"Training to Lose" Chinese fencing article

[Capt. Slo-mo]

From the AFP:

"When Frenchman Christian Bauer saw the Chinese fencing team he was hired to train for the Olympics the first thing he did was to send them all home...."

http://www.france24.com/en/20080507-...lympic-chances

[Peach]

Excellent article. It isn't only the Chinese who don't understand the role that rest plays in making top-quality athletes, though.

[Mr Epee]

Quality article. Good find.

I've, personally, had the pleasure of enjoying a few dozen bouting/training sessions with the Chinese team (99-01), when they were staying in Budapest and participating in the international training nights. They were all very entertaining to fence and interact with during the sessions. Zhao was obscenely talented when he was "feeling it". He would occasionally absolutely shred members of the Hungarian squad. As a consequence, I think they started to dodge him, because he was usually free for a bout.

However, the most memorable part of the experience was watching them do loads of wind sprints after every exhaustive session. It was a little intimidating to watch, but mostly we just sat around thinking "WTF are these guys doing", and "How is that possibly a good idea."

These guys were regularly training PAST the point of exhaustion at the height of the European World Cup season. Bizarre.

On the other hand, they were still making very good results.

[jjefferies]

Originally Posted by Mr Epee

Quality article. Good find.
:
However, the most memorable part of the experience was watching them do loads of wind sprints after every exhaustive session. It was a little intimidating to watch, but mostly we just sat around thinking "WTF are these guys doing", and "How is that possibly a good idea."

These guys were regularly training PAST the point of exhaustion at the height of the European World Cup season. Bizarre.

On the other hand, they were still making very good results.

UhOh! PLEASE Don't let this out!. IF they do well this year my coach will undoubtedly pick this up. He loves any excuse to pile on more exercise. I can just barely handle the wind sprints before practice.

[Peach]

Originally Posted by jjefferies

UhOh! PLEASE Don't let this out!. IF they do well this year my coach will undoubtedly pick this up. He loves any excuse to pile on more exercise. I can just barely handle the wind sprints before practice.

Give your coach the article instead--it points out the value of NOT piling on the exercise.

[D+F+P=Hadouken!]

I'll express an unpopular sentiment.

Sometimes its neccasarry to overtrain far and beyond your "capabilities". Nothing creates a hard edge better than destroying your past conceptions of what you can and cannot do.

But generally, overtraining is bad.

[Mr Epee]

Originally Posted by D+F+P=Hadouken!

I'll express an unpopular sentiment.

Sometimes its neccasarry to overtrain far and beyond your "capabilities". Nothing creates a hard edge better than destroying your past conceptions of what you can and cannot do.

But generally, overtraining is bad.

Pushing yourself to the limit (perceived) and beyond can be a very positive and reaffirming athletic experience.

Agreed.

That, however, is not the same thing as overtraining. Overtraining specifically refers to pushing past the point of positive return, and results in physical breakdown of the body. Overtraining often requires weeks/months of recovery. An athlete attempting to achieve peak performance would find intentional overtraining to be a profound step in the wrong direction; a massive step backwards.

I know what you're talking about, and agree with you. But let's call it over-performing. Shall we? Or does anyone know an actual term.

Originally Posted by jjefferies

UhOh! PLEASE Don't let this out!. IF they do well this year my coach will undoubtedly pick this up. He loves any excuse to pile on more exercise. I can just barely handle the wind sprints before practice.

Like Peach already mentioned... the article explains why this wasn't the best approach.

Yes, the Chinese ME team made some very good results those seasons. But they tended to be very erratic in their results. The same fencer (with one exception, Wang iirc) rarely turned in consistent top performances.

Yes, sometimes epee is like that.

I don't have any hard information, but I'd lay part of the blame for their inconsistency on the fencer's/coach's approach to training. Constantly training past exhaustion could easily lead to erratic performance, because the athlete will be unsure (more than usual) about what their body will provide for them that day.

This isn't a statement against hard training... only a comment about training hard at the appropriate time.

[D+F+P=Hadouken!]

Originally Posted by Mr Epee

Pushing yourself to the limit (perceived) and beyond can be a very positive and reaffirming athletic experience.

Agreed.

That, however, is not the same thing as overtraining. Overtraining specifically refers to pushing past the point of positive return, and results in physical breakdown of the body. Overtraining often requires weeks/months of recovery. An athlete attempting to achieve peak performance would find intentional overtraining to be a profound step in the wrong direction; a massive step backwards.

I know what you're talking about, and agree with you. But let's call it over-performing. Shall we? Or does anyone know an actual term.

I would actually term overtraining as the point where you start seeing some physical and psychosomatic symptoms. Depression and overuse injuries are the ones that come to mind.

