Five Star Fitness 24 hour Gym in Thomastown
Well Chris Guccione has left to the US after spending 3 months rehabilitating his achilles and then getting fit to play. I enjoyed the experience and look forward to seeing Chris play again. Chris lives in the Northern Suburbs and used the 24/7 facility in Thomastown (Five Star Fitness) owned by Tony Mercuri. Amazing place and one of the first if not the first 24/7 gym around. Costs $3, 30 to train there and there is a massive amount of gear and also a separate ladies only gum. I use it heaps and Chris also did lots of sessions there since December. Here is a pic of me with Chris….Geez I thought I was 5 11 but have to confess to 5 10….Oh well.
Here is a link to the website.
Tennis and overtraining. Maybe just more the problem?
My background was track and field and I was lucky to train in Europe and listen to many of the gurus that underpinned periodization. Tschiene, Bondarchuk and so on.
Trained sprinters then and moved into the AFL from 1987 to 2007. Volleyball, netball and many other sports.
So I have tested and seen first hand how people train, how much and how intensely. And the results. Things change of course every year and sometimes athletes push barriers. Clubs do more in training etc. But always there remains a breaking point.
But even in my days with Franz Stampfl who sometimes did huge loads, I can always remember him “getting out of gaol” by giving an athlete 5 days totally off before a competition of importance. 5 days. HA….
We all are privy to stories of swimmers who missed their taper and peaked whilst on holidays after a competition.
I have never known a sport where athletes train so much as tennis in Australia. They just seemed obsessed. It is actually quite odd. The courts are like rock and they just cannot wait to get on court and hit. Yet when I test tennis players they are not particularly outstanding. Often random kids turn up and test better. Maybe it is a TID factor but I think it is the monotonous slow training.
Kids who are super fit aerobically and are a bit slow but can play often do really well as young players. Who cares. Nice for them but what happens when the hormones kick in. Whoosh one needs power and speed and repeat speed. Yes and of course an adequate aerobic base.
Netball players who train and play 5 days a week at high intensity look more toned and in fact are often fitter. They nearly always test heaps faster at every age group and every level. It is weird. Tennis players just are catabolic half the time. It seems to me that lack of planning and continuous monotmous loads are a real problem.The weeks roll on and on and the loads ( yawn) are high and the training is full of junk and core and slow things and volume and hitting when the body is just rooted.
Thus we generally have slow players who train at sub maximal speeds and then have to click up a gear in top notch comp.
What does the rest of the world do? Seems there are some smart ones but also lots of broken down bodies and minds in this sport. Forget the Russian formula. Won’t work here. Simple. So the more professional we get the more the sport is running out of control.
I can understand the need for more clay courts also given what I see.
We respect things like the beeper test too much in tennis in OZ when maybe we need to look at a more specific ability. Can they play, can they move and have they had a comprehensive mulitaleteral development.
The data to me suggests overtraining. Most coaches in OZ are what I call “slow-coaches”.That is an opinion at this stage but we have a massive tennis industry and there has been a massive amount of hitting in the last ten years, and coaches making players do suicides on court and then calling that speed and movement.
Parents see this and are happy given in their ignorance often they equate this to a formula for success.
Again let me assess this one again in a few years. The AIS seems to be getting good people in and there seems to be a core group of people in Tennis Australia that are on top of this. And there is a push with TID and seems some good kids and good fitness guys starting to move in. Hope it changes a culture of “slow-coaches”.
Josh and Chris…..Sports Scientists? Visit to mygene…..
Paid a visit to mygene in South Yarra today. Josh Ross and Chris Guccione came along also and had a look at the operations and in fact provided a sample for analysis which will be interesting. All totally private information for the athlete and coach but certainly genetic testing for sport is a new frontier and I will be able provide people with their product and of course back up advice on training and developmental needs.
Bit worried about the white coats but maybe they have found their new career for after sport!
Dannielle Hulett is my niece and is their scientist and I am very proud of her achievements.
Anyway will chat further on this area. Thought the pics were ok for the moment!
