Aaron King (00:00):
Welcome back to the podcast. I'm Aaron King with coach Bob King. Today we are talking about, is it okay if I miss a workout and we'll drive down into some nuances and more specific elements of that, but let's start with this question the other day from a parent they have a son who's taking a week off, I believe.
Coach Bob King (00:24):
And they ask if they could take a week off, did that mess them up? Would that be okay? And they wanted permission to take a week off with school being out and all that.
Aaron King (00:32):
All right. So again, just to preface everything, we will go through all the levels of what this means, because I sometimes wonder this. And but for youth athletes how old,
Coach Bob King (00:44):
We're talking eight, nine years old. Just about that. Yeah. Just about to turn nine.
Aaron King (00:48):
All right. So a young youth athlete and how many days a week are we going?
Coach Bob King (00:53):
Not more than two right now with me that doesn't include sports practice and that's, that's gotta be factored into it. So everybody understanding that I'm doing skill work, technical work for speed, agility, quickness, those kinds of things. We're not doing any strength training, but we are just focused on speed. So we're going fundamentals of movement, fundamentals, just learning how to put one foot in front of the other.
Aaron King (01:15):
All right. So let's say that you get it, you're going to two days a week and they take a week off. Where do you pick up? What did you do? Did they get left in the dirt? Are they having to make it up?
Coach Bob King (01:25):
Well, it's, it's, it's a great question from parents because they are afraid that the bath water's gonna run out of the tub and they left dry. And so that's not true. This is not scientific. What I'm going to say is, but I tell them, go ahead, don't worry about it. Let their body absorb the training. And what I mean by that is the nervous system is going to imprint the drills. The language is huge so that when you get a verbal command or a cue, you're able to say your brain just tells your foot what to do. So that all kind of sits in and just gets, you know, fermenting into the brain because I've always said the distance from the ear to the brain, to the foot or body part, being coached is a very, very long way. And we can close that distance just by getting away from it because they're not constantly.
Coach Bob King (02:11):
And I do mean overloaded. If you say two days a week, can't be an overload. The stimulus is coming from everywhere. They usually have one to two in rare cases, three sports practices, obviously school, a parent's home, that kind of thing. They have got to be able to get away from everything a little bit and zero in on one or two things at a time. And now where that goes with kids is, you know, I'm in the loop and I'm practicing or training or working on the mat. And after a while, it's like, I don't want to go to practice well after they get away from anything. And in my case, in this case, me, they go do their other sports and all that. I get them back and it's like, I'm a breath of fresh air or a break from the other grinds before we start grinding again. So it really works to allow the kids to get away, do see something different, and start to absorb the training that we've been doing.
Aaron King (03:03):
You're talking to a neuroscientist the other day about that exact thing. There's they have some terms for it, but basically talking about the plus to city plus
Coach Bob King (03:13):
Plasticity. Yes.
Aaron King (03:16):
Yeah. And so I'm actually gonna have this, this doctor on the podcast. I'm really excited about that one. But she was saying how, you know, little things like pro athletes, you put on certain glasses and it blocks things, makes it hard to catch a ball, adjust to a ball in the air, et cetera. So when you take them off, it's even easier. So that, that sounds like that's kind of what's going on there with them, them coming back and, and being able to do the movements
Coach Bob King (03:40):
Well, we're in such a hurry and there's the debate in the 10,000-hour rule and these kinds of things. And that's been debated. And what I've discovered in my own reading and research is that people who say that it doesn't require 10,000 hours to do something are talking about the anomaly, the person who can pick up a violin and play the person who can, can, can step onto the track and just be fast. That's the anomaly who doesn't need 10,000 hours because they were gifted. And so we can't, you know, there's those programs talented and gifted for a reason, those people are born that are genetically just predisposed to be brilliant and whatever it is, it doesn't matter. And so with my world in the speed training, if I get an athlete, a young athlete, especially when I got in to the program this week this kid's got some stuff he can move.
Coach Bob King (04:30):
He can't control it right now at nine years old, but you can just see it. He's his stride is already out there. And that's the hardest thing. Cause kids want to take little short, choppy, quick strides, and they feel fast, but they're not. So what we'll do is just try to get him, all his body parts in sync, get, his legs going in the right cycle, get his arms going in the right track, keep his head still all the fundamental stuff. But he has shown up with some Moxy and he's going to be very good at what he does as he gets older. Can't rush it because his body's going to go through those amazing changes between now. And we'll just round it off to say 17. So it's a long way to go.
