Yup. The bulkiness and stiffness that naturally develops as a result of powerlifting is actively harmful to basketball ability.
This is just not true. Bulk and stiffness comes from lightweight voluminous workouts. Body building type workouts. Don’t believe me? Watch the 70s documentary about mr universe with Arnold and all those guys. They can barely lift their arm and rotate their torso to throw a football. The bulk you see from our guys is just the normal increase in muscle from skinny kids who lift for the first time. Or it is the change in body fat percentage making their muscles more visible.
Dense, explosive muscle is built through heavy strength training. This type of strength training also reduces injury (see fletch Twitter for multiple scholarly articles on this).
Weight training is also not the only part of the fletch regimen. He consistently works on their flexibility and trains the central nervous system to build connections and help neurons fire faster. He is a also a huge proponent of core stability.
The real culprit is we just haven’t had athletic dudes in general. Mav for example. His athleticism maxed out after fletch controlled him for 2 years. He got considerably more cut due to dropping body fat, but the point remains, we were all excited that a 7 foot dude could finally finish consistently with a dunk. Base level of athleticism matters a lot more.
Yeah, there's some ideas being tossed around here that our guys are "powerlifting" to pack on mass. Without sounding like too much of a bro, power lifting is a very specific type of training that is most definitely not the centerpiece of Fletch's training with our players. While squats, deadlifts, and bench are displayed over social media, there is a ton of conditioning & behind the scenes work that is very basketball focused. Fletch knows what he's doing.
Man, I remember seeing this same weight training issue brought up during the Eddie Johnson years (not on here...don't even know if this site existed back then).
Everyone was concerned that the weight training would affect the players' shooting. I guess it worked out OK for EJ.
That would have been a few years before Al Gore invented the internet!Man, I remember seeing this same weight training issue brought up during the Eddie Johnson years (not on here...don't even know if this site existed back then).
Everyone was concerned that the weight training would affect the players' shooting. I guess it worked out OK for EJ.
That would have been a few years before Al Gore invented the internet!
The four players transferring or graduating gave the Illini about 15 points a game in the big ten and they won four games. Does anyone really think that would improve next year? Let's give our coaches the opportunity to develop their own players and support our Illini.
#3 for Purdue, Edwards? Looks pretty damn solid across the shoulders.
This is just not true. Bulk and stiffness comes from lightweight voluminous workouts. Body building type workouts. Don’t believe me? Watch the 70s documentary about mr universe with Arnold and all those guys. They can barely lift their arm and rotate their torso to throw a football. The bulk you see from our guys is just the normal increase in muscle from skinny kids who lift for the first time. Or it is the change in body fat percentage making their muscles more visible.
Dense, explosive muscle is built through heavy strength training. This type of strength training also reduces injury (see fletch Twitter for multiple scholarly articles on this).
Weight training is also not the only part of the fletch regimen. He consistently works on their flexibility and trains the central nervous system to build connections and help neurons fire faster. He is a also a huge proponent of core stability.
The real culprit is we just haven’t had athletic dudes in general. Mav for example. His athleticism maxed out after fletch controlled him for 2 years. He got considerably more cut due to dropping body fat, but the point remains, we were all excited that a 7 foot dude could finally finish consistently with a dunk. Base level of athleticism matters a lot more.
I left out Black in my estimate but I Wii be surprised if Griffin and Damonte won't more than make up for the other three . I also think the freshmen bigs and Ebo improving will more than make up for Leron departure
I agree with most your point but that part is not true. Bulk comes from lifting HEAVY weights and stiffness comes from not stretching properly. It is the difference between fast twitch fibers and slow twitch. Fast twitch are bigger and used for explosiveness, like a power clean or jumping high. Slow twitch are for your endurance and "pump".
For a simpler example - Look at a power lifter. He didn't get that way by throwing around 15lb weights 50 times. And that documentary is called "Pumping Iron". It is a fantastic watch if you like fitness. Or just wanna watch Arnold smoking a joint
Lifting heavy weights with an emphasis on explosion within the movement is what creates fast twitch muscle fibers. Some people call this powerlifting, but powerlifting is its own sport. Fletch seems to prefer heavy strength training, usually based around “power” lifts such as the squat or deadlift, and “explosive” lifts such as the clean. There is also quite a bit of research out there (again check fletch’s twitter as he randomly posts this stuff) that indicates heavy strength training increases flexibility and reduces injury.
You talk about pump. Powerlifters don’t work out for the pump. They work out for pure strength. Hence, they generally lift heavy weights for less than 6 reps per set, and probably not more than 5 sets (which still feels high). The auxiliary exercises are also for pure strength gains to help the main lifts.
Body builders do want the pump. The best pump is achieved through high volume, which as you say builds slow twitch fibers, which are not as useful for basketball. High volume is the best way to increase muscle mass (or bulk which I use interchangeably), which is why a lot of body building based workouts are high in repetition.
Id really encourage everybody to follow fletch and read some of the scholarly articles he posts or retweets on the subject.
Before I broached this topic, I said to myself "Self, you're probably going to bring a dump truck of weirdly uncomfortable weight room jargon down on your head, are you sure you want to do this?" and I stupidly ignored that voice.
Before I broached this topic, I said to myself "Self, you're probably going to bring a dump truck of weirdly uncomfortable weight room jargon down on your head, are you sure you want to do this?" and I stupidly ignored that voice.
It depends on how people view the holes needing to be filled. We still need more help in the frontcourt in order for next years group to be seen as upgrade, but I'm not looking at the posts to make up for Leron's production. Our guards struggled to score consistently which made us depend entirely on Black and Frazier at times. I don't expect the same issue next year with our guards, but if they struggle as a whole between the 1-3 like this past year, then we're going to have a similar record. If we have average offensive production from our bigs but better defense, I think we'll be an improved unit. We're still one transfer big away from that though. We need a Sam McLaurin type IMO..
Before I broached this topic, I said to myself "Self, you're probably going to bring a dump truck of weirdly uncomfortable weight room jargon down on your head, are you sure you want to do this?" and I stupidly ignored that voice.