Soviet Philosophy of Physical Training

Copyright © 2008 DrMWSpanakos

The Soviets had a highly organized philosophical approach to physical training. They identified at least eight interrelated principles to their method of scientific sports preparation.

1. Principle of Awareness:
The Soviets believed in their athletes having conscious awareness of all processes involved in acquiring sporting proficiency. The individual athlete was required to understand the physiological and psychological processes ongoing in their mind and body so as to enable them to fully master control and objectively evaluate their sensations and responses to training and work capacity.

2. Principle of All Around Development:
Before an athlete would specialize in a sport it was necessary for them to have a solid mental and physical foundation to build upon. Speed, strength, endurance, flexibility, coordination, will power and determination and exemplary moral and cultural development were germane. Mental preparation included persuasion, explanation, example, encouragement, peer influence, self-motivation and anxiety adaptation.

3. Principle of Consecutiveness (Consistency):
This principle is based on a periodization of a systematic progressive overloading of intensity, volume, and complexity in training both the physical and mental. This applied to all periodized cycles, from macro (yearly) to micro (daily) cycles in both forward progression and reverse.

4. Principle of Repetition:
The three Soviet stages of sporting skill acquisition are consistent with Pavlov's three stages of learning.

• Development of skill knowledge through full understanding before mastering. Knowing before doing. New activities stimulate overly large areas of cerebral cortex with activation of unnecessary agonist and antagonist muscles for the particular task. A more through knowledge of the task will hasten this process. Every learning experience with motor skill acquisition can be made more productive and faster when you know what you are learning, why it is necessary to learn and how it will help. A road well known makes for easy first time travel.
• Development of motor ability through constant repetition. Developing firing patterns reducing spurious neuromuscular activity enabling concentration and focus on the precise activity. Consistent and effective movement and patterns are achieved. Later enabling voluntary focus and concentration on proprioceptive input during task execution. Moving away from visual and verbal coaching cues toward proprioceptive cues and self correction and mastery. The central nervous system at this point is activating major components and interconnections to control and execute this new motor activity.
• Development of an automatic motor response. The athlete advances and no longer concentrates on execution and can now focus on external cues while performing the skill with no inefficiency and as a conditioned motor cortex reflex. Achieving this automatic stage is essential. Inefficient patterns, intensities and timing of movements, unnecessarily recruited muscles of different degree or pattern of tension are eliminated which not only increase precise execution but reduce energy, strength requirements and injury.

5. Principle of Visualization:
The Soviets thought it very important to have a very developed ability to visualize the movements of the sport. The athlete must progress through stages of visualization by first observing demonstrations by coaches, then moving pictures, then slow motion pictures all the way to frame by frame shots. The teaching and visualization of complete and partial movements with full understanding of the kinetic components and their significance were very necessary to the development of the athlete. This activity is an extension of the first stage of learning but integrates into imaging training, performance preparation, rehearsal, overt and covert conditioning.

6. Principle of Specialization:
There were two areas of reference concerning specialization.

• Environmental specialization. Competition and intern practice should be performed regularly under the specific conditions which are encountered in the competition setting. Recreation of the competition environment in a less formal setting in which teaching and in turn learning by the athlete can take place is extremely beneficial in athlete development.
• Auxiliary training specialization. Special exercises that reinforce and perfect motor skills and patterns consistent with the sport are germane. Strength training, strength conditioning both aerobic and anaerobic, cardiovascular conditioning via both aerobic and anaerobic method are to be specialized. Most sports scientists in the United States refer to this as sport specificity.

7. Principle of Individualization:
Individual programming and design was stressed with importance. As we all know the obvious this undertakening can be laborious for coaches in particularly if you coach many athletes and are without large training facilities and staff. Individualizing programs will obviously maximize progress and potential of the athlete. But individually designed programs coordinating sports medicine, sports science and coaching personnel will require an in-depth knowledge of the athlete as well. A full medical history, psychological evaluation and a sports science/performance work up.

8. Principle of Structured Training:
Soviet athlete training was a highly structured and planned event by well trained personnel. Training was categorized in three large general stages. Preparatory or preseason training, competitive season training and transition period training. This same type plan of action was applied to individual work outs as it was to yearly work outs. Many will recognize this principle as that of "periodization". Both long term programming and short term programming is done in a cyclical fashion with macrocycles made from mesocycles made from microcycles. The concept of periodization and the formation of these cycles are to take into account and optimize the physiological abilities of the body to adaptation, recovery, restoration, growth and natural body rhythms in an effort to maximize performance results. An athlete can not sustain maximal progress in a linear fashion. Nor can an athlete sustain peak performance continuously. Hence the necessity for a cyclically progressive calculated plan both at the basic level of the daily work out all the way to peaking performance for a year ending championship event.