Aaron King (05:08):
All right. So when you're, when you get to that high school level missing, missing is not the desk death of the program. Maybe, maybe we'll come back to the youth because you said 17 years old. And let's say I am a high school athlete. And the thing I always thought through or look back on is like spring break. And you come back from spring break, it felt like you have not worked out in months. So what's going on?
Coach Bob King (05:31):
Well, your body has been going in blowing. I mean, when in any school setting, I mean college pro and in high school, any time of off-season, just as grinding you and your body gets a rhythm and momentum. And when you take that break, it just, it really takes a couple of days, but it just shuts down. And the first day back is like, you never worked out before in your life, but the rebound is really, really relatively quick. And so you have to stay in motion, but you take a week off. You might be flirting with a little bit of discomfort coming back, but if you take a weekend off and take, you know, a good warm-up and get back into your routine it's usually just, you know, a real quick re-entry to get started from a layoff. And when I say lay off, I'm talking about a week or longer.
Coach Bob King (06:18):
If you say a weekend remember how to count, because if I stop, if I take Friday's workout and don't work out again until Monday, Friday to Saturday, Saturday to Sunday, Sunday to work out Monday is three 24 hour periods. So it's not just two days, it's getting into three days. And so it's time to get back going again before your body realizes we're not doing anything, we're going to totally shut down. And there goes your conditioning. There go your strength levels slow, but it starts. And a reentry is not that difficult if you prepare for being off and coming back.
Aaron King (06:52):
I had a, a memory when you're talking from college where I and one of my buddies wanted to spend an extra couple of days visiting a place. And so we were in the middle of off-season conditioning. So we try to make up our workouts ahead of time. So on our days off, we're like, Hey, can I make up next Friday's workout on this Wednesday so that we had made up our team workouts. And then finally the coach, coach Davis, who's awesome. Sits us down and goes, guys, I see what you're doing. And like, I get it. Like the makeup days are there literally as makeup days, not so you can go take a whole week off. That's not how the training works. She's like, you can't just work out over, you know, overtrain and then take a week. So I think that that's something that people have to learn too, is, is over the course of the calendar.
Coach Bob King (07:36):
Well, the thing that you have to keep in mind with a lot of the training language we use, it goes in both directions. So if we say, well, you train and you do this stressful event, you do this to adapt. Your body will adapt and get stronger, okay, stop doing something. Your body will adapt and get weaker because you're not doing anything. So it adapts to nothing. And so that means it will slowly decline because it's meant to be in motion. The body is meant to be adaptable. And so when it has nothing to stimulate it, it just turns everything off. And so neurons aren't firing like they were the muscles not contracting and doing what it was doing. And it's certainly no speed and that conditioning's going on. So [inaudible] works in both ways. We just always think that it's always a better thing. No, it's a two-way street. So you don't do anything. You will adapt negatively.
Aaron King (08:26):
This is a little bit more advanced and goes more into the complete programming, but maybe you could touch a little bit on unloading week and then re-entry.
Coach Bob King (08:36):
Oh, that's great. That's very, very important because we talk about this a lot where people just want to hit it. I'm going to go 52 weeks, watch me. And I'm going to say, no, you're not what you, and so the idea is that the body has to have recovery time, rest and recovery are part of the training. And again, it goes both directions. I'm going to push, push, push we'll, rest, rest, rest. And so what that means is there's been enough time and decades and science and everything and training to now tell us how to paradise or cycle training and workouts. And what that means is we go from maybe you know, it was a, say a light, medium, heavy load cycle, and then come back to a medium-light. And then what we call some people doesn't matter.
Coach Bob King (09:22):
We call it unloading where we do a workout week and I call it non-adaptive training. That means anything you're doing and running or lifting is not something you've not ever done before. So it's right in the standard flow. I've done this before. This is like, you know, 70%, 75% of my total effort or strength. And your body has, does not have to have a shock to it, or have to have a serious adaptation period to get stronger or faster. And that means you just maintain. And so that's not the worst thing in the world because you're not crushing the muscles, you're not crushing the nervous system to be responsive to commands, and the body gets to kind of freshen up. And so what we will do is look at our training schedule and, you know, it depends on the coach. I kind of look into the seventh to the eighth week.
