SAQ-A Developmental Prospective, By: Tony Reynolds, MS, CSCS, YCS II
Important Notice
Tony Reynolds, Progressive Sporting Systems Inc, and their associates
and affiliates are not affiliated with Anabolic Steroids in anyway and
do not promote or encourage the use of these drugs. His articles within this section of our site are published to offer a broad range of fitness and nutritional knowledge that will help you to achieve your health and fitness goals without the use of Anabolic Steroids.
Speed, agility, and quickness (SAQ) training is something that tends to
become a topic of heated discussion. Many coaches feel that the effort put
forth while practicing the sport is sufficient to improve these motor skills.
Their theory is that you cannot get any more sport specific than performing
the sport itself. Therefore, by training that sport, you are developing the
set of athletic skills specifically related to that sport and not wasting time
on unnecessary activities.
By participating in your sport at game intensity, you will learn and develop
Jumping and landing mechanics, acceleration, deceleration, and cutting
mechanics, increase foot speed, and develop everything else that goes
into well rounded athleticism.
The other school of coaching tends to believe that component training, or
breaking complex skills down into trainable pieces, is the best way to go
about athletic enhancement. They think that working on each motor skill
independently of the sport and than introducing the corrected skill back
into the sport is much more efficient.
Without question, dynamic human movement is extremely complex. The
simple act of walking involves very in-depth motor programming that
functions on a subconscious reflexive level.
By subconscious reflexive I mean that you do not have to think to execute
complex motor skills. If you had to think about every muscles action
while you walked it would take you days to get from the couch to the
refrigerator and your movements would look very robotic.
This reflexive motor programming starts to develop as an infant. You learn
to do very basic skills, and as you mature, the programming becomes more
complicated as does the movement. As the programming becomes more
complicated, it becomes increasing more resilient to change.
The problem is that a child is typically never truly guided through the
earlier stages of development. As infants they learn to move by trail
and error. Walking, standing, sitting, reaching, rolling over, and all
the other things that are being learned and developed are all self taught.
In North America, as children age and enter preadolescents, they
are typically steered away from programs that focus on physical
development. These children now start to build more complex
programming on top of already faulty self instructed programming.
Developmentally, it is at this age when children are the most “plastic”.
Unfortunately it is also at this age that that the introduction to structured
practice results in them repetitiously ingraining incorrect movement
mechanics.
As a result, we start to see more and more non contact injuries at younger
and younger ages. We also find that correcting these reflexive problems
becomes increasing more difficult.
These types of kids typically face more developmental problems as they
get older. Motor learning research tells us that you go through progressive
stages of learning as you acquire new skill. Some skills are similar to others,
so we are able to skip various initial stages along the way.
When issues exist within theses skipped stages, the latter stages of
Development will be negatively affected. When this happens, time
must then be spent fixing the foundational issues, before efficient motor
programming can continue to occur.
As I mentioned earlier, most motor skills are designed to function without
cognitive control. Once again you do not have to think to walk or run.
Your body will automate the process dependant upon its programming
regardless of right or wrong.
My question than becomes…If your body is running off of reflexive
automated motor programming, how are you going to fix these
developmental issues by playing your sport?
The average human brain does not possess the capacity to multi-task and
efficiently refine or learn distinct foreign skills. Most individuals are not
and can not think about improving a specific motor skill while they are in a
confrontation situation (which is truly the essence of most sport).
If you asked most athletes what they were thinking during such a
confrontational activity (such as being guarded during a lay up)they would
more than likely say, I don’t really remember thinking of anything.
I just did what was natural.
They functioned on preprogrammed information. They functioned reflexively, maybe
not efficiently, but definitely reflexively. Did this athlete actually develop or correct
any specific motor skill during this situation?
He may have learned how to better cope with the psychological stresses
involved in confrontation. He may have developed a greater efficiency in
coordinating multiple motor skills, which is important if the components are
sound, but he undoubtedly did not improve an individual motor skill.
If the athlete depended on trial and error as a process of learning movement
motor skills throughout his whole life, he probably didn’t know that
a problem existed. If this is the case, than there was definitely no effort
made for correction.
By using SAQ drills, we can isolate problems and try to fine tune erroneous
preprogrammed information while we increase their overall warehouse
of skills. We can break down gross movement skills into components that
allow an athlete to cognitively address issues that tend to be combined
into complex reflexive compound skills.
Each motor skill should than be optimized before the athlete progresses.
If they lack the coordination or ability to perform certain motor skills as
an isolated component, which is many times the case, they lack the ability
to perform them when they are integrated into chaotic confrontational
sporting situation.
Fixing these erroneous motor skills may require 1 repetition or 1000
repetitions depending on the skill and the athlete. Once the athlete
demonstrates proficiency for each individual motor skill, the skills can
than combined into motor skill clusters, or small subsets of motor skills.
When the athlete demonstrates proficiency for coordination of skills within
a subset, subsets can be combined and the process continued.
Part II of this series will deal with the actual neural acceleration (quickness)
elements I utilize in my protocols. I will be discussing how and why I utilize
the specific drills within each workout.
