Professor, Dr.Hab. I.G. Gibadullin
Associate professor, Ph.D., Honored Сoach of Russia V.G. Lazarenko
Kalashnikov Izhevsk State Technical University, Izhevsk

Keywords: sports reserve, type of power supply, stress tolerance, training process

Relevance. Most of the promising young athletes coming to most of the sport disciplines fail to adapt to the elite sport requirements and make no success entering the adult athletic categories. We believe that the core reason for this failure might be in the insufficient physiological and psychological basis for the long-term planning and control of the sports reserve training process. It has been for many decades that athletes in our country were trained based on the Training Process Periodization Theory by L.P. Matveev [15] that has always been subject to criticism. It may be pertinent to mention in this context the works by Y.V. Verkhoshansky who has been quite successfully disproving for a few decades the traditional beliefs in effectiveness of the Periodization Theory shared by most people in the sport coaching community; he argued that “it is only the biological component that must be used as a methodological and natural-scientific basis for an athletic training theory” [1; 2]. S.E. Pavlov [17] who supported this undisputable statement noted the following: “Real practical laws of physiology shall be viewed as a single sound basis for any sports training and instruction process. And the process shall be focused rather on the general physiological principles governing the vital activity of any advanced organism than on some very specific regularities of one or another process in the human body that are so thoroughly explored by the absolute majority of modern researchers. Sports physiology being a component of general physiology must provide, among other things, a good theoretical foundation to build up a good theory and practice for the sports training process since it is only the human body development theory with the relevant adaptation concepts viewed as its integral component that must be used as a basis for construction of any scientific theory or concept to explain different forms of human activities and processes in their development”. Later on the author makes the conclusion that the theory and methodology of sports training process offered by L.P. Matveev, V.N. Platonov et al fail to factor in the real practical laws of physiology and therefore groundless in fact. The current situation in the sport training sector, as stated by S.E. Pavlov, is unique as the artificial theories are accepted by sport practitioners without any doubt and are broadly multiplied regardless of the fact that they yield virtually no practical benefits. S.E. Pavlov offers a block system for the top-level sports training process as a good alternative and expects it to make a valuable contribution to the efforts to establish a modern theory and practices for sports training process. He adds, however: “The conservatives of the sport education sector stood up against the theoretical fundamentals developed by Professor Y.V. Verkhoshansky and ignored the facts of successful implementations of his developments in real practice by many elite athletes. The local hardliners supporting the old sport theories and practices has failed to accept the “block training system” that has been at the same time successfully accepted and appreciated by foreign coaches and athletes”. Summarizing his position, S.E. Pavlov affirms the following: “We expect to see one day at least somebody in the sports education community who will be able to comprehend and analyze the huge volumes of data collected by multiple researchers and practitioners. Regretfully, when we look on those who publishes today the works relating to theories and methodologies of sport training, we cannot find a single author to pin our hopes on as far as the efforts to develop a really effective “special theory of sport” are concerned” (highlighted by the Authors). Since then the sports theoreticians have been going on with their discussions while the sports practitioners and coaches have had to work without concrete recommendations on how the sports reserve must be trained.

