If you got anything from my endless repetition I hope it’s this: consistent success or outright dominance in sport is universally predicated on a complex interplay of factors ranging from sociocultural, political, economic, physiological, etc.  You need the numbers of athletes going into the sport which means having facilities and availability, along with coaching, the athletes need support, incentives to go into the sport and put themselves through the training, etc. etc.  You simply can’t speak of one factor in isolation without considering the others. 

And while the details differed between all of those groups, invariably within the specific context of each one each of those factors (along with others I’m sure I ignored) was present in one form or another.   Take any one factor away and the whole thing tends to collapse.  Bulgaria’s incessant politicking, the dissolution of the GDR, as soon as one aspect of the overall system went away, the rest of the system collapsed upon itself.  But it’s ultimately the synergistic whole that is relevant.

The only time that a single solitary factor is relevant is if it’s the ONLY one missing in the equation; in that case shoring up that one limiter might be sufficient to fix the ‘problem’.  At least assuming it can be fixed easily.  That is, when the entire rest of the infrastructure is there but only that one thing is missing (as might have been argued to be the case for UK Track cycling where it was the infusion of huge amounts of money that got the ball rolling).

As a final point, if there’s anything else I’ve gotten across is that you simply can’t consider the issue of sporting dominance (in general or when looking at a specific sport) outside of the specific cultural (and geographic and the rest) issues.  The entire Soviet approach came out of the sociocultural environment in which it developed as did the GDR’s and all of the rest.

Which means that in turning my eye to the US and examining the issue of our success (or lack thereof) in Olympic lifting, it’s equally important to address those same issues.  Location/geography (like most Americans I can almost find my home state on a map), culture, etc.  That will lead into a discussion of sports in general and finally allow me to look at Olympic lifting in specific.

One quick pedantic note in a failed attempt to eliminate some nitpickery: technically America (or the Americas) refers to more than just the USA.  South America and Canada (America, Jr.) are all technically part of America.  But here realize that I will be using the term America to refer to the United States of America (USA#1) and nothing else.  It’s just less tedious to alternate than typing USA all the time.

Oh yeah, for people who don’t detect sarcasm real well, you’ll see some of my personal in-jokes about USA#1 throughout this and the next two pieces.  Just realize that it’s (mostly) a joke I’m making to make the point about how Americans feel about America (while being absolutely true).

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The Disclaimer

Invariably discussions of this type tend to hit close to home for a lot of people.  For whatever reason, folks (especially if they exist outside of what I’m going to describe) disagree, don’t want to hear it or don’t want to believe it. They forget that they are often in the small minority, that is they are the exception to what I’m going to say (some of which will not be kind).

Make no mistake, I say what I’m going to say as an American; the opinions I’m going to express aren’t necessarily ones that thrill me and I often wish they weren’t true.  I also want a flying unicorn that poops gold.  Because how I want the world (or America) to be and how it is are generally not the same.  Most people simply confuse the two ideas: they conflate how they want the world to be with how it actually is and can’t make the distinction.

As well, to save space, time, energy and endless repetition, assume that just about every sentence I’m going to write about this topic starts with a qualifier of ‘On average’ or ‘In general’ or ‘On the whole’.  It would get tiresome to keep typing it and I’m the first to recognize that there are exceptions to everything I’m going to write.   And it’s always the folks in that small percentage of exceptions that takes the most umbrage at generalities.  Because it doesn’t apply to them and their select group of friends.

But as I’m fond of saying “Exceptions to a generality don’t disprove a generality” and the folks who typically get pissy over this usually don’t realize that they aren’t the in the majority when they debate it.  Essentially their argument amounts to “Well when I and my 6 highly educated upper middle class white friends go to see the newest Almodovar movie before drinking imported Bolovian coffee at the poetry jam and then going home to blog about our superior Paleo lifestyle…well, hmph, we certainly don’t think this way.  And since your comments don’t apply to us, clearly they don’t apply to anyone.  Pass the organic gouda, please.”

And they’re absolutely right in that I’m not talking about them.  And absolutely wrong in thinking that their exceedingly limited experience/group of friends/lifestyle is in any way indicative of anything approximating the majority in this country.  Because in what I’m about to say, I’m not talking about foreign film watching, gourmet food eating folks with an appreciation for obscure and nuanced activities like rhythmic gymnastics, dog shows, and polo or movies where elephants spew blood out of their trunk and that has some deep meaning.  They aren’t the majority in the US and they never will be even if they can’t seem to come to terms with it.

Because when you’re talking about something like sports in the United States (which is both big business and a way of life), you’re not talking about the niches, the exceptions, the tiny percentages.  You are talking about the majority because it’s the majority that watch the sports and pay money for tickets, merchandise, etc. to those sports. Hence, it’s towards that majority that my comments are aimed. Which means that to understand sports in this country, you have to understand the majority.  And to understand that, you have to understand America (#1).

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Location/Geography

The United States, like the USSR of old, is an absolutely massive landmass and that’s just including the continuous 48 states.  Throw in Alaska, Hawaii and a couple of others we claim are our own and it’s just a monstrous amount of land under a single flag.   As a single country, it spans an incredible amount of space and this, of course, has as number of consequences. 

First and foremost, I would argue that America contains within it perhaps the most variable number of different climate/weather systems of any country on the planet.  Examples follow:

Head to the Northeast and you get brutal winters alternated with miserable summers.   Head south to Florida and it’s perpetual summer even if it gets hot enough to melt your dashboard.   Back to the midwest of Wisconsin and Minnesota and you have an area that is frozen roughly 14 months out of the year.  Even if that’s impossible.  There’s an old joke that “The Vikings left their homeland, traveled across land and water, to arrive in America, finally settling in Minnesota, a place just as cold and miserable as the one that they’d just left.”  Having water skiied in Minnesota in October, it’s no joke.

The midwest is it’s own flat empty expanse of nothing (about the only thing to do there is meth), there are the high-altitude mountains of Colorado and Utah, the desert of Nevada, the dunes of New Mexico, the swampland in Louisiana and parts of Florida.   Over to California and you see another perpetually warm weather environment.  Except for the snowy peaks of Big Bear and Mammoth a mere 5 hours away. 

If you’re willing to get up early and hustle you can snow ski in the morning and be back on the beach in LA by afternoon during certain parts off the year; there aren’t many places in the world you can find that that I know of.  Head North to Oregon and it rains about 400 days a year.  Go too far north and you’re in Canada and you need to turn around and come back to civilization.

But ultimately, you name just about ecosystem or climate and the US contains it one way or the other.   From swamps to desert to temperate climes to near frozen tundra, the US contains it all.  And that includes volcanoes because of Hawaii and the arctic because of Alaska (inhabited by wolves, the Inuit and mentally deficient female politicians). 

If nothing else this may explain why, on the whole, America tends to generate athletes in so many different sports compared to the many countries that are locked into a single ecosystem or another.  Norway and Sweden and their ilk are predominantly winter sports folks, not a lot of summer athletes coming out of those because it’s tough to sprint in the snow.  Nor a lot of winter athletes from Jamaica (the bobsled team notwithstanding) or Kenya.

The dominant climate plays a big role in what sport you can or will pursue.  The US, we’ve got it all, and there’s almost no sport that can’t, in premise, be pursued here.  It helps that you’re free to move about the country if you want a different climate; you go where the sport or lifestyle you want is.

An additional factor that I only bring up here for the sake of something I’m going to write about later is the structure of American cities.  Because while New England is structured quite a bit like the Motherland (i.e. England), the rest of the country is not.  As you move further south or west, you can almost track the development of the US as the cities (especially those in the warmer areas of the country) moves towards urban sprawl.

You start to see pretty much nothing but big blocks of concrete where it looks like someone used a waffle iron to set out a perfect grid.  Also keep in mind that the connecting roads between major cities are freeways and interstates, made for high volume high velocity traffic.  Because America is nothing if not a car country and this is just how we roll.  I know this seems irrelevant as all hell, it’s really just background for one specific point I’m going to make in a few days and it belongs here.

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Sociocultural Rhetoric

Ok, this is where I’m going to piss some folks off, mainly the literati who refuse to accept what I’m going to say.  Because I am going to argue that, in aggregate, the US has no real culture.  Or at least no singular culture.  I would go so far as to say we are uncultured but that’s got sort of a different meaning.  Simply keep in mind that the US is just over 200 years old, that’s not nearly enough to see some of the cultural traditions that exist in the other countries of the world to develop. 

Europeland is a couple of thousand years of cultural tradition, China about 5000.   The other countries of the world are in that ballpark (trust me, I’m as much of a historian/sociologist as I am a geographer or mathematician so bear with me for skimming on the details here; I’ll just get them wrong and give people yet more excuses to nitpick irrelevant stuff).

At only 200 years and change old, the US is a baby and hasn’t developed any really singular culture unless you count mom, baseball, apple pie, rampant obesity, Michael Bay movies, and breast implants.  And even if you disagree with that, you can’t disagree with the fact that what culture the US does have is not a singular type.  That is, go to Britain and most of it is pretty similar to the rest with slight variations depending on the local flavor.  Because most of Britain (or England or the UK or GB or whatever) has existed as Britain for a couple of thousand years.

But in the US it’s all over the map and trying to pin down a singular culture (beyond some generalities I’ll make shortly) is impossible.  It just doesn’t exist in the US and it’s not going to, the structure of the country as a whole won’t allow it and neither would the people.  Because developing a single culture would mean moving, effectively, backwards from where we are now.  We’d be moving from more of something to less of something and that’s just not going to happen.

That said, however, I will also argue that you can find pockets of local culture (i.e. areas where the culture is consistent within that area) due to issues of location, weather, when and by whom the states were settled by and all of those other factors that always go into this.  This is, areas that may be exceedingly similar to itself but drastically different from other parts of the US.

Local idioms, dialect, norms, etc. all vary across these groups and locales.  Nobody would confuse New Jersey for Oklahoma, or Floridians for Oregonians.   Or confuse a New York accent (caw-fee) with a Boston accent (wicked smaht, retahded) with a southern accent (God’s chosen language) to the beach speak of Southern California (tasty waves, brah).  Put them all in the same room and you’d swear you were dealing with folks who have nothing in common with one another.  And they sort of don’t outside of being bipedal and from the USA.  Half of them wouldn’t understand a word the other half was saying.

