Big business frequently looks to the sporting world for fresh approaches to improve teamwork, motivation and goal setting. All too often the focus tends to be on the high achievers and their results, whilst overlooking the need to plan, develop and perform more like their sporting heroes.

The modern business trend is to adopt an increasingly flexible or agile business model.

In this article we will examine some of the techniques used by athletes and their coaches and explore how these can be harnessed to support such a business environment.

The Athletic context

Let’s take a 400m hurdler as our example. This event is considered one of the toughest track events because of its need for high levels of technical skill, speed, stamina and strength. What does it take to create an elite hurdler?

First, we must recognize that elite athletes are developed over long periods of time and are never overnight successes. It takes 10 years of extensive practice to excel in anything[1] and scientific research has concluded that it takes eight to twelve years of training for a talented athlete to reach elite levels[2]. This is called the ten-year or 10,000 hour rule. For athletes, coaches and parents, this translates as slightly more than three hours of practice daily for ten years[3].

This means that planning has to be long term. A young athlete just starting out as a hurdler is unlikely to be ready to compete in the next Olympics. Accepting that planning has to be long term we can set about the developing the athlete through careful training and scheduling.

Development

Athletes train to get fit, but what does ‘fit’ really mean? At its simplest, its the ability to carry out day to day tasks without getting tired and still have energy left to cope with unforeseen emergencies. However, for the elite athlete it needs to be much more than this. “Fitness” applies to a specific task. Being fit to run the 400m hurdles does not automatically mean you are fit to run a marathon. There are six components of athletic fitness that are more commonly known as the six S’s.

1. Stamina
2. Strength
3. Speed
4. Suppleness
5. Skill
6. Shape.

The relative importance of each component varies with the task in hand. For instance our hurdler will be concerned primarily with Speed, Suppleness and Skill, whereas the marathon runner will be more concerned with Stamina.

To improve on these six components the athlete must follow some basic training principles.

Specificity Its essential to do right sort of training for your event – Clearly there is no benefit to a marathon runner training over hurdles.

Progression A training programme must be progressive and iterative to take you from where you are to where you want to be. In 1972 swimmer John Naber set a goal of winning the 100m backstroke at the 1976 Olympics. In order to do this he would need to improve his best time by five seconds. He broke the five seconds down into the number of hours he had available to train, calculating that he would need to improve by one twelve hundredth of a second for each hour he trained. He reasoned that since this equated to one fifth of the blink of an eye, then his goal was achievable. It was, he won the gold, breaking the world record in the process.

Overload All training is based on the overload principle. To get better you must apply stress to the body. The body is broken down by the stress and reacts by strengthening itself allowing it to take more stress next time.

Recovery The body does not improve during training, it improves in the rest period after training. Simple rule, no rest, no improvement. The athlete must be allowed time to recover after any bout of stress training. ‘Over training’ frequently happens with elite athletes and it is essential to be aware of the symptoms and the consequences.

Reversibility Use it or lose it. If you don’t use the improvements you have made to your body then it will return to its original state.

Any training programme should follow the ‘FITT’ strategy. The approach recognizes that to maintain motivation it is necessary to vary the following factors:

1. Frequency – how often the athlete is stressed
2. Intensity – how much stress
3. Time - how long the stress lasts
4. Type – how the stress is applied

Figure 1 demonstrates an ideal training programme (progressive, overloading and allowing good recovery). The athlete trains hard in the first session (the first dip in the curve) and then rests, allowing the body to super-compensate and increase the fitness level to the first peak. In the second training session the athlete is put under stress again and with sufficient recovery is allowed to bounce up to a new, even higher level of fitness (the second peak).

However, as figure 2 demonstrates, it is easy to get the plan wrong. In this case the athletes is following a progressive, overloading schedule, but without the proper recovery. As with the first chart, the athlete trains hard in the first session but is not allowed sufficient time to recover from the stress. When the second session starts the athlete is already at a fitness level below the original baseline. If this pattern is not broken than the athlete will continue on a downward spiral. This is known as ‘over training’.

The symptoms of over training.

● A decrease in performance

● Aches and pains in muscles

● Fatigue/tiredness and insomnia

● Elevated morning pulse

● Headaches

● Inability to complete training sessions

● Susceptibility to illness

Scheduling

Coaches tend to follow the principle of periodisation for their athletes. Periodizing your training plan means dividing up your long-term training program into discreet cycles and varying both training intensity and skill set from one cycle to the next. Working at different levels of intensity over time improves your overall fitness, teaches you to cope with fatigue both physically and mentally, makes training more enjoyable, lowers your risk of injury and helps you to avoid the dangers of over training.

The cycles are:

Macrocycle The high level cycle is known as a macrocycle and would typically represent one competitive season. Our hurdler would have one, sometimes two macrocycles in a year. The macrocycle is then divided into mesocycles.

Mesocycle A macrocycle consists of three mesocycles preparation, competition and transition.

Mesocycles are then split into a number of microcycles.

Microcycle Typically a few days long, they represent a collection of training sessions

So a simple schedule for our hurdler might look like this:

A macrocycle of five months, three specific mesocycles and approximately twenty microcycles each of one week.

A schedule like this would bring an athlete to peak level towards the end of August, usually for a major competition.

Macrocycle

Preparation mesocycle

Competition mesocycle

Transition mesocycle

micro

micro

micro

micro

micro

micro

micro

micro

micro

micro

micro

micro

micro

micro

micro

micro

micro

micro

micro

micro

May

June

July

August

September

The preparation phase builds the athlete both physically and mentally to full fitness. The work in this phase will mainly consist of high volume and lower intensity.

The competition phase is where the goals are met. This consists mainly of low volume but extremely high intensity work or races.

The transition is an essential phase as it allows the athlete to recover from the highs (or lows) or the competition phase and mentally and physically recharge before the next macrocycle begins.

How does this relate to testing?

None of this is rocket science. If we want a healthy athletes they need the right preparation. the same is true for testers. We’re all human beings, why should it be any different?
So why do we push our testers so hard? Late nights, long weekends are seen as essential to showing your commitment to the project. When things get tough its all hands to the pump. But let’s just imagine a top athlete is approaching the Olympics - would we expect them to train through the night in the last few weeks before competition?

I’d like to follow this up in a future blog, but would appreciate your thoughts.

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[1] H Simon, Nobel Laureate

[2] Bloom 1985; Ericsson et al. 1993; Ericsson and Charness 1994

[3] Salmela 1998

Tags: agile

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 30th, 2008 at 11:52 by Jon Tilt. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.