It should be mentioned in this context, however, that the developments of the Periodization Theory opponents are not totally free of drawbacks either. Main provisions of the innovations by Professor Y.V. Verkhoshansky may be summarized as follows: “The traditional “instructional” approach was substituted by the clearly formulated and substantiated principle of the “priority of biological component”, and it stepped up the quality and effectiveness of the theoretical component in sports activity and made it possible to upgrade the theory to the level of a scientific discipline designed to develop and generalize the objective knowledge accumulated in this sector <…>; it is a monolithic structure that offers a system of training actions that may be differentiated in micro-cycles which content and structures are tailored to the specific targets and objective prerequisites that make due consideration for the regularities of bodily adaptation to the concrete motional patterns; <…> high-intensity specific impacts on each of these component are needed and they claim high energy spending in the process <…>; This arrangement secures, in the first place, additional capacity for the power generating mechanisms to support the specific bodily workability in the relevant motional pattern, and this is viewed as a prime condition for the progress of athletic mastership at the topmost level” [3]. However, the practical recommendations by Professor Y.V. Verkhoshansky are based on too general reasoning relating to the short-term and long-term adaptation and metabolic consequences of stress syndrome. But the most important thing, as he states himself, is that the “block system comprises a non-traditional form of the training process structuring within an annual cycle designed exclusively for top-ranked athletes both in the amateur and professional sports”, while the system implementation tools are designed only for the athletes with already well-developed physical qualities (highlighted by the Authors). What this means is that this approach shall be applied with reasonable caution as far as training of the sport-reserve athletes is concerned. Therefore, there are good reasons to state that the general recommendations by Professor Y.V. Verkhoshansky and S.E. Pavlov [20; 21] are too far from the real operation area of the majority of the sport practitioners, coaches and instructors despite the fact that real practice quite often demonstrates high effectiveness of the block training concept. Regretfully, these authors give no specific recommendations as to individual planning and control of the instruction and training process in application to the sports reserve training needs. It may be worth noting that the authors make no consideration for the key individual psychological parameters including the stress tolerance and attention focusing capacity of the athletes that is the only possible way to have some understanding of their actual working capacity and effectiveness in extreme situations. And it should be added that the problem of differentiation and individualization of the training process in every stage of the long-term training of athletes is among the top priorities for today.

We believe that the practical implementation of the theoretical principle of the “top priority of the biological component” in the practical training process to secure due differentiation and individualization in every stage of the long-term training process of athletes is only possible if we apply the reasonable physiological classification of physical exercises that is long known but rarely used in practice [19, p. 17-25]. The classification system was established based on a few clear and controllable parameters, namely the dominating ways of power supply to the body and the power demand for the active work – both of the parameters being quite measurable today using readily accessible tools and means applicable virtually under whatever conditions. It was S.A. Dushanin who was the first to formulate fundamentals for this approach [9; 10]. He offered to assign and differentiate between the following five bio-energy groups determined by the dominating way of power supply to the athlete’s body, namely: aerobic, anaerobic-glycolytic, aerobic-anaerobic, anaerobic-aerobic and anaerobic groups. V.P. Karlenko was a pioneer of this approach implementation in real practice [11] since he successfully tried and applied the grouping principle when trained the women's national biathlon team of the former USSR in the middle 1980ies. Ironically, his successful innovations were subject to furious criticism at that time despite the obvious benefits they yielded – as a few female athletes whose training for the competitions was based on these concepts of the functional condition monitoring and control and the reserve capacity mobilization became the world champions. In recent years, V.P. Karlenko has been in charge of the Ukraine national biathlon team and used the same training methodology for the team; and it is no wonder that successes of his trainees are so impressive and much higher than the modest progress of the Russian women's biathlon team.

Materials and methods. It was more than 20 years ago that we started our work on physiological substantiation of the differentiation and individualization approach applicable at every stage of the long-term training process of athletes with regard to physiology [4] to elaborate on and further develop the principles established by S.A. Dushanin and V.P. Karlenko. As things now stand, we use computerized “D&K-TEST” system to generate data on the following parameters to assess and control the functional state and the reserve capacities of athletes in a wide variety of sport disciplines using such indices as:

- anaerobic predisposition of the tested athlete;

- individual ability to stand the preset loads rated with the 3^rd to 5^th intensity zones (anaerobic metabolic capacity);

- explosive force rate, reactivity rate and strength endurance rate (representing non-lactate constituent of athlete’s speed abilities);

- capacity of the glycolytic power source of muscular activity (representing non-lactate constituent of speed abilities);

- individual ability to perform the preset load rated with the 1^st, 2^nd and partially the 3^rd intensity zones (aerobic metabolic capacity);

- overall physical working capacity and ability to perform planned load (indicative of total metabolic capacity);

- maximum oxygen demand level; and

- aerobic power source employment efficiency (APSEE) rate.