Consider New England (damn Yankees!) to the south (God’s chosen land) and the huge differences (and rivalry) that exists between the two areas.  Or East Coast vs. West Coast (Tupac is dead, deal with it) in terms of standards, norms and cultural differences.   Easy example, watch Beat Street and Breakin’ back to back and you’ll see East coast vs. West coast writ large. Headspins and windmills vs. Electric Boogaloo; Bronx Rockers vs. whatever a Shabadoo is.

Or contrast, for example, urban blacks from New York to rural blacks in the south; anything I’d add to that will sound racist.  The south is more similar to itself than to the north but Florida (which is in the south) isn’t considered a Southern state.  West Virginia is about as different from Mississipi as France is from England; there’s less inbreeding in West Virginia for example.  Texas has southern elements but it’s Texas (God’s truly chosen people and country) and not truly the south.  I’m a southerner by birth and a Texan by choice and I can tell the difference.

The midwest is it’s own odd area, if you go to Minnesota or Wisconsin, you must memorize the phrase “Ya ya, doncha know.” and learn Sven and Ollie jokes; ‘pop’ refers to anything carbonated.  In the south it’s Earl and Bubba jokes and you must realize that “y’all” is singular and “all y’all” is plural and that all soda is a ‘Coke’ even Sprite.  Go to New York and you should memorize the phrases “Fuggadaboudit” and “What the fuck are you looking at?”  And carry a gun.

In a state like California, it’s even stranger, the state is so big that what you see depends on where you are.  Southern California has a culture and language distinct from Northern California and the Inland Empire is different entirely (take a gun there, too).  Don’t go to Victorville regardless; it’s ‘on the way to Vegas’ for a reason.

Get my point?

‘Merkuns

Another factor to keep in mind when looking at American culture is that we are an entirely immigrant country (excepting the small group of indigenous folks that we rapidly oppressed, murdered and drove into a life of alcoholism and casino management).  And the folks who founded this country, by and large,  represents that slice of humanity that didn’t get along with everybody else, who just couldn’t get along in their home country or culture and set out to do their own thing. 

The first settlers in America were the folks who didn’t like it back home for one reason or another (specifically religious persecution, their idea of the Big Imaginary Guy in the sky was different than everyone else’s).   So they upped and left and founded their own damn country to oppress everyone with their peculiar beliefs about the Big Dude in the Sky.   And it built from there. 

The US is called the Melting Pot for a reason and we had, at least up until recently, an open door policy.  Anybody who wanted in was welcomed and there have been various waves of immigrants over the short history of the country.  And it was almost invariably the same types of folks showing up for their apple:  usually the folks coming to this country were the ones who disliked it enough back home or didn’t fit in and wanted a fresh start.   Or who just wanted more opportunities than they had in their country of birth with it’s thousands of years of unchanging tradition.  In the US, anything was possible and the opportunities were endless.  In premise at least.

Basically, the US is made up of the individualistic rejects of the world.  And I mean that in a positive fashion since I don’t think being statistically abnormal (I’m using that word in it’s literal sense with no negative connotation) is necessarily a bad thing.   But America is made up of the folks that didn’t fit in, weren’t happy with the status quo, who wanted to try something else or just to give their countryfolks the big middle finger by going somewhere with more TV channels (or more than one). 

So they upped and left and ended up here where they invariably ended up setting up small enclaves just like it was back home.  Hence you get Little Italies, China Town, pockets of Middle Easterners or Hispanics, Jewish communities, etc.  Makes perfect sense: spend enormous energy getting out of your home country to get to the USA (#1) to set up an area that’s just like it was back home.  Just with more breast implants and donut shops.

One huge consequence of this, that I’ll spend an entire section in the next part on is the hugely individualistic nature and attitude of most Americans.  Which just has to come out of the people who came here.  As above, the folks who were happy just towing the cultural line and staying in the motherland aren’t the ones that came here initially (they often followed afterwards).  Rather, it was the folks with that inherent individualistic streak who started the migration.   And it shows up in spades in the overall attitude of ‘Merkuns towards, well…everything.  But that’s for later.

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Physiology and Genetics

Relative to sports specifically is that, due to the immigrant nature of the country, the US arguably contains the greatest mixture of different ethnic groups (again, I’m avoiding the word ‘race’ here) of any country in the world.  The former Soviet union, pretty homogeneous buncha white eastern Europeans.  China, pretty Chinese.  The UK and parts of Europe are more mixed than many may realize (and I certainly didn’t focus on this in those posts) with a large minority population but I don’t think anything can compare to the US in terms of the sheer breadth of ethnic groups represented here.

You name an ethnic group and they are represented here and we try to accommodate them all on some level.  Dating myself, I remember growing up watching Sesame Street in the 1970′s and the big thing was teaching Spanish because that was the recent group of immigrants that had shown up.  The last time I watched it (college: 1990′s; we had a lot of free time), they were teaching kids to count in Laotian and at this point it’s probably Mandarin.  I’m not joking.  But all Asian cultures, blacks of all descent, Hispanics, East Indians, Middle Easterners, whites of every country on the planet; you name it and you can find them to one degree or another here.

Which given the specialized nature of sports these days has a number of implications that I will obviously touch on later.

 And believe it or not, this is only one-fourth of my rambling on this topic and I’m cutting it here.   See you next time.

Read Why the US Sucks at Olympic Lifting: Part 10.

For the groups I’m going to talk about today, I’m not going to do the subsections I’ve been using. This is to prevent me from being excessively wordy and it is getting repetitive at this point. Mainly I’ll sum up where things were the same and focus on difference and how they impacted on the end result in any given system.

I am, gradually, getting to a point. 

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East German Sports Dominance

The East Germans dominated a select number of sports in and around the 1980′s and, as I mentioned above, a lot of what they did is structurally similar to what the Soviets had done a decade earlier.  Fine, East Germany (or the GDR, German Democratic Republic) was Socialist as opposed to communist but, for all practical purposes, the end result was the same. 

Folks in the culture are raised to believe in the whole over the individual and Germany was just as intent on using international sport for sociopolitical reasons as the Soviets.  This is just as reflected in Harre’s periodization manual as it was in Matveyev’s but I’ll spare you a block quote.

In contrast to the Soviets, however, the GDR was much more focused in terms of the sports that they, err, focused on and dominated in (and you’ll see this as a repeated theme when I talk about China on Monday).  And the reason, as much as anything, had mostly to do with the size of the country and its population.

With a population of only 17 million people, the GDR just didn’t have the bodies to throw at every sport under the sun and hope to succeed; they had to pick and choose their targets more carefully (this will come up again when I discuss China on Monday).  And in the sports they selected, they did dominate. 

Furthermore, since they couldn’t do it on sheer numbers/grinder system (they didn’t have quite as many athletes to simply throw away), they did by taking classically German (read: anal retentive) approach to the problem. Even with my addendum to yesterday’s piece, I’d almost argue that whereas the Russians worked on a ‘maximum’ model, the Germans were more about finding an ‘optimum’ training model.  Of course, some of that optimization came through doping as I’ll discuss below.

In the 80′s the East Germans simply dominated track and field and swimming along with doing quite well in a handful of other sports (including but assuredly not limited to track cycling, rowing and they had some Olympic Lifters; Marc Huster’s name springs to mind).  And part of the reason that they choose those sports is the same reason that the UK picked track cycling: there are lots of medals in the each of those sports because of the large number of different events.

Consider track and field with its sprints, relays, middle distances, hurdles, jumps and throws (and the pentathlon and decathlon).  That one ‘sport’ alone has dozens of medals.  The same is true of swimming with its dozens of events, and track cycling.  Perhaps less so in rowing (not a sport I have enough information about to comment on).  Of course, Germany had their share of OL’ers as well (the Soviets and Bulgarians were really the ones dominating during this time).  Those sports were picked (and I’m basing this on an audio interview I heard with an ex-GDR coach that I cannot for the life of me find to source) since they had the greatest chance of yielding the most medals for the effort invested.

Contrast that to focusing on something like soccer or hockey where there is one potential medal and matches are often won or lost for things out of your control (East Germany and ‘lack of control’ are not two concepts that go together).  They wanted sports with no only a big medal potential but that were also relatively more controllable without things like tactics and team dynamics to muck things up. 

Sports where the results mostly come down to excellent technique and physiological development without the other stuff to get in the way.  I saw these recently referred to as kg/cm/sec sports but I can’t find the paper that did so right now.  Basically those that are determined by how much you lift, how far you go or how fast you do it in.  And nothing else.  The time in the marathon or road bike race is irrelevant, it’s about who crosses first.  The Germans focused on sports that were more objective: who goes furthest, fastest, heaviest.

And just as in the former Soviet Union, other options weren’t available to folks being thrown into the sports machine.  If the testing said you swam, you swam.  If it said you were a thrower, you threw.  You do what you’re told and don’t ask questions, end of story.  Which means that the potential talent (and like Russia, Germany is a pretty white country which also tended to impact on the sports they may have chosen) goes where it can potentially do the most good.  Again, other options weren’t allowed at the time (this would change with the reunification of Germany and the fall of the Berlin wall and Germany is far from the superpower it once was).  And what population Germany had was fed into the specific sports that were targeted.

But beyond that, the East Germans did things pretty similarly to the Communist countries because Socialist ideology is similar enough that you get similar things happening.  Athletes were put through selection (the Germans have statistics on EVERYTHING in this regard) and placed into the sport they were best suited for and no other choices were available. 

Compared to Russia, certainly the system was far more centralized in terms of how it was structured.  Again that’s simply a consequence of the size of the country and the fact that it was a single country (as opposed to Russia’s sprawling inclusion of numerous countries).  Athletes were fully supported and received massive incentives for success just as in the former Soviet Union.  Top athletes had had an entire entourage of helpers: physios, coaches, timers, you name it and the athlete was taken care of.  All they had to do was win.  And in certain sports, during their heyday, win they did.

Athletes were funneled up a pyramidal structure as they improved and coaching seems to have been far more standardized and structured (again reflecting the more centralized nature of the system) with coaches being highly trained to make their athletes the best.