Coach Bob King (10:09):
Usually, I'm going to say seven weeks and the calendar can be built around our life. And that means Christmas holidays, new Year, we're going to either be off and, or an active recovery week, the same thing with schools and, you know, breaks. We're going to plan for that in our training. So that it's time your body needs a break or it will break. And that means that when we get through the like in school settings with say spring ball or just the end of school, do you have exams and exams provide an active recovery week off because theoretically, you will say, June 1st, we hit it for eight to 10 weeks in the summer before a fall training camp, the cycle keeps going. So off is built-in active recovery is built-in. You don't want to take a week off when it's time that your body says I'm done.
Coach Bob King (11:00):
I'm going to shut you down. And that's not a good thing because it usually takes more time to recover. And when I get into this training is pretty serious. I'd always tell athletes fresh is best. So push and then back off, pushing them back off. And we do this cycling within the training week so that we're not always pushing. We have a built-in system of training to where we did, you know, this thing, hard, this activity hard, and we're going to leave it alone for a couple of days and go on to something else. If your body's in motion, it's in motion. So it doesn't mean that if you don't power clean today, you lose your power clean. It'll be fine two days later because you're doing other strength, other activities in the meantime that keeps your body sharp and strong.
Aaron King (11:43):
So, yeah, while you're talking, I think about me or any clients I've worked with or clients you work with when they're coming back from whatever, or a new client, someone just starting out, it's the initial soreness. So if you, if you don't ease into it, how people, how many times have you had someone that called you and is like, yo man, I got to take a few days. I can't get out of bed. I'm so sore. So just, they come in and they hit it too hard, right out the gate. So maybe a little bit kind of talk about that and the importance of easing into it and how to overcome that initial story.
Coach Bob King (12:18):
Right. That's very, very important to understand. And I say this all the time, I've used it two or three times this week with a couple of new people being oriented to the training. And I say, I said, I mean, this, I don't care if it's an athlete or a, you know, some business person who's 43 years old wanting to get in shape. I always tell them, soreness is not a goal that has nothing to do with how good your workout is. It could be everything to do with how weak you are or how bad I am directing the program or whatever you may have. What I like to call, especially in your pecs, the signature that you have, that little soreness, but it might be just sometimes it's unavoidable. But the idea is this I'm going to train you how to train. And this first workout, you will never leave saying, wow, that's the best workout I've ever had.
Coach Bob King (13:02):
Cause it's 50% for me, 50% for you because I got to learn what you, I got to know what you know, and then you have to learn. I have to know that, you know what I am talking about. So the first workout, because even with athletes in the NFL for years, we would, you know, players move back and forth and we'd get free agents or, or trades or draft picks. And, and players would come into our organization and we had to really have to reorient them because their whole world was being changed. And so they did not, we don't have a cookie-cutter strength and conditioning program for any level college or pro or, or a high school. And so you start over with language technique. Now we're not, we don't do it like that because they did something that's just foreign to us and now we're foreign to them and we have to get them together. So it's best to start off, you know, let's call it a comfort zone where give you an example. If we're doing any kind of exercise that requires eight reps, you could have done 10 or 11, that's the weights that easy. And so we're not trying to make you sore. We're trying to know what you know, and see if you can understand what I'm saying. So it's not a-okay, we're going to get you strong today. It doesn't work like that. So we're not trying to pretend it does
Aaron King (14:15):
On that topic about looking at the workouts. W I've seen folks were especially online with our training, let's say it's a four-day workout week, or three-day even, doesn't really matter. And they only get two of the three or three of the four workouts. What, the question I get a lot is, well, should I start the next week on day one? Or should I just pick up and continue the sequence of workouts so,
Coach Bob King (14:41):
Well, when we ride workouts or I'll give you know, the hardest thing for me to do, it's not hard, but I'm not my funniest thing to give a notebook or a manual say, here, go and go work out wherever you live, because I like to oversee it and direct it. But I tell them, you know, we count them day one, day, two days three, and all that. If you Ms. Day two, it's gone. Just go to day three and we're not going to try to go back. Cause we got to keep moving forward because you're doing enough that you're connected. But if you try to always make up stuff, then you'll never get down the road where you need to be. So if you miss a day, it's gone. So if it's Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, you miss Saturday, then it's Sunday off on Tuesday, Monday, Tuesday, you just keep going.