The tall one is Chris Guccione and er the shorter one is Josh Ross……The bloke below…er me
Josh Ross, NFL and St Albans!
This is an article from Sundays press.
Josh was coached recently by a good mate of mine Adam Larcom and won the Nationals last year with Adam. Adam was an assistant at a number of AFL clubs and also head fitness co-ordinator at Fremantle AFL before completing his physiotherapy studies. Josh retired after the Worlds and one day he just appeared in another mate’s gym in Saint Albans. Health Club 101 which is owned by Paul and Rebecca Galea. They have helped Josh with training facilities and he spent pre-xmas pumping iron deep in Saint Albans. They have a great gym.
Anyway another mate of mine, Piero Sacchetta-Ex OZ Jav Champ ( I have heaps of friends!) started talking to Josh about NFL. I contacted Nathan Chapman from PROKICK and now we have Josh on you tube and even in the main print today.
So watch this space and good luck to all concerned. Worth a go given what I saw. Can catch, can run and can jump!
Training Loads in Tennis. How much is enough?
Reading journals such as the British Journal of Sports Medicine or other journals of Sports research etc there are lots of articles or studies on the physiological effects of playing tennis. From HR data to lactate and RPE anlaysis there is heaps of info to provide some background to the impact of tennis.
Players in Australia seem to just train and train. That doesn’t seem to be the problem. Yet often their fitness tests are very poor. Doesn’t make sense.
Everyone seems to say it is different and yet no one seems to want to draw a line in the sand and say ..”hey, this exists an optimal load for a training block and an optimal load for a competitive block.”
Players seem to me to train at low intensity or use huge volumes.
I use perceived exertion data to get some feel for the loadings needed in tennis. I think players go into tournamants at 80/90% optimal states quite often. If they are lucky to win a match they then just freshen up a bit.
Coaches in general in Australia will not accept Sports Science. That is an opinion. They say they do then say a player is mentally weak and train them for another 2 hours if they lose. Some just go back to the old days of OZ tennis.
I was lucky to evolve with Track and Field from the early 70’s till now and see the whole specificity of loadings and relationship to performance. Then in AFL I went from the VFL to the AFL and from HR monitors to RPE data to GPS data and saw clubs evolve to accept loading dogma. HA! Why? because they won more if they did and CEO’s said whoa you coaches, adapt or perish!
Tennis is weird. It is one BIG IMBROGLIO…….I call it the AAAAAGHHHHHHHHHH principle of training. Condiitoning staff seem scared of coaches and everyone just does their own thing.
So as a result we have players doing massive loads who lose in RD 1 of qualifyings.
Intensity and Volume. There must exist some optimal loads in tennis.
Forget the studies on the impact of tennis on physiology!
How much is enough to win matches given all things ( Skills etc) being equal.
Invite your feedback
Specificity of running in Tennis
Watching Andy Murray running down balls in his semi final at the Australian Open made me think. There is a lot of literature in tennis fitness about the need for speciic running versus traditional training. We hear time and time again about how 80% or more of running is multidirectional and less than 4metres.
Recently I watched a powerpoint by Mark Kovacs from the USTA who superimposed Blake off the mark with Tyson Gay and showed the differences in gait.
But watching Murray it seemed that the key points involved 100% explosive running efforts. I think there is a need for a really good EMG study on this topic.
Often players are running laterally with their upper body twisted, but hips pointing in the direction they are running to. Thus in this case I would assume hamstring and quads are contracting maximally and whilst moving across the court it is essentially a straight line burst.
So how are these statistics compiled about movement needs in elite tennis? This is important because it impinges on training needs.
Just seems to me that the big boys really run heaps.
Food for thought.
Australian Tennis Open. SEN reports Nicole Pratt saying we have to start young?
Listening to Andrew Gaze and Tim Watson on SEN today chatting about Nicole Pratt’s opinion that kids should be pushed into early devlepopment and “leave school” etc in tennis. I haven’t heard her quotes but I did hear Todd Woddbridge also say this a few months ago. And Craig Tiley also pushed the youth development button last year.