There are some S&C coaches that find scheduled overtraining to be very effective. Generally it goes along the lines of high load, frequency and volume for 2-3 weeks (or however much it takes to mentally turn Archie into Ted Kaczynski) and then a 1-1.5 weeks off laying at the beach and chasing tail.

The guy who comes to mind in this instance is a canadian coach, Charles Poliquin, who uses this method for busting plateaus with his athletes. Might be worth some reading.

[ddavis]

Originally Posted by Mr Epee

I know what you're talking about, and agree with you. But let's call it over-performing. Shall we? Or does anyone know an actual term.

I think I have heard this called "over-reaching." It (unlike over-training) _may_ have a place in a well designed training cycle.

[freerider258]

When do you reach the point when you start "over-training". How do you decifer if you can or should keep going. Like, how do you know if running more sprints will be a good idea, since you have some energy left, or a bad idea, because you are already exhausted.

[Squall_Leonhart]

like everything else, I think you'd have to try first. Everyone starts somewhere, and it's usually not the same place as everyone else.
Overtraining, means you don't give your body time to rest and build muscles. A good rule is for any training you can do in the gym (free-weights, calisthenics, etc.) for every 5-6 days, you need one day of rest.
Exercise(if you don't know about the biology part of it) actually damages your muscles a little bit. It breaks down and rearranges and builds new fibers. If you don't give your body the time and energy it needs to do that, you continue to break down the muscle you already have and never build new ones.
That being said, with overtraining, a decent place to start is to do a timed whatever. Whether it be a mile, 100m-dash, how my p/r you can do in a minute, etc. Time yourself and go 100% the first time. After your training regimen, time yourself with the same standards again. If your numbers are significantly less than what you started with and you know it's not because the first week of training made you sore, it is possible that you're forcing your body to eat up its own muscles, so you can't build any, hence, you remain slow(relatively).

Hope this helped.

[Grasshopper]

Asians are generally physically smaller than their competitors and there is a real focus here on "compensating" for that by training harder and longer than other countries or by using unorthodox techniques. In fencing however, the physical aspect is only one part of the sport and both China and Japan have woken up to that recently - partly thru the influence of foreign coaches. When it comes down to it, size does not matter.

[gatsby]

so ummm...
it seems like youre saying that asians have some sort of inferiority complex and feel the need to 'compensate?' i'm not sure i'd phrase it that way at all.

i think i'd rather say that many asian countries are perhaps newer to some sports (fencing and such), and adopt some 'unorthodox' training methods to try to succeed?

in other words:
maybe they work hard so that they can do well in areas they're kind of new to.

[Jason]

Originally Posted by gatsby

so ummm...
it seems like youre saying that asians have some sort of inferiority complex and feel the need to 'compensate?' i'm not sure i'd phrase it that way at all.

i think i'd rather say that many asian countries are perhaps newer to some sports (fencing and such), and adopt some 'unorthodox' training methods to try to succeed?

in other words:
maybe they work hard so that they can do well in areas they're kind of new to.

Right, and women should be given the vote.
Go back to Woodstock, hippy!

[HDG]

Originally Posted by gatsby

so ummm...
it seems like youre saying that asians have some sort of inferiority complex and feel the need to 'compensate?' i'm not sure i'd phrase it that way at all.

I think they said it themselves right in the article:

Following her London win, Zhou's coach Liang Songli defended his training methods.
In a television interview, he repeated the often-heard argument here that Chinese athletes start off with a natural physical disadvantage to westerners so they have to work that much harder.

[sloper]

I don't buy the physical disadvantage bit, although I think it creates a powerful underdog message that probably helps.

I think it's more about Chinese sports valuing the individual less for cultural and practical reasons.

If you've got a billion people, you can play survival of the fittest with sports training. There's always a new bunch of kids dying to try. Kill off 95% and you're still left with a large pool of very tough athletes. If you lose a brilliant, once-in-a-generation individual along the way, it's not that important in the overall scheme of things.

[Tyldak]

I have done fencing and Chinese martial arts, and both included being trained by (former) top/professional athletes from China. The stories they tell of the kinds of training they went through during their teen years are almost unbelievable. Just the other day one of my martial arts teachers said that her typical daily workout was sandwiched in-between two, count 'em, TWO 8-mile runs. They lived, breathed, ate, and slept training from ages 13ish to 23ish. She "retired" about 5 years ago, but she still has dreams where she wakes up with a shot in the middle of the night, feeling stressed out that she's late for her training session.

I can hear Professor Czajkowski now railing, "And how do 8 mile runs or wind sprints improve one's fencing?!?!" The Professor argues very convincingly that the best training for fencing is fencing, and those exercises which directly correlate to fencing actions (e.g. footwork, lessons), not general fitness exercises (running, jumping rope, etc.).

Jason can elaborate on that much better than I...!