Coach Bob King (15:23):
It doesn't, it doesn't revert back because that's just going to slow you down. So basically if you, if you miss a workout or there's a lot of things that we know, like I said, back to the pro thing, you know, they make a trade, a guy shows up on Thursday, well, wait a minute. We're, we're three weeks into it. It's Thursday. So come on, here we go. And so we start them on that day's workouts at a lower level introduction. And w what we want to do is if you're offered a period of time, we just call it re-entry, you know, come back in and do the 10 could have done 12 or 13, and just be sure that you're reentering and kind of getting the, you know, just get the dust off. And if you've been in a program for any length of time, then you're going to be able to, you know, have a one-day re-entry and you're going again. And we see that all the time.
Aaron King (16:07):
Right? And so for that parent, that's taken that week off. Is there anything that they should be doing while they're not in the gym? Is there like a backup thing, you know, like getting on the bike or something?
Coach Bob King (16:19):
Well, I deal with that regularly as well. It's like being busy, you know, so for you take the example. If we have athletes, we're getting you in shape to do the thing you're going to be doing next, which is some sort of competition practice or try out whatever it is. However, if you're not there stay fit. I mean, there's just, a regular human requirement that stays fit, gets on a bike. Push-Ups sit-ups whatever you have available. We have the 80 that we use a little dumbbell cycle it's quick and easy. So off is really not even health is a health issue. You want to be able to take off and work may be at a less intense level, but you don't have to work out every morning at 6:00 AM, but go get a workout every other day, get on the bike, get on something to get some fitness going because that's just a fundamental human requirement.
Coach Bob King (17:09):
So it doesn't go from a hundred miles an hour to zero. It needs to kick back to 40, 50 miles an hour or something like that, but make sure you're working on maintaining your fitness level. And as you get into higher, higher levels of competition, the fitness level is ridiculously important. And I'll give you a sidelight story on that. They had a player that I worked with at the Mavericks. He was with us and he was released and picked up by the the Utah jazz who had Karl Malone. Who's called the mailman back then because he could always deliver in a game. And he was in training camp. And Doug called me and I said well, how's it going? He said, Oh, I'm doing well. I'm fine. Ready? I'm hanging with these guys easy. I said, tell me about Carl Malone.
Coach Bob King (17:53):
He goes, he's a beast. And I said, what do you mean? He goes, well, in-between two daily workouts. He's down in, in the basement of the hotel, on the StairMaster. And that season, I had an opportunity when the jazz came to town, I, I talked to Carl Malone. I said, tell me about your off-season. And he said, I make them, I make the team in the off-season. You're a perennial all-star. You're going to set records. You're going to dominate. You're going make it a team in the off-season. That's the mentality that, that it takes. And so to say, I'm just going to take off for a week, unless you've just had some incredible serious run, like an Olympic cycle where you've cranked it out for four years. Yeah. Take a week off. But otherwise, you want to stay in a fitness protocol so that your body stays sharp. You don't want to let your heart and lungs and everything just get dusty. So fitness is an all the time thing for any human.
Aaron King (18:46):
That's the difference between those guys, Kobe. MJ, just that's what you hear is that knowing the talent was one thing, but is that competition and then that work ethic, well, unless you got something else.
Coach Bob King (18:59):
No. I just think that what you mentioned to tag on that is that you know, the things we see in the Nike or the things we see in, in shoe commercials and clothing commercials, we're pro athletes where they're doing a little 62nd workout. Doesn't tell a story. And I just want to make sure people understand that does not tell the story because we do a lot more than that.
Aaron King (19:20):
Well, there you have it. Y'all if you have any questions, comments we are available on social media coach, Bob King is on Instagram at coach Bob King. We'll also be doing a lot on clubhouse. I'm on there a lot. Just look me up at @deepsnap. He's on there as well @CoachBobKing. We'll probably start doing some, some rooms in there where you can ask us questions so we can get some cool round tables going. But until next time we're King sports. Thanks for listening.