First of all in defence of tennis in OZ is the fact that the whole world plays tennis. Everyone. All trying to get into that TOP 100. Cricket and Netball represent sports that are played in the Commonwealth so their results should be paralleled with our results in sport in the Commonwealth Games versus Olympic Games. Even sports like Rugby League are not quite international. So we need to be very careful in always saying how fantastic our sports science industry is when very few of our running based sports do as well internationally as we are led to believe.
China has 2 players in the quarters in women’s tennis and that is creating some hysteria as we speak. Of course they start young in China but also they pump massive amounts of kids through the system given the society they live in. And their society lends itself to getting kids into academies en masse and fnding the odd jewel. Wont work in OZ.
In Australia we have a different society. It takes many years to create a player. We have seen so many dysunctional people involved in tennis. So many broken dreams. Lost educations and poorly adjusted kids. So trying to say kids should leave school when a zillion people are trying to squeeze into the TOP 100 in tennis is seriously flawed.
It is a simplistic notion that if you take kids out of school and then that we will get results. This already happens. Parents who dont have enough money simply cannot afford tennis yet pay huge amounts to achieve the dream. And parents have morgtaged their house to get results and oten they get zero return and a heap of problems. This should never happen.
How the hell are we going to nab the right 10 year old? WHo knows at that age
Our tennis clubs have no structure to maintain kids that cannot afford tennis. We have no club tennis to keep players in the game to develop. This is a sport where the coach athlete relationship is pivotal. There is a role for institutes like the AIS and VIS but this must be more in the form of a transit point for young players.
We need to create an Australian system where kids are made to stay at school till puberty at least. They need to study all day and train at night. Play AFL and netball as kids. There is a complete lack of evidence that kids not going to school will work. What happens when they have a bad year in the 14 YO age group?. Do we go to the next player? NEXT! What happens if the young player is not at school? In a way tennis often is an excuse for young players to not go to school. HA.
Add to this is the mature age of players in tennis. Lets not forget this. Average age of the women’s TOP 100 is 24. A long way of 12. If we get players in the top 20 it wont be 15 players. It may be we have 2 to 3 which would be great. So what happens to the 100’s of kids who leave school in OZ. Forget the TOP 100 let alone TOP 100 in Australia.
Simply one has to create a huge base. Pinpoint the child prodigy and nurture the talent. Be aware that a problem in OZ is that tennis is too expensive. Better to play AFL and not spend money. Systems need to be put in place which allow young players to not spend as much on their development , so that one can track the next tier of players from 12 to 18 which is critical in development.
It is not as simple as start them young!
In fact I find many of these pre pubertal players totally overtrained and injured. The issue is not how much they train but how well they are developped over 10 to 15 years. I have had a good look at the tennis industry in Australia and quality is the key ingredient missing not quantity. Coaches, players and parents hardly know what they did the day before or the week before. It is just a big “IMBROGLIO” .
Track and Field, Weightlifitng and Power Lifting. More important than AFL.
AFL, netball and cricket have high participation rates. I love AFL footy. But these 3 sports will probably never be international sports despite some of the press recently. And in these sports one just needs a mix of fitness and athleticism.
And all these team sports ( and others) are contrived sports based on arbitrary rules or specific equipment. Track and Field, Weightlifting,Power lifting even swimming are really pure sports that almost 100% reflect fitness, strength and conditoning levels of the athlete and thus require pure training methodology.
In reality participation rates are very high in athletics given little athletics. Ahletics (or track and field) is a fundamental sport. The ability to run fast and also run long and fast is a critical need in many sports. And weight training and power development underpin nearly all sports.
But more Athletics has been the sport which simply has underpinned the understanding of how to run faster and longer/faster, jump higher/longer or throw further.
Trial and error combined with research has created the knowledge base which is utilized by strength and conditioning staff and fitness gurus worldwide. Not a laboratory. Certainly not human movement courses.