It is a matter of general knowledge today that in elite sport in our days of mostly the same methodological and technical backgrounds, the top priority in achieving top performance is given to psychological readiness of an athlete. Nevertheless, this important component of training is almost never taken into account on a systemic basis in the training process planning and result forecasting stages. Striving to bridge this gap, we offered an integrated approach designed to rate simultaneously both the physiological and psychological parameters and generate quantitative parametric data at the same time [8]. Any assessment of the athlete’s psychological condition shall give the top priority to his/her stress tolerance rate. To determine the latter, we rated the emotional stability indices based on the Hans Eysenck’s theory [18, p. 111-116] and individual anxiety indices based on the Charles Spielberger - L. Hanin State-Trait Anxiety Inventory [18, p. 116-121] and used them to design the best possible methodologies to forecast the athlete’s behavior under extreme physical and mental overloads and his potentially attainable results [12]. This approach is driven by the fact that the block training system requires to give the top priority to the special physical training loads and practices over other training loads and practices that means that the athlete must stand high-intensity specific impacts that claim much power. As a result, the athlete is under the risk of early burnout and over-training symptoms of the 1^st type which are dominated by manifestations of deep neurosis [14, p. 280-281]. It should be reminded in this context that power spending to support the nervous system functionality claim up to 20% of the total power demand by the human body. In addition to the above mentioned methods, we used the R.M. Nideffer’s method [16, p.106-119] in application to athletes from different sports (biathlon, ice hockey, football etc.) to rate their attention parameters, including their attention-focusing and fast-switching ability and the ability to simultaneously monitor and analyze a few objects at a time. This rating is very important in two aspects: first, in the context of specific requirements of these sports to the athlete; and, second, for the reason that any impairment of attention will inevitably trigger some drop in individual stress tolerance.

Results and discussion. Based on the studies of the physiological and psychological states of about 1500 athletes, we have developed parametric models for qualification, planning and control of athletes in application to the long-term sports reserve training process based on broadly quantitative parametric data. This methodology is particularly important in application to paralympic sport disciplines where traditional functional tests are too complicated. Furthermore we have developed the athlete’s individual working capacity control algorithms with the training process targeting scenarios for the micro-, meso- and macro-cycles of the training process. With this new toolkit trainers can focus the training practices on the “problem points” that normally come up now and then in every stage of the process; in addition it gives the means to forecast the short-term and long-term results the athlete can achieve in competitions.

Our study results in application to biathlone [6], football [7] and handball [22] have been reported at a few national and international conferences, publicized in a few monographs and many research articles, and summarized in study guides [13]. We have completed tests of many athletes of the Russia national paralympic teams (table tennis and sledge hockey). According to the feedbacks from the team trainers, the test data and recommendations have largely contributed to the successes of the teams in the Paralympic games in London and Sochi. It was in 2013 that we tested and studied the junior national team on commission of the Russian Biathlon Union and came up with specific individual training recommendations for the athletes who then achieved excellent results in the world championship. In the period of 2013 through 2014 we were contracted by the Biathlon Union of Russia under the Physical Culture and Sports Institute of Izhevsk National Technical University to report fundamentals of our integrated methodology at the skills-upgrading courses to an audience of about 100 trainers and sports practitioners that came from many regions of the country. All the above gives us good grounds to make a conclusion on the high practical efficiency of the integrated system that gives the means to generate individual recommendations for the promising athletes’ qualification process and for the sports training process planning and efficiency control. The system brings a few proven benefits due to its ability to generate objective quantitative parametric data indicative of the power supply potential and psychological state of the athlete; it is important for the whole system toolkit to be portable and handy that makes it quite user-friendly in a variety of field applications including training sites and competition arenas.

References

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Corresponding author: ffkis@istu.ru