And, then of course, there were drugs.  As would come out a decade or so later as classified documents were unearthed, the GDR had put in place perhaps the most systematic and scientifically approached drug program yet to exist.  Eveything was studied, tested and determined: how much drug, when to give it, what results it should generate (in the throws for example, if you were put on steroids and didn’t improve by a certain amount, that told the coach that you had been using drugs already and you were kicked out).  It was systematically structured and it worked shockingly well (of course it also did damage to many of the athletes, the details can be found in Faust’s Gold below)

This brings me to a quick tangent, a gender issue that will come up again but that I want to introduce.  Perhaps even moreso than the men, the German women were simply overwhelmingly dominant in sports like track and field.  This was just at the start of drug testing, of course (and the Germans were just as good about not getting caught as the Soviets had been) but their female athletes started showing up in certain sports simply transformed.  And records fell by the dozen as German females simply rewrote the record books.

In fact, at least one German world record (the women’s 400m on the track by Marita Koch) set in 1985 stands to this day and that’s simply anomalous as hell; what near 30 year old world record still holds up? But no woman has been able to touch it; realistically the reason is that the German ‘women’ running at the time effectively had the hormones and physiology of men due to the doping program.

In fact, some German women were outperforming some men from other countries.   There is a story in Charlie Francis’s excellent Speed Trap about an American shotputter warming up when a German female came out, picked up his (heavier men’s shot) and, without warm-up, threw it further than he ever had.  He packed his lunch and went home.  Yes, drugs are in fact, awesome.

There’s actually a reason for this believe it or not, as I’ll talk about again when I discuss China, there is the simple fact that women respond MORE potently to steroids than men do.  It’s a function of having much lower levels, higher receptor sensitivity and the fact that the same dose of steroid will raise a female’s testosterone levels proportionally much more than it does in a man’s.  The only real point I want to make here is when you see a country or a coach that only seems to produce dominant women (and they will usually have some lame excuse about why the men can’t produce in their system) it usually points to drugs.  Because females get more out of them.

In any case, that’s the former GDR, a sports machine that was truly dominant (albeit in a smaller selection of sports than the Soviet Union during it’s heyday).  There were differences primarily due to the smaller size of the country and what implications that had for the structure of the sporting system and how many people they had to throw into the grinder. 

But beyond that it’s the same story told yet again: a tremendous number of athletes, put into specific sports (based on testing) where they could perform, fully supported meticulous training, rest, recovery and support. And of course, doping.  Again, the biggest difference being that the incentives here were based more on the Socialistist nature of the country (though medal winning athletes got major bonuses if I recall correctly) and representing for mother Germany that out of anything else.

Sources
Faust’s Gold : Inside The East German Doping Machine by Steven Ungerleider.  While not the best written book, this gives a good account of what went on inside the East German sports machine during it’s heyday.
Hormonal doping and androgenization of athletes: a secret program of the German Democratic Republic government by Franke WW, Berendonk B. A review paper about what was going on in Germany in the doping program.  Free PDF available here.

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Bulgarian Olympic Lifting

And now let’s take a detour to Bulgaria because, in a lot of ways it’s both insanely instructive and kind of an oddity in the world of sport.  And the situation here was different enough to make it worth discussing.   If for no other reason than there is an absurd amount of misinformation floating around about what went on during the heyday of Bulgarian Olympic lifting or what a certain individual actually did (I’m lucky enough to have an inside source).

Like Germany, Bulgaria was not a country with a massive population which makes it’s success at the world level so interesting (like the Kenyan runners).  This is true to an even greater degree when you consider that such a tiny country took on the Soviet sports machine (with it’s massive population) in Olympic lifting (where the Soviets had 450,000 lifters) and, for quite some time, came out on top.

Like Germany with it’s smaller population, Bulgarian didn’t really have much potential to dominate a lot of different sports and inasmuch as I know anything about what went on they don’t seem to have done much in the grand majority of sports.  But somewhere in the 70′s and 80′s, they started producing champion after champion in Olympic lifting.  Not only with their tiny single-country population but against the might of the Soviet Union and their sports machine.

But even that is not really the interesting bit.  Because whereas Russia had it’s monstrous decentralized system (existing primarily under the countrie’s flag) that succeeded through sheer numbers and East Germany had its centralized sports school system (with a monstrous number of highly trained coaches and meticulous training and doping program), Bulgarian success in Olympic lifting can be traced to a single man: Ivan Abadjaev (note: you will find this spelled many different ways).

Abadjaev had been a lifter of some note himself, taking silver at the World Championships before being put in a pencil pushing role.  During most of his career, most folks outside of the US trained like the Soviets did.  Abadjaev did not: he started lifting twice per day in 1953 when such things simply weren’t done.

And as the story goes, someone in the OL’ing federation heard about this man complaining about Bulgaria’s lack of medals at the 1968 Olympics and how dumb and poor the training and coaching was.  So they decided to show him by telling him to put up or shut up and putting him in charge of the team.   In 1972, a mere 4 years later,  his lifters would win three golds and three silvers in the Munich Olympics.

And he did it by taking a completely different approach to the sport than had been used before (amusingly, Americans had used a similar system years earlier but I’ll come back to this when I talk about the US later on).  Basically he thought that the Russian approach with it’s endless variety and multi-faceted training was pointless. “You don’t become a pianist by practicing the flute” is a quote supposedly attributed to him but may have been made by someone else. 

The Russian approach was to use dozens if not hundreds of specialized exercises which Abadjaev started getting rid of  them little by little.  By the end of his coaching career, his lifters did a total of maybe 6 exercises: full clean and jerk, full snatch, power clean and jerk, power snatch, front and back squats. Maybe a pull here and there as necessary.  Pretty much nothing else.

Those core exercises would be done in short blocks (each lift being trained for 30 minutes before a 30 minute break) and lifters would literally be in the gym all day (it’s worth mentioning that some feel this was mainly a way to control his lifters by keeping them too tired to go out carousing at night).  Note that this was the elite team, the developmental process of Bulgarian lifters was far different; this training was for the guys who had spent the 10 years reaching the topmost levels already (what little information there is can be found in Dreschler’s book sourced in Part 6).

He moved away from percentages and classical periodization feeling that there was little point in detraining between peaks.  He believed that the body could adapt if you just gave it time and, as someone recently put it ‘pushed through the dark times’.  Admittedly some of his ‘scientific rationale’ was fairly bogus.  So what, it worked.

He didn’t buy into the idea of working sub-maximally most of the time and then hoping to hit a big number on competition day.  He instituted an intensive, highly competitive system based around the competition lifts and squats with lifters going to what he called a daily max (the most they could lift on that given day even if that meant that they were 20kg off their best at any given time) on a near daily basis.   This is probably the most misunderstood aspect of the system but this isn’t the place for me to talk about it.

Singles with the occasional double were done and weights 5-20kg lighter might be taken depending on the situation.  Assistance work simply wasn’t done for the most part.  Rather than trying to peak for a few competitions per year, Bulgarian lifters competed regularly since competition invariably takes folks to a new level of performance.  It was pure specificity taken to its logical end extreme.

Everyone said he was nuts, everyone said it couldn’t work (certainly there is some mention of of injury and boredom but the last time I looked training wasn’t meant to keep you entertained; it’s meant to work). Athletes needed general preparation and fewer competitions and transition periods and variety and all of that, right?  Then his athletes started kicking everybody’s ass up and down, setting record after record and folks started paying attention.

At the time, most other systems took the athletes maybe to 90-95% during peaking and then hoped that the lifter could figure out a PR weight on the platform.  But technique and timing and a lot of stuff can change in the OL’s as you move from 75-85% to 95%.   In contrast, Abadjaev’s athletes were routinely handling world records in training (admittedly often at a heavier bodyweight than they’d reduce to in competition); this meant that doing it in competition was pretty rote.    When you’ve done 210 in training, only having to make 195 in competition is no big deal.

Of course, as a fairly poor country without a lot of options for most people living there, Bulgarian lifters were highly motivated to succeed and they did receive massive financial support for their training (as discussed in this thread on Goheavy by an individual who actually grew up in the system) with bonuses for medals and world records.   I’d imagine that once Bulgaria started producing success, that provided the incentive for up and coming kids to pursue the sport, so the numbers started to develop.  The tradition, once started, fed into itself just as with many of the other systems.  That’s on top of the financial and other incentives.

So again, different country, more or less the same story as before.  You have a large enough talent pool being exposed to systematic training, support, doping, etc. under the eyes of a master coach (in this case a single master coach who rewrote the rules of elite Olympic lifting training).  And, for a time, the results completely and utterly spoke for themselves.

I’d note that Bulgaria is no longer producing the champions it once did but this appears to be as much for political and financial reasons as anything else.  Apparently there are three different federations politicking each other to death over the future of Bulgarian OL’ing.  Many of it’s lifters were sold to other countries many of which adopted Abadjaeve’s once ‘insane’ training theories (I’ll talk about training a bit more when I finally get to the US).  Bulgaria didn’t even compete in Beijing after a failed drug test got them sanctioned and, unlike the Greek team (who also got popped), they couldn’t pay the fine to send a ‘B’ team.

Abadjaev himself is currently in California trying to recreate the magic with American lifters.  I personally doubt he can as the rest of the system, the financial support, the number of lifters to grind through the system, the motivation to succeed just aren’t there.  But only time will tell.   The Bulgarian system which produced champions for Bulgaria has more or less collapsed.  But that doesn’t change what the system was or what it did in its heydey.

Sources
An article/interview on Abadjaev at LiftUp. This is Abadjaev’s story in his own words.  Go read it if you’re at all interested in what Bulgaria, this tiny little country, did at the world stage during their prime years.
A private conversation with a buddy of mine who is currently training with Abadjaev, his permission was given to share what I shared but he prefers to remain nameless and there are more interesting details about what really goes on that he didn’t give me permission to share. So I won’t.

Australian Swimming

And finally (and somewhat randomly), I want to talk about a group that is only tangentially related to either group I talked about above, East Germany or Bulgaria.  The reason I’m including it is that Australia, like East Germany and Bulgaria, is a country with a relatively small population (at least as countries go).  Yet despite this it has produced success in a number of sports (including track cycling).

But where it has probably shined the most is in swimming.  With their first championship win starting in the late 19th century, Australia established a tradition of great swimmers in the early 20th century, typically flip-flopping (and forming a massive rivalry) with US Swimming over who was kicking the most ass.  The US would win one Olympics or World Championships and Australia would come back at the next one all fired up and win and this has gone on for the better part of a century.