In track and field one has to find the extra .01 secs or the extra metre and this requires so much fine tuning. In team sports it is simply important to get things 95% right and get players very fit and very strong and resilient. Then added to that one has to have the best “cattle” and also wait for teams to mature with game sense and experience. Also finances become critical and so on. Thus the purity of athletic preparation is not the main ‘chase”.
I am amazed at how track and field coaches receive little funding in Australia. So many young strength and conditioning staff go straight from university to clubs and institutes and really just slot into systems. Put them to the test and tell them to fine tune sprinters and runners and many simply would fail. Yet by association they become gurus overnight. Odd.
In Australia we have this notion we are sports science leaders. Yes the AIS is awesome and some of the research is great but all these strength researchers abound and yet few can get people really powerful. Powerful people go to coaches like my brother in law Gus Puopolo who can get you to throw 20 metres plus in the shot put and bench and squat massive amounts. And his systems and training at Ringwood simply cannot be rivalled in many so called research/sports science places. Yet he receives a plaque. Weird.
The people researching sport (ie Crawford Report) need to understand that we need coaches (and athletes) striving to run faster/throw further/jump higher. It is a fundamental need and there needs to be a career path.
The spin off for OZ is a pool of people who know how to teach speed and strength and not just click a button on a GPS and connect it to a computer.
We are in danger of producing mediocre coaches who cannot see past repeated speed training and small games and gadgets to assist monitoring. I use all these gadgets but in the end I am sure Federer jumps off plyometric boxes and sprints down tracks and pumps squats more than download sports science data.
Weightlifting is also a fundamental need and yet hardly anyone knows how to lift properly now. The players at Geelong Football Club were lucky. I had people like John Minns teaching them how to squat year in and year out. We talk so much about how important power is and yet we do not encourage the sport of weightlifting (and power lifting). Yet institutions like Edith Cowan pump research out on these topics. Really odd because the people that actually can get people powerful generally reside outside these institutions.
These sports are fundamental. They are historically the main sports from Spartan days and they represent what we actually strive to often do. Run faster, lift heavier. Key needs in survival situations. Yet we are not encouraging them at suburban level.
Kids love these sports. They are key sports to develop coaches and underpin knowledge and research. Yet they are neglected at senior level. Ckubs and coaches are totally unfunded. Weird. Dumb.
Think again. People love these sports but more so they form the critical foundations for all training dogma.
When I see SLAM BALL I cringe. Kids love little athletics but really coaches do not exist after little aths and clubs are destitute. Weightlifting clubs simply hardly exist and gyms now look like factories. All weird. Yet our researchers say POWER is the key. Then they go and train on their treadmills.
Crawford Report? Have these people actually travelled and do they understand the process of training? Or are they good at marketing and political decisions?
Development Pathways in Junior Tennis? Multilateral Development and Superstars!
These anecdotes are from “GOOGLE” so one has to be careful. But it is interesting how often multilateral development comes into play in tennis when one delves into the past of great players. One issue of course that clouds tennis is that it is difficult for talented players from low socio-economic backgrounds to do well in tennis so I think pathways are a little clouded.
Nevertheless I have a suspicion that young tennis players in Australia should keep playing as many sports as possible till puberty then make a career choice. Then they will have balanced development. That is not to say that they should not have all the skills before ten for example, but I am convinced that puberty is the key to go wham bam thank you maam..
People will say Agassi or someone else started in the womb but this is reverse logic. There are thousands of tennis players and parents who invested early and got zero return apart from a junior trophy. And really the Agassi theory is clouded because he probably was simply talented also.
Again these are just little bits and pieces from Google below, but it would be interesting to draw comment on development pathways for tennis given the mature status of rankings. Talents should receive specialized coaching early but it is far better getting fitness at 11 or 12 running around chasing a ball than running laps. Also one cannot buy the decision making development that occurs by these players continuing to play invasion sports till approximtely puberty.
The problem in Australia might actually be that recently we might have forgotten the “Australian” way of development? Just a thought eh?
