we'll talk to you next time. I'm Aaron King's coach Bob King. Thanks for tuning in