And without going into the same repetitive detail, it’s for the same basic reasons.  Swimming is HUGE in Australia; according to the wiki, Swimming Australia has 90,000 swimmers and it’s clear that kids grow up in Australia wanting to pursue swimming as there is a cultural and historical tradition in the sport with plenty of heroes to emulate.  Facilities are abundant, coaching is available and excellent (the Australian Institute of Sport or AIS is at the cutting edge of training and sports science).  Having to outrun crocs swimming in open water is great sprint work (ok, that’s me being silly).  

For athletes pursuing the sport, there is likely to be a combination of personal glory, national pride and potential financial benefits (via sponsorship and endorsement deals that are available in non-Communist countries) for success.  So within the specific parameters of the country, it’s just the same story told yet again.  Tons of athletes, coaching, facilities, support, incentive, history, tradition, etc, etc.  Are you getting the point yet?  Are you finally ready for me to talk about the US?

Source
Gold in the Water: The True Story of Ordinary Men and Their Extraordinary Dream of Olympic Glory by PH Mullen.  One of my favorite books, among other thing it details the history of Australian and US Swimming along with the rivalry that exists between the two countries.

 And next time I’ll finally wrap up my world tour of sports dominance and talk about the most recent addition to the truly dominant sports machines: Communist China.  Then, finally I can turn my eye to the US and move towards a point.

Read Why the US Sucks at Olympic Lifting: Part 8.

So over the next few parts, I want to take more of a snapshot of a variety of different sport systems that have shown success or outright dominance in various time frames.  And since it makes some logical sense, I’m actually going to look at them in somewhat of a chronological order (that is, in terms of the times they were dominant) since this makes some other points about changes in training and focus some of which I feel are relevant to my ultimate topic of US Ol’ing.

In series, I’m going to talk about the Russian Sports machine today, Bulgarian OL’ing, East Germany and, of all things, Australian swimming on Friday and then finish by looking at the most recent sports machine, Communist China, on Monday.  Then, finally I can turn my eye to the US and spend too much time getting to the point.

So today, we turn our eye to the former Soviet Sports machine.  And since I’m a dumb American as I pointed out on Tuesday, I will be incorrectly using terminology ranging from USSR to the Soviet Union to Russia interchangeably.  I know these are all subtly different but I can’t be bothered to worry about it or even Wikipedia it.  You know what I’m talking about and that’s the former Soviet Sports Machine that dominated sport for at least a solid 20 years.

Definition of Dominance

I couldn’t put a date to it but around the 1950′s to the 1970′s, the Russians/Soviet Union started to get really interested in sports, showing success in many and outright dominating some others; they won some incomprehensible number of Olympic medals during their heyday and did so in an amazingly broad number of sports (not the least of which was Olympic lifting), both summer and winter.  

And irrespective of some of the points that I’m going to make further down that are critical of the training and system is that the Russian/Soviet Sport machine did truly dominate in quite a number of sports and did so for a fairly extended period.  And while their true dominance has waned in recent years (most likely due to the overall collapse of the Soviet Union and other issues), their dominance was unmistakable.  

Since the 70′s or so Americans have been fascinated with Russian sports secrets and how they achieved what they did.  This part of the series will tell you and it wasn’t a black tar-like substance from the bottom of the ocean (mumia, we miss ye).

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Sociopolitical Rhetoric

Perhaps the single biggest difference between the Soviet sports machine and the two groups that I’ve discussed before is the sociopolitical climate.  Obviously, the Soviet union was a communist state (like the Smurf village although it’s technically a Socialist commune; whatever the difference is.  And Russia had more than one woman.) and that impacted on literally everything I’m going to talk about.

First and foremost, at least one basic tenet in such a system is that the success of the state as a whole is more important than the success of the individual.  Folks are raised to put the success of the country before their own individual needs and that means doing what they are told is best for the country.

Perhaps more importantly, you have to realize that when the Soviet Union (and other countries I’ll discuss next) started pouring energy into sport at the world level it was as much a political statement as it was anything else.  Sport has always been sort of a metaphor for war and as the cold war was developing, international sport became the battleground where countries could ‘prove’ whose country and politics were the best.  And they did this through their athlete’s performance and their medal haul.  Whomever won the most medals had the best country and political system.

Before you dismiss this as the ramblings of a mad-man, lest we forget that boycotts were used to make political statements although only the athletes were truly impacted; the US boycotted in 1980 and the Soviets in 1984.  World sports had become a political platform in many ways during this time period and much of what developed in many countries came directly out of that.

And don’t think this was just a Russian, East German or whatever thing.  Anybody who remembers the 1984 Los Angeles McLympics may remember the US rocking out in all of its jingoistic glory during the Soviet boycott, prattling on about how many medals we won without recognizing that the current best on the planet weren’t in the stadium (just as the Soviets had done in 1980 when the US wasn’t there).  As a political statement, countries were willing to do everything to succeed in sport.  The Soviet union might have been the first to really do it in the fashion that they did but it certainly wouldn’t be the last.

Maybe you’re still not convinced, here’s my final example: if you ever get a chance to read Matveyev’s or Harre’s original texts on periodization, you’ll see what I mean: about 1/4 of both books talks about how sport is being used to show the superiority of Communist/Socialist ideology over Western bourgeoise belief systems and how sport is meant to inculate kids into communist and socialist ideology.  It sounds absurd but I’m so not kidding about this.  This is a quote from page 17 of Matveyev’s book Fundamentals of Sports Training, arguably one of the first periodization manuals translated into English.  Read that again, this is a book about periodization:

The ruling circles of the imperialist states, as is known, persistently try to use sport for implanting bourgeois ideology.  They are interested in international sports ties, above all, as a means of propagating an imaginary superiority of the “Western way of life”.  The slogan “Sport outside politics” in practice becomes nothing but political hypocrisy in this case.  Reactionary forces do everything to place sport at the service of anti-communism, chauvinism and race discrimination.

Of course, the above is hilarious because the Soviets were using sport for exactly the same damn thing but that’s the nature of politics; it’s always the other guys doing something bad even if you’re both doing the same damn thing.  Anyhow, there’s way more of that throughout his book, how sport is meant to teach Communist (or Socialist in the case of East Germany and Harre’s book) kids to be good little Communists and Socialists. 

And how ultimately, through sport, you can prove the superiority of your political system.  That was really the driver for all of this in the first place.  It wasn’t about money, fame or anything else; it was about proving that Communism was a superior political ideology without having to go to actual war and risk getting nuked.

And having decided to dominate sport, the Soviets threw an immense amount of resources at the problem.  This included testing and selection for young kids, intensive training, ‘research’ (this included scouring the West for ideas about training; they left no stone unturned), coaching education and, of course, doping.  I’ll touch on some of these below. 

Of some relevance, athletes were pushed/forced into the sports that they were expected to perform in and only Olympic level sports were an option (it’s only in recent times that non-Olympic sports such as powerlifting or bodybuilding have been allowed to be pursued).  People are raised to do what’s best for the country and that means doing what they are told will bring the best results for Mother RRRRrrrussia.

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Location, Location, Location

It’s critically important to remember that the Soviet Union was an absolutely monstrous entity, encompassing an absurd land mass and many, many smaller countries all under it’s banner.  This had a number of implications in terms of their domination and what developed there.

Perhaps the most important was that, with such a large population the Soviet Union simply had a staggering number of athletes going into the sports that they were focused on (and as I mentioned above this only included Olympic sports at the time, nothing else was relevant, considered or allowed). 

As the only example relevant to this discussion I saw it recently stated that, at one point the USSR had 450,000 active Olympic lifters.  Let that number sink in.  450,000 in that singular sport.  That’s half the population of Austin, Texas devoting their lives to what is, in the US anyhow, a niche activity.

I’m quite sure that other sports had an equally absurd number of athletes going into them after all of the testing and early competition children were put through.  And the simple fact is that when you take that many people and put them into intensive methodical drug-assisted training from an early age and you’re going to find some stars just on statistics alone (and make no mistake I will touch on the talent/physiology/genetics issue when I get to actually discussing US Ol’ing). 

And since there’s only one gold medal to be had, you only need one world beater out of all of the hundreds of thousands you train the bejesus out of.  It doesn’t even matter who wins so long as it’s a Russian.  In this sense it shares some commonalities with Kenyan running, although all Kenyan runners are out to win, it’s more important that a Kenyan win at the end of the day.  It’s simply that the Kenyan idea comes out of tribal ideas more than communist ideology per se.

A second impact and one that I will eventually cover in another over-written series has to do with the training and specificity versus variety.  Since the USSR was so diverse, covering so many different countries, there doesn’t appear to have been any truly central sports system or program in place (beyond, perhaps, win at all costs).  Make no mistake there was a general philosophy that appears to have existed but beyond that you see a lot of different stuff going on because everything was so spread out.  That was at least the case for OL’ing (and see my sources if you want discussion of this) and I’m assuming it held for other sports.

A third impact, and one that would be relevant for not only OL’ing but other sports was that briefly, after the collapse of the Soviet Union (which had been limited to a single team), all of the individual countries were able to send full teams under their home flags to the major events.  So the Soviet machine went from sending only the top 6 athletes to the top 6 from every little (previously) no-name country that had existed under the Soviet banner.  With the depth that they already had, this simply pushed almost everybody to the bottom of the board at least until the rules were changed to prevent it (I’m not clear on the details of this nor does it particularly matter).

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Genetics and Physiology

Since the Soviets didn’t dominate in any singular sport, I can’t really talk about physiology or genetics in the same sense that I did in the two previous groups I described.  However, I do think it’s worth noting when the Soviet Union was truly dominant which was during the 60-70′s (make no mistake they were still producing in the 80′s and still do so today but that was not time of their dominance).

But keep in mind that this was a time when not only was overall competition standards lower but many of the groups that would show up to truly dominate certain sports (such as the West Africans in Sprinting or East Africans in distance events) simply weren’t on the field yet.  In a more modern environment, it’s unlikely that the Soviet machine would have shown results in nearly the same broad array of sports.  There is much more specialization nowadays for a reason.

As a bit of a teaser, you’ll see the real-world outcome of this when you see the very narrow list of sports that Communist China focuses on in the modern era on Monday; they don’t even try in sports that they know they don’t have the available genetic talent to win in.  With the same ultimate sociopolitical goal in mind, the Chinese only focus on about a half-dozen sports they know they can dominate.  And that doesn’t include track sprinting or distance running (there is that one weird high hurdler example).