SOME GOOGLE BITS and PIECES which I have not verified:
***Full name is Lleyton Glynn Hewitt…Played Australian Rules Football until age 13, then decided to pursue tennis career…I
***At age eight, Nadal won an under-12 year regional tennis championship at a time where he was also a promising football player.[11] This made Toni Nadal intensify training, and at that time he encouraged Nadal to play left-handed—for a natural advantage on the tennis court, as he noticed Nadal played forehand shots with two hands.[11]
When Nadal was 12, he won the Spanish and European tennis titles in his age group and was playing tennis and football all the time.[11] Nadal’s father made him choose between football and tennis so that his school work would not deteriorate entirely. Nadal said: “I chose tennis. Football had to stop straight away.”[
***Roddick lived in Austin, Texas, from age 4 until he was 11, then moved to Boca Raton, Florida in the interest of his brother John’s tennis career,[4] where he lived, first attending Boca Prep International School which Mardy Fish and later Jesse Levine also attended, until graduating from Highlands Christian Academy in 2000.[5] Roddick played varsity basketball in high school alongside Davis Cup teammate Mardy Fish, who trained and lived with Roddick in 1999. During that time period, he sometimes trained with Venus and Serena Williams; he later moved back to Austin
***He played football until the age of twelve when he decided to focus solely on tennis.[32] At fourteen, he became the national champion of all groups in Switzerland and was chosen to train at the Swiss National Tennis Center in Ecublens. He joined the ITF junior tennis circuit in July 1996.[33] In 1998, his final year as a junior, Federer won the junior Wimbledon title and was recognized as the ITF World Junior Tennis champi
***A natural athlete, as a boy Newcombe played several sports until devoting himself to tennis. He was the Australian junior champion in 1961, 1962 and 1963 and became a member of Australia’s Davis Cup winning team in 1964.on of the year.[34]
Tennis Australia-How young should we start and why?
Tennis Australia is embarking on a massive youth policy. That is great. Having a broad base with kids who have the skills is a real need. But the evidence never stacks up that tennis is a young sport. The average age for women top 100 is always 24 approx. and for men high 24’s approx. Grand Slam fields are usually 24 to 25 average for men. Grand Slam male winners average out at 25 over many eras. Forget prodigies. Forget awesome talents like Hewitt. Tennis is the same as all other running “eccentric” sports. So why do we train 12 year olds like adults? Why don’t we track players into their 20’s? Junior ITF results keep a lot of coaches in jobs yet really are fairly meaningless like most junior sport is. Junior sport is about providing experiences and pathways. Not an end itself. Important for the player of course. But even there the average age of Male players is 17 plus and 16 plus forFemales. So when a 13 year old boy is missing out on school and not getting a multilateral physical development I cringe.
Tennis is littered with failures and broken dreams. When we will wake up. Training immature skeletons like adults is almost a crime. Parents want to see their kids flogged. It is just friggin the dumbest thing I have seen.
And when Tennis Australia encourages players to not attend normal schools what are we developing? Misfits? Do they tell the parents the truth? There is very little chance of making money in tennis? Unlike AFL where young kids earn hundreds of thousands. Where is the evidence. Who says a kid cannot play AFL till 13 then choose tennis. I think this might be a real problem.
Tennis academies throughout the world push all this of course.
Strength and Conditioning coaches need to be always aware they are dealing with children in tennis not adults.
Parents need to know that on average players enter the rankings in their 20’s.
Let’s think about all this? Maybe Australia has to hang on to players of the 15 to 20 year old bracket and keep them going instead of always going back to kids in the hope of finding a diamond. A good 18 year old male might take till 22 to go from 400 to 76 in the world. But in Australia it is too hard. Next and the same again.
| Women’s Rankings NOV 2009 | |
| 1 to 100 | 24.10 |
| 100 to 200 | 23.55 |
| 200 to300 | 23.55 |
| 300 to 400 | 22.39 |
| 400 to 500 | 22.21 |
| 500 to 600 | 21.23 |
| 600 to700 | 21.14 |
| 700 to 800 | 20.26 |
| 800 to 900 | 20.56 |
| 900 to 1000 | 19.58 |
loris bertolacci 