So while Valeri Borzov was the top 100m sprinter of his day and won the gold in 1972, he was racing in the time BEFORE the majority of West African sprinters came to complete dominance.  Ben Johson and Carl Lewis wouldn’t show up until the mid 80′s and now you will basically never see a non-African at the starting line of a 100m final unless they just aren’t present at all.   Countries without folks who come from a West African (and specifically Jamiacan) background may have short sprinters but they won’t be producing for the most part (a recent exception was a female Greek sprinter).

The same would hold true for the Soviet distance runners who weren’t running against the East Africans (who not only weren’t present but weren’t focused much on the Olympics).  The first Kenyan runner showed up in 1966 and the true influx wouldn’t happen until later as their sports domination got rolling (and again the Keynays were not Olympic focused to the degree that the Soviets were).  The Soviets were good, make no mistake, but they weren’t competing against the best during their day.

Again, this isn’t meant to dismiss what the Soviets accomplished by any means.  But realistically, many of the sports that the Soviets dominated during their heyday are not sports they would show results in now.  They don’t have the right ethnic groups present because, despite their massive landmass, it’s still a fairly homogeneous group ethnically speaking. And while I’m sure that any Serbs and Croatians will surely take issue with this statement, I think you get what I’m saying.  Not a lot of folks of any African descent in Russia.  Or pretty much any other ethnic group (again, I won’t use the word ‘race’).

I’d also note, a bit snarkily, to keep that in mind when you seek to learn from 30 year old sports ‘secrets’ in sports that the Soviets really only dominated in many sports for lack of top notch competition (who simply weren’t there yet).   I’ve read some Soviet sprint programs and, simply, they bear no resemblance to what any top performer does today.  It might have ‘worked’ in 1970 against the other non-competition but it doesn’t now.

Which isn’t to say that their training was in any way bad or should be ignored, you just need to keep some perspective about it, how it developed, where it came from and why it ‘worked’ (i.e. put 450,000 people through any training program and drug them enough and at least one will probably do well on it).

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Training

Russian training evolved as much out of their sociopolitical and country structure as it did anything else.  For example, exercise and fitness for health was also part of Russian ideology for various reasons; in the same way that Russian children were expected to learn chess (as a way of learning military tactics), they were put into multi-faceted training at a young age and that was part of making them well-rounded little Communists as much as anything. 

It’s another thing to keep mind when you look at Russian training methodology and the idea of using that type of multi-faceted training in early development versus what most countries and top athletes are doing now which generally being very specific from a very early age; for example Chinese kids are learning the Olympics lifts at age 4, not dicking around with calisthenics.

Also keep in mind the time that the Soviets dominated, it was before all of the world cup and big money meets came into play (that would happen in the 80′s).  You can set up huge long-term year-long periodization plans when all you care about is the Olymipcs or the World Championships and nothing else matters.  Those old annual plans are more or less dead outside of a handful of sports because they don’t apply to modern sport and the demands of competing frequently for World Cup points or money.

As well, with such a massive landmass and being so spread out, as I mentioned above, there was no real centralized training structure.  Rather it was a bunch of individual countries and locations doing somewhat of their own thing. It’s been suggested (see my sources below) that a lot of the ‘variety’ that you see among Russian programs seems to stem from the fact that there were so many different coaches doing so many different things with so many different athletes in so many different locations 

They were all based around the same central ideology, mind you but you saw different ‘flavors’ in different areas.  So Belarussian OL’ing has it’s own nuances compared to more central Soviet coaches which probably differed from another of the satellite countries that was doing it’s own thing.  And I imagine the same held for other sports.

Even some of the overall training philosophies and ideas that came out of the Soviet sports machine were as much to do with the harsh Russian winters as anything else.  For example, Verkoshanky’s own recent book Special Strength Training describes how his heavy use of weight training in the ‘off-season’ was done primarily because his jumpers had no facilities to jump in.  They lifted weights because it was that or nothing.

I’d also note (and folks who have read me have seem me be rather critical of a lot of Russian methodology) that when you have that many freaking athletes in a sport, pretty much irrespective of the training that you use, if it’s hard enough and you grind enough people through it (and drug them sufficiently) at least one person will respond to it.  And when all you really care about is generating a single world beater, that’s all you need: one guy to respond and peak on time (and pass the drug test).

Even some of the block training and ideas about pounding on your athletes for months at a time to try and get a big rebound when they recover really only works when you have enough athletes.  I actually saw this first-hand in SLC during the No Regrets period; one summer we worked with a Russian trained coach who used standard Russian methodology (not recognizing that it doesn’t work well without ‘assistance’). 

For 6 months straight he pounded on his athletes, everyone got injured including him.   And with trials in December, the one athlete that stayed with him did in fact peak and was flying…in Februrary.  Sure, use that system with hundreds of athletes and one will hit it just right and that’s all you care about when all that matters is the medal.  But it doesn’t work well with small groups because there is no guarantee that someone will hit it right.

My point is simply this, remember the era (in terms of sports performance and competition standards) and the sociopolitical climate that Russian training methodology developed during and under.  That as much as anything explains it’s structure and, as I’ll come back to later in this series, it doesn’t necessarily work outside of that structure.

Regardless of the above, the simple fact is this: once selected for a given sport, Russian athletes were trained mercilessly.  The 80′s where when training volumes just went through the roof and most of this was being driven by Russian methodology (it’s since come down a bit).  

Coaches were highly trained, a tremendous amount of ‘research’ was done (I’ve read some of the translated stuff, by Western standards it’s crap).  And note that Soviet scientists were under huge pressure to tell their superiors what they wanted to hear.  There are also rumors of deliberately false information being disseminated by the Soviets to confuse other countries who were trying to follow them. 

As well, going to the support, rest and recovery issue, not only were the athletes full-time and not required to work, the Soviets did a lot of the early work on various recovery and regeneration methods.  The athletes trained, rested, ate, recovered, slept and did it all again.  For years and years and years.  Top level athletes have their own entourage of support; their personal coach, massage and restoration experts, timers, and anything else they would need.  All they have to do is train, rest, dope, compete and win.  Everything else was completely taken care of.

Their job was to be an athlete and the countries skirted the silly-ass amateur rules (a leftover from when sports were  played by rich white guys who didn’t need to make money from sport; they already had money) by giving them ‘jobs’ or ‘putting them in the mlitary’ to give their athletes the best opportunity to win.  Rules that kept American athletes perpetually hamstrung because US federations were still enforcing the old amateur rules.

Basically, the Russian sports machine, on top of whatever else it did right or wrong really worked through nothing more than an immense grinder system.  And I’m not saying that’s good or bad, just making the point.  Athletes were tested and told what sport to pursue and then put into what is arguably one of the largest grinder systems ever to have existed or deliberately created (China is arguably bigger in modern times).  

The training was systematic, intense, and voluminous, the athletes fully supported to do nothing but train.   And with the knowledge that there are 10 or 100 or 1000 other athletes working just as hard to be the top guy.   It’s not unlike the intensely Darwinistic system that developed organically in Kenya, everybody is competing with everyone else and it pushes everyone to either success or destruction. 

The Soviets were happy to destroy 99% of their athletes so long as they got a gold medal; throwaway athletes were used for ‘research’.  There is a famous study where the Russians tested depth jumps off a 3m box, that’s 9.9 feet, just to see what would happen (I bet what happened was not good); you can bet that their top potentials weren’t the ones recruited.

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Doping

And while many have tried to downplay the doping issue (it’s not as if US athletes haven’t or weren’t doping), the Soviets, as the East Germans would do later, took a fairly systematized approach to it.  The 70′s and 80′s were when doping really started to come on the scene of international sport in a big way (they weren’t even banned until the 80′s) and the Soviets doped the hell out of their athletes. 

It’s been suggested that some of the Soviet periodization ideas were actually set up to correspond with drug cycles; more training when they were on, less when they weren’t.  This is one of those contentious points that everyone argues about and nobody knows for sure.  There are rumors that Soviets believed that female athletes got a boost from the hormones that are released during pregnancy and that female athletes were told to get pregnant (by a boyfriend or their coach if they didn’t have a boyfriend) and then abort to get it.  The Soviets were willing to do anything to win.

But that Soviet athletes were using heavily is not up to debate.   They doped, figured out clearance times and made sure that their athletes could pass the tests when it was time.   There is actually a famous story about the Soviets setting up a floating lab at one of the big competitions.  Athletes had their blood tested there and if they couldn’t pass the test, they were pulled out of the competition. 

With the depth that the Soviets had in most sports, it didn’t matter.  Like I said in the training section, when all you care about is producing a single gold medal, you only need one athlete to survive the training, hit their peak just right and be able to pass the drug test.  That requires a lot of athletes because some things are not controllable.  But when you have dozens at the top level (who survived out of the thousands or hundreds of thousands you ground into paste), at least one will hit it right. Which brings us to.

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Incentives and Motivation

In Kenya, runners train to create a better life, to follow the tradition of their heroes, but they ultimately do it voluntarily.  The same is true of cyclists in the UK; they choose to follow the sport.  In a communist country like Russia, this was not the case.   As I mentioned above, the overall country motivation to pursue sport was primarily a political one, to ‘Demonstrate the superiority of Russian ideology against the western pinko burgeoise blah blah blah’.

On an individual level, it’s a touch different.  First and foremost, in a communist or socialist country, Folks are raised to believe that the country is more important than the individual.   I don’t know if it’s so much national pride  (especially given how many defect to get the hell out of those countries) so much as having been raised to do what you’re told and do whatever is necessary for your country. 

As well, despite it’s massive resources, the realities of Communism and the rest meant that most people didn’t have a very easy life.   Make no mistake, the folks in power always had it better than those not in power (anyone who thinks that Russia was a ‘true’ communist country with all shared by all is naive) but the majority were simply trying to survive.  Being given food, housing, the chance for a better life to pursue sport in the Soviet grinder was as much of a motivator as anything else.  I’d make a joke here about Siberia but it might be inappropriate.

I don’t get the feeling that most Soviets grew up wanting to emulate heroes or the sports tradition or that that is the primary motivation.  Most were put into sport whether they liked it or not, told what to pursue but offered enough reasons to suffer (money, food, a better life, helping provide Communist superiority) to put up with it.

I could very well be wrong about this.  But it ultimately doesn’t matter.  Since sport wasn’t voluntary, you don’t need people choosing to pursue sport to follow their heroes.  As the old joke goes “In Russia, anything not forbidden is compulsory.”  Sports was compulsory; you do them or get sent to the salt mines (in Siberia?).  Sorry, couldn’t resist.

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Summing Up

So again we see a similar story to the ones I’ve told already even if the system was set up a bit differently than the others: thousands of potential athletes, channeled into sport (though in this case without much say in the matter), given full time support, coaching, drugs, and intense motivation to reach their potential.

It was similar to the UK approach to track cycling in that it was put in place and set up deliberately but different in that the overall culture and motivation came more out of Communist political ideology than anything else.  And the sheer numbers available, along with the realities of weather and location (and the focus on Olympics and World Championships) had as much to do with the training methods   And during the heyday of the Soviet machine, the results spoke for themselves.

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Addendum

As I was starting this series, I had contacted Glenn Pendlay to ask for input on some of the individual parts and he was nice enough to provide it.  Having been taught the Olympic lifts by Coach Medvedev himself and having spent a good deal of time in Russia, Glenn is one of a few in the unique position of having first hand knowledge of what went on in the Soviet Sports Machine. 

And in reading today’s piece he said that while he felt I captured the overall tone of the former Soviet Union and how their system worked, he did take issue with description of it as a pure grinder system with the only goal being success at all costs no matter how many athletes it destroyed.  And while I thought about trying to include what my conversation with him entailed in the above, it would have required a near complete rewrite.  This is easier.

In any case, he told me of many things.  First and foremost, sport was culturally a huge part of Soviet thought, this goes to my comment about training and fitness being part of their goal of developing well-rounded Communists.  As well, coaches in the Soviet Union are highly trained, highly educated and highly regarded (compare that to the US where a typical high-school coach is usually thought of as ‘just another dumb jock’).

He also told me that, culturally speaking, the Russians are very protective of their children and that junior and developing athletes are often not pushed as hard as I might have implied (or thought initially).  Certainly Russia did have somewhat of a tradition of their top athletes having longer careers than many (cf. the Bulgarians who I’ll describe tomorrow). 

When I mentioned where some of my ideas/attitudes about what compromised Soviet training methodology came from (the handful of major authors that have been translated into English such as Verkoshanky, Issurin and Bondarchuk), he pointed out that, just as in the US, a number of coaches that we know about here not only weren’t quite as big in the Soviet Union, they were far from the only coaches around or producing results.  Many of my ideas about ‘beating on athletes for months and hoping someone peaks’ come out of Supertraining and Special Strength Training; both representing primarily the work of Verkoshansky.

Basically, we hear about a handful of coaches and methodologies, as I mentioned training methodology was spread among thousands of trained coaches and there was no single system or approach being used.  In contrast to most of what I had seen, Glenn described a system of training focused on gradual long-term development (what the Soviets called the Process of Attaining Sports Mastery or PASM) moreso than a brutal Darwinistic type of system that I implied above.

Some of this may also be a difference between what was done with junior/developing vs. elite athletes (i.e. at the top levels guys got pushed harder as you would expect them to); at the very least it probably reflected differences between what Soviet politicians wanted in a global sense (sports success at the World level for sociopolitical reasons) and what was going on locally. 

This goes to the fact that the Soviet Union comprised a ton of smaller countries, many of which had great rivalries with each other.  This is not unlike the situation in the US where states or geographic locales (North vs. South, East vs. West) are highly competitive with one another even if they all fly under the US flag when the time comes to do so.  Collegiate swimming programs are cut-hroat as hell with one another in local competition, but everybody puts it aside when the US Flag goes on the cap.

Glenn said that at least some of the motivation for Soviet athletes came out of this rivalry.  With so many athletes at the highest levels and the fact that there could be only one Gold medal winner, many were competing for individual country-wide pride or points (the Soviets put on a number of internal competitions) or to prove their local superiority as much as anything else.  Of course this still has the end result of driving athletes to attempt to achieve the highest levels, bringing the cream to the top.   The end result was still somewhat the same, the reason for it was subtly different.

In any event, I want to thank Glenn for taking the time to not only read my rambling but share the above with me; that’s why I’m taking the time to express his thoughts.  I specifically asked for his input so I wouldn’t get anything glaringly wrong (except basic geography) and hopefully the above sheds some light on what went on.

Sources
The Weightlifting Encyclopedia: A Guide to World Class Performance by Arthur Dreschler.  This has a discussion of the variety issue inherent to Russian sports due to the huge geographic area that was encompassed.
Supertraining, 7th Edition by Dr. Yuri Verkoshanksy.  If anybody reading my site hasn’t heard of this book I’d be shocked.  If you want a broad overview of Soviet training methods, read it.  Expect to get a headache from all of the differential equations.  There are a bunch of other books related to this training methodology (I highly recommend both of Issurin’s books and Bondarchuk’s SECOND book) on Ultimate Athlete Concepts.
Special Strength Training: A Practical Manual for Coaches by Dr. Yuri Verkoshansky.  Perhaps one of the most coherent explanations of the Soviet’s ideas of special strength training and Verkoshanksy’s block training.  I’m mainly sourcing it for the explanation of the history of how it all developed (out of a lack of facilities and poor winter weather).

See, I told you I could get through an entire system in just one day.  Tomorrow I’ll continue chronologically by looking at the East German sports machine and Bulgarian Olympic Lifting with a very brief stopover in Australia.

Read Why the US Sucks at Olympic Lifting: Part 7.

As with the Kenyan runners, I’ll look a bit at the sport and then try to examine what the UK did to achieve dominance (and more importantly how they went from doing nothing on the world stage to kicking absolute ass in a relatively short time period), to see if there are any commonalities or what have you.

Again, I don’t intend to spend nearly the time ton this as I did on Kenyan runners.  I’d just end up typing the same stuff over and over again and it’ll get a lot less detailed as I go. And while this is a bit longer than I’d have liked, some of that was my attempt to break up the blocks of dense text with videos.

I’m also going to move to 4X/weekly updates, otherwise this is literally going to take me like 6 weeks to cover because I keep adding stuff to it.

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What in the Hell is Track Cycling?

Track cycling is another one of those weird little niche sports (not unlike Olympic lifting) where the folks involved in it are passionate to the point of psychosis and the folks who aren’t haven’t even heard of it, can’t understand it and don’t give an ounce of a damn (much to the lament of those who are passionate about it).  Unless they are watching Youtube videos of the absolutely awesome crashes that occur such as this one; then it’s pretty cool.  Jump to about 20 seconds in to see the carnage in slow motion.

Track cycling developed back in the early part of the 20th century and rapidly developed into something called 6-day races, literally races where cyclists were expected to keep going for 6 days straight often in a smoky closed area where folks would drink and gamble while the cyclists tried not to die.  And it’s any wonder that cyclists started doping about 12 minutes after the first race was organized.  They needed drugs just to survive.

Since then it’s become a bit more civilized.  Racing is done on a velodrome, a banked track that ranges in length from around 130 to to 500m or so events range from all out sprints to individual and team time trials (such as the 1km and 4km), the Madison (a 2 rider event where riders sling each other into the race as they trade off who’s racing).  There are also longer distance events on the track which I imagine are boring as hell to do and to watch.  Yayy, 100 times around a track.  Then again, America does love NASCAR.

One odd event is the Keirin where riders start riding behind a small motorcycle called a Derney which pulls them up to speed (riders have to maintain their position in the pack until the Derny pulls off) before letting the riders sprint for the win.  It’s one of, if not the, largest source of gambling in Japan and Keirin schools exist simply to train riders to race.  Isn’t that weird?

Track cycling is done on specialized bikes with one gear (single speeds, like the hipster kids ride) and no brakes.  The racing ranges from boring as hell (time trials) to confusing (the match sprint where you’ll see cyclists track standing in place for minutes at a time and it’s this weird chess match) to exciting to everything in-between.  Crashes happen often enough and tend to be pretty horrific as shown above. Skin gets torn as guys slide down the wood and broken collarbones or worse are common as guys cream one another at 70 km/h.

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Sociocultural Rhetoric

Like road cycling, track cycling is a sport with a nearly 100 year history.  And yes, it existed in the US in the early part of the 20th century although it’s never really been a big sport here.  Until recently, cycling has never been monstrous in the US (although never small either) and track cycling was rarely more than a niche interest.

However, overseas that’s far from the case.  First and foremost, cycling is absolutely monstrous as a sport.  The countries are built for it, everyone cycles, there are long-standing traditions in the sport and endless heroes for kids growing up (who aren’t drawn to soccer or cricket) to emulate. 

The hard men of Belgium and Flanders, the French tradition (remember they created the Tour De France), the Classics, the smaller tours, the TOUR DE FRANCE; over in Europeland cycling is huge as hell and people will camp out for weeks on the Tour de France’s course to watch the cyclists come by for 15 seconds.   For recreation, for fitness and for sport cycling is life over there.  That alone gives the sport an incredible base of participants to begin with.

Track cycling, at least in certain locations, has an equally large tradition.  One of the stranger records in the sport is the hour record with the goal being to cover the further distance possible in one hour.  And it’s done on a velodrome.  Imagine going to your local 400m track and running as hard as you could for an hour straight and the measuring the distance you covered; that’s the hour record.

Without exception the records have been held by Europeans with some of the best cyclists ever ranging from Eddie Merckx to Miguel Indurain (both of them won the Tour De France as well) to Chris Boardman (whose name you will see again) to a crazed Scotsman named Graeme Obree (who rode the hour twice in two days, setting the record on the second try and did so on a handmade bike including parts from his washing machine).  Obree would also invent two different ‘new’ riding positions on the track that would be later banned by the UCI.  Merckx famously said that setting the hour record was the hardest thing he’d ever done and that the effort took years off his life.

My point being that both cycling in general and track cycling in specific have had a fairly large base of folks involved in it for various reasons. Tradition, history and, believe it or not money.  Especially in road cycling.   Because while people in the US tend to think of cycling as a hobby for rich white guys, overseas it’s about as blue collar as it gets.  Becoming even a decent cyclist there is a way to a better life and more money than you could make otherwise.

Let me put this in perspective, Lance Armstrong, before he even became dominant was hired by a French team in 1996 for an annual salary of $1 million (he was only paid $675,000 of it when he got cancer).  It’s not the kind of stupid level incomes that you see in football, baskeball or baseball in the US but it’s better than working in the pub for someone growing up in some shithole town in NORTHERN Ireland.  It’s like a kid in Waco pursuing football in Texas.

Even a domestique/helper on a team makes more money then they’d make working a normal job and this is major motivation for people to go suffer on the bike and try to reach the highest levels of the sport.  Or at least a high enough level to get hired on a team.  For this reason, along with the others, thousands work to become top cyclists because it’s better than any of the other options.   And in countries with big track traditions, that means that some will pursue the track.  So what’s required for success?

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The Physiology of Track Cycling

So let’s talk about track cycling, a sport I imagine most of my readers aren’t terribly familiar with.  First, I’d divide the track events into the endurance events (including the 4km individual time trial, 4km pursuit, Madison, points race and maybe one or two others) and the sprints (match sprint, 1km individual time trial, 1km sprint, Keirin).

Endurance trackies typically come from the road, the same basic physiological requirements are present and necessary including low body weight/body fat, a huge aerobic engine, all that sort of thing.  And it’s not as if the UK lacks for road cyclists. Here’s an example of the 4km team time trial, you can see how riders take alternating pulls at the front and it will give you some idea of how they use the banking of the velodrome to both slow and accelerate (to rejoin the ‘string’ of riders).

The sprints are a bit different with track sprinters being on the taller and heavier side comparatively speaking (males may average 80-85kg+ compared to 70kg for an endurance trackie; some road climbers may weigh 60kg).  Do realize that the only track sprint that is even close to a true sprint is the match sprint.  But even there it’s not like the 100m in track and field.

Rather, it’s 3 laps long with the first 2.5 being done at a walking pace as the cyclists jockey for position (often they will stop in place on the track for minutes at a time trying to force their opponent to lead them out) and all that matters is the final 200m (which takes 10 secondsish for the top guys) and who crosses first; best 2 out of 3 wins.  This is a typical match sprint and apparently Thunderstruck by AC/DC is a universal sports song.  Weird, huh.

The team sprint is 3 laps of the track with each rider taking a single pull before pulling off the line; the time is set by the final rider crossing the line.  The first rider needs the best start and acceleration to get everyone up to speed, the second guy needs more endurance since he has to ride the first and second lap and maintain speed and the third guy (who needs to ride all three laps) the most endurance of all since he rides all three laps and tries to keep up the top speed against fatigue.  Again, it’s speed plus endurance.  This is a team sprint.

The 1km individual time trial is similar, it takes about a minute 5 so it’s on the short end of anaerobic glycolysis, you need speed plus endurance and the ability to hurt when acidosis is trying to shut you down.  But it’s not as specialized as either a pure sprint (i.e. West African dominance in the 100/200m) or pure endurance events (i.e. East African dominance).  It’s in that same weird place as the 400m/800m in track running.

Of far more relevance to the sprint events is this: the bikes only have a single gear and this has huge implications for the physical demands.

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Equipment

Like I said, track bikes are fixed gear (the back wheel doesn’t spin freely, if it’s moving so are you legs) have no brakes and only one gear.  And the single gear means that track cyclists have to strike a shocking balance between a gear big enough to let them go fast (they may hit pedal cadences of 150-160 RPMs) but not be so big that they can’t get it moving from a standing start or accelerate it up to speed.

This video should give you an idea of the effort involved in a standing start.  It’s nuts and the instantaneous power outputs that are measured are absurd, topping 2000 watts for the men (an average untrained 70kg man might hit 700 watts to put this in perspective).

If the above isn’t clear, imagine driving your car for example and having only one gear.  What would you choose?  If you chose 1st gear, it would be easy to get going but you’d rev out the engine and your top speed would be limited.  If you chose 5th gear, it would be impossible to get moving (you’d stall the engine) but you’d have a high top speed so long as you could get to it.  If you’ve ridden geared bikes you may understand this better: in too big a gear you can’t get the pedals moving, in too small a gear you spin out.  So you start in a small gear and increase as you start going faster.  You can’t do that on a track bike.

They make this choice based on their own strengths, weaknesses, the events, conditions, etc.  Junior riders are actually limited in the size gear they can run so that they don’t ruin their knees pushing too big a gear when they are young.  But  track cyclists ultimately need everything from low cadence near limit strength to extremely high speed movements (like a track sprinter).  Most track sprinters spend an enormous amount of time in the weight room for this reason (enduros don’t hit the same top speeds and don’t have to push the same monster gears so most of their work is still endurance based).

A track sprinter has to have the instantaneous power to turn over this huge assed gear from a standing start, accelerate it to speed and ultimately be able to keep putting pressure on the pedals at 160rpms once they get there.  All while holding their line on the track to minimize the distance covered.  Even being able to spin the pedals that fast smoothly takes a tremendous amount of coordination and practice.  Like this:

But ultimately the demands of track sprinting are strength, explosive power, speed/acceleration and some endurance.  Again, endurance races on the track are mainly about endurance (top speed is of course important but not to nearly the same degree as for the sprinters).  Which means that you might not expect a single ethnic group to be dominant (in the way the running events have been dominated): the demands are too varied and somewhat non-specialized.

Or you might expect there to be a broader cross-section of folks who could be potentially good at it because the demands are not quite so specialized.  That is, to be a great distance runner requires a very specific set of characteristics; if you don’t have them you can not reach the top.  This just isn’t the case for something like track cycling because of the broad range of characteristics required.

Tangentially, the same is  true for road cycling because of the nature of the sport.  Many don’t realize that road cycling is actually a team sport at the highest levels and most teams will have guys ranging from their star (the one who can actually win the race and tends to be at least good in all disciplines) to climbers to sprinters to what are called domestiques (effectively grunts whose job is to support someone else).  If you can fill one of those roles, you can be a top level road cyclist even if you don’t have the all around talent to win races.  And they all get paid.

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Genetics

But because of all of the above you wouldn’t necessarily expect a given ethnic group to dominate the sport, certainly not one that had evolved/developed a very specialized set of physiological characteristics that would predispose them to dominating in one sport (cf. Kenyan runners).  Even East Africans with their endurance advantages aren’t built to do well in distance cycling or something like swimming; they are too small and don’t have the physical strength or body type to be good at it.  In many ways, it would be less surprising to see 100 or 200m track sprinters doing well in some of the track cycling events.

It is interesting to ask why there haven’t been more black track cyclists (one notable one was Nelson Vails in the 1980s’) especially in the shorter events given the propensity for strength/power performance in that ethic group.  But this is probably social/cultural or economic as much as it is anything else.

Track cycling is a niche sport to begin with and most of the countries that are big in track cycling such as Germany don’t have large black populations and even the countries in Europe that do don’t have much of a cycling tradition in the black communities that do exist.   So it’s a pretty lilly white sport for the most part.

In any case, those are some of the requirements for track cycling success in a physical sense and I tried to touch on the issue of whether you might expect genetic dominance in the sport as has happened in running (the answer would appear to be no).   Now I can start getting to the meat of the issue: UK Track cycling.

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Location, Location, Location

It is interesting to note that even countries with fairly miserable weather still produce a lot of road cyclists (I bring this up since I mentioned the altitude and overall weather of Kenya in Part 1-3).  How do they deal with the weather?  Simply…they deal.  There’s a reason that you hear about the hard men of Flanders and Belgium, they ride regardless because of the history and incentives inherent to the sport.  Rain doesn’t stop them and neither does anything else.  And strictly speaking you can ride a bike anywhere there are roads. Sometimes that doesn’t even stop folks, Paris-Roubaix is famously held on cobblestones and at least one road race seems to be run through a dirt track.

For the track, it’s a bit different.  Bad weather shuts down tracks, the material the velo is made out of the nature of the wheels means that snow and rain shut down training. Especially given that early velodromes were typically open air (just like football and baseball stadiums in the United States).  In modern times, most velos are fully enclosed, so long as a country has one of those, trackies can train year round the weather be damned.

But that brings us to the next issue: the presence of velodromes.  Being fairly specialized (and expensive as hell to build) they aren’t found universally. Some countries have lots, some have a handful (the US has maybe a half dozen, 2 in Texas, several in California, at least one in Florida, one in Colorado Springs), some have none or the ones that they do have are old and delapidated or open to the elements making year round training impossible.  Oddly, there is a high-altitude track in La Paz, Bolivia where many world records have been set.  It’s not the best track but it’s at super high altitude and since wind resistance provides much of the slowing, this is a benefit.  The drawback: no air.

And this becomes a limiter for people wanting to pursue the sport.  Especially in the sprints where you simply must train on the track to get to the top level (enduros can and usually do a lot if not most of their training on the roads). No facilities means no success no matter what else is in place.  As you’d expect, many of the dominant countries not only have the tradition and history in the sport but also the facilities that allow folks to pursue it.

S.

So Who’s the Best?

It’s a sport where international dominance seems to shift quite a bit, the Australians were dominant in the sprints for a while (using about the simplest training program you’ve ever seen), the French have traditionally been strong, I’ve mentioned the German 4k team time trial when I’ve talked about Methods of Endurance Training.  The Canadians have rarely done much (with one recent exception, a female track rider who took gold at the age of 38), same with US track riders.

One country that has traditionally not been a force in track cycling is the United Kingdom (again, here I’m referring to Great Britian, Scotland and NORTHERN Ireland as a whole).  There were always riders but they never did much.  And like I said above, it’s not as if cycling isn’t monstrous overseas, there are zillions of cyclists (give or take a billion) in the country.  And the UK just couldn’t produce on the track.  They were hampered by a lack of tradition, a lack of facilities, a lack of a lot of things.

And about 1996, they decided to change that.  By 2001 they started winning and within about a decade they were considered the dominant force in the sport.  For example, they won 9 of the 18 gold medals at the 2008 Championships. In Beijing they won 14 total medals including 8 of the possible 18 gold medals.  They did it in the sprints, in the distances and both their men and women riders were successful.  And they got there in about a decade.

And the reason that I’m talking about this at all is that how they went about generating this monstrous change is what’s really interesting since it basically provides a framework for how you go from zero to top of the heap in a relatively short period of time.  Because effectively it all changed when the UK Cycling federation simply decided that they were going to dominate track cycling.  They had a lot of hurdles to jump but it all started with that conscious decision.  But first, an important question.

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Why Track Cycling?

The question being asked here is why the UK would choose to focus on a sport that is not only fairly niche but would certainly seem to pale in comparison to targeting something like the Tour De France or even the Olympic road events (why they focused on cycling in the first place I don’t have an answer to).  And the reasons, of course, are numerous.   As I mentioned, cycling has a huge tradition on the continent, that alone was probably one of their motivations to pursue cycling.

But why the track rather than say the Olympic road race or the Tour De France, both of which are arguably more well known and more prestigious?  One reason is that road cycling is much less controllable than what goes on the track.  Road cycling revolves not only around physiology but team tactics and a whole bunch of other variables that are difficult to control; the strongest guy doesn’t necessarily win on any given day and all kinds of strange things can happen that change the results. For reasons you’ll see in a second, UK Cycling had to produce winners and there were too few guarantees in road racing.

As, well at the Olympic level (the biggest stage in the world for all sports) there are only a couple of road medals available. Coupled with the unpredictability of the events and it just wasn’t a risk worth taking to focus on them.  In track cycling, the potential medal haul is much larger because of the larger number of total events.  You’ll see this idea come up again when I talk about the German sports machine later on.

This is especially true given the overlap in the events in terms of physiology.  A guy strong in the match sprint (relying on explosive speed and some endurance along with tactics) can do well in the team sprint (put him with two other good guys) and can probably be trained to kick ass in the kilo (an event taking under a minute) with a bit of speed endurance work.

The same holds for the endurance events, a top enduro rider (and they invariably come from road cycling) can do well in the Madison with a good teammate, the 4km individual time trial, the 4km team trial and the points race.   When you find and develop a monster talent in one of those events, their potential to win in the others is that much higher meaning more potential medals.  And without the massive unpredictability of racing on the road.

Keep in mind that this was all happening in the mid- to late-90′s when all of the drug issues were really coming to a head (before cycling tried to clean things up) and they just didn’t want to touch the drug issue (or risk being associated with a sport with such a deeply rooted culture of doping).  Either track cycling doesn’t have the same ingrained culture of doping or the UK folks felt that they could produce on the track without drugs.

So that’s the background.  They decided to target cycling and track cycling specifically and to become a force at the world level.  What did they do?  Perhaps more importantly, what gave them the ability to even try in the first place?

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This Week’s Lotto Jackpot: 4 Billion Pounds or Euros or Something

It all started with lottery money.  For reasons I’m not entirely clear on, UK cycling was given a huge chunk of the UK lottery money to throw at track cycling to do what they wanted to do.  First and foremost this meant giving the potential riders the support necessary to actually train full time.  Suddenly cyclists could focus on training and recovering rather than on, you know, making enough money to have food to eat.  This also allowed them to deal with the equipment end of things.  Velos in the UK ranged from dismal to depressing where they existed at all and the UK would build a state of the art velodrome giving it’s athletes a place to train year round.

They poured a lot of money into equipment development; small improvements in things like bike weight and aerodynamics pay huge dividends on the track and you don’t generate good results riding on crap bikes.  Chris Boardman who I mentioned above, was the head of the cycling skunkworks, developing top secret equipment to allow the athletes to get the most out of what they had.  Supposedly they destroy their skinsuits after each race so that nobody can reverse engineer whatever they’ve done.

To avoid having to reinvent the wheel, they brought in experienced coaches from Australia and elsewhere to set up the training programs (this is what I actually will have the least to say anything about; the information isn’t available).  A huge amount of physiological testing was done. Strength and conditioning specialists handled that as was diet, supplements, etc.  One of the sources I’ll provide in the next part talks about a sports psychologist brought in a bit later in the program to help with the final piece of the puzzle.

Basically they made sure that no potential improvement to performance went unexamined.  They focused on what they called ‘the aggregation of small benefits’ or something roughly to that effect.  They tried to get an extra 1% here and 1% there and 1% another place by optimizing training, and diet and equipment and…. This is a sport where first and second place can be decided by hundreths or thousandths of seconds.  Finding a 3% advantage pays dividends like you wouldn’t believe.

Sources
Flying Scotsman : Cycling to Triumph Through My Darkest Hours by Graeme Obree.  A fascinating look at a fascinating indivdual, an amateur road cyclist from Scotland who decided to attempt the world record.  And briefly held it.  There is also a movie of the same name but it garbles many of the facts.
The Crooked Path to Victory: Drugs and Cheating in Professional Bicycle Racing by Les Woodland.  A look at the culture of cheating/doping within cycling, I’m mainly sourcing this for a history of track cycling for anybody who really cares.

And that’s where I’ll cut this today.  You’ve got the basics of track cycling as a sport, the cultural background, the physiological demands of the sport along with a teaser on how a country went from zero to hero in about a decade with an infusion of lottery money.  They had the desire, the drive and they created the facilities and support; the numbers were more or less there.  But now they needed something more important.  Talent.  And that’s where I’ll pick up next.

Read Why the US Sucks at Olympic Lifting: Part 5.

Today I will wrap up this discussion and look at a bunch of other relevant factors.  Again, I’m only spending this much time on this particular group once; the other groups I’m going to look at will get one part or less.  Mainly I’m going into such depth here to give you some idea of the complexity of this topic in terms of what is required for sports success.

I finished up on Wednesday by talking about Kenyan training and what it entails.  I’ll pick up from there and then move into a discussion of perhaps one of the most important factors in all of this.

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When They Aren’t Running

Outside of running their brains out, the Kenyans do little else training wise.  They do a lot of the evil static stretching and some ‘exercises’ which appear to be more or less a plank type series with some other basic movements.  They don’t cross-train, don’t lift weights for the most part (gyms are unheard of in the country).  They run and run and run some more.  And then run some more for good measure. And they do this from the start to the end of their career.   Specificity rules and the results are the proof of that, but that’s a topic for another over-written series I’m working on.

There are few distractions for runners, no TV, no Internet, no Facebook.  Many run first thing in the morning and then take a nap before run number 2 a few hours later; they go to bed when the sun goes down.  This ensures plenty of sleep, a key for recovery.  That’s in addition to naps that are often taken between runs.  They train, rest, eat, repeat.

In a related vein, between blocks of hard training, Kenyans often do no running.  No cross training, no active recovery, no nothing.  They will take 2 months to recover (and do things like work on the farm and spend time with family) and then train like maniacs when it’s time (and you can bet they are rested and ready to go when it’s time).  When they go hard, they go hard.  When they go easy, they go easy.  There’s nothing in-between.

Basically they are full-time athletes, training as much as they can handle and resting the rest of the time.  But being able to do that is predicated on arguably one of the single most important factors, one you’ll see coming up again and again.

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Support

Very simply, without support to pursue the sport, no amount of training, passion or what have you will get an athlete very far. Whether it’s financial support for equipment and food, moral support, paperwork support or what have you.  Without it it’s tough to succeed.  As Charlie Francis famously put it “You don’t get full-time results out of part-time athletes” and support is a huge part of that.

And this manifests itself in Kenyan running in a bunch of different ways, much of which comes out of the tribal/communal nature of the group.  For example,Kenyans do a lot of their training in large groups on a daily basis.  It’s apparently not uncommon to see groups including everyone from world champions and record holders to complete newbies.  Nobody is excluded; if you can keep up you can be part of the group.

That sort of environment not only encourages everyone to try (making it more likely that a huge talent might show up) but also pushes everyone to a higher level.  What’s more motivating for a new runner than to beat a world champion when they are having an off day?  What’s more motivating to a champion to see the guys who are trying to out do him and challenging him?  The newbies are pulled to produce their best and the established runners see that they can’t rest or someone else will take their place.

This also extends to supporting runners who want to pursue the sport; when Kenyans decide to pursue running, they are given the support that they need.  Sometimes it’s as simple as showing up at a fellow Kenyan’s homestead where the wanna-be runner can expect food and lodging and everything needed to allow them to train full time.

There are also the training camps some of which are organized by the Kenyan sports federation, some by schools, some by the military and some of which are sponsored by the big shoe companies.  Regardless of who is involved, they all provide the same type of support so that the athletes can train unfettered by having to worry about anything else.

Although they appear to have come about a little bit later in the development of this entire ‘system’, there are now Kenyans sporting federations that, along with the shoe company training camps, help with other important aspects of support.  Stuff like travel visas, making sure athletes are taken care of when they are out of the country.

There is also a developing group of European sports agents who represent Kenyan runners who fulfill a lot of the same roles.  And, of course, all of this is critical, your runner can’t win if they aren’t at the races.   And they can’t get to the races if they can’t travel, don’t have the right visas, don’t have lodging, etc.  It’s all covered to ensure that the athletes can get to the races ready to win.

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Diet and Drugs

Dietarily, Kenyans are one of the few groups of endurance athletes that actually hit the recommended 70% carbs with pretty much all of their food coming from unrefined sources (including a maize based food called ugali, an evil grain that doesn’t seem to be hurting them too much).  Dietary supplements are unheard of and go unused when provided. This isn’t actually a topic I’m going to address in later parts of the series, I bring it up here primarily for completeness (and to poke fun at the anti-grain cultists some more).

I suppose I should touch on the drug issue, a notable few Kenyan runners have come up positive for banned substances including ephedrine and one or two for anabolics.  It’s unknown what the degree of drug use is among this group; some feel that this has increased since European sports agents have started handling Kenyan runners but nobody seems to know for sure what the extent of use is or whether it’s just less talented runners who are using in an attempt to win.  Most argue that cultural attitudes towards such would keep most runners from using but clearly some athletes have gotten popped.  It’s really a big question mark.

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Psychology

I made a joke once that I had read two books on sports psychology and considered myself an expert; I was only half-joking.  And while I’m not going to get deeply into this issue, it is felt by those in the know that there are some important psychological aspects of Kenyan runners that contributes to their success (along with all of the other factors).  Again, the issues span multiple topics.

Some feel that the Kenyan upbringing teaches them to endure pain.  They are circumcised without anesthetic as teens and expected to make no noise.  Effectively, they are taught to internalize pain and show nothing and some think that teaches them to suffer and do it in silence.

As well it’s thought their overall lifestyle of relaxation and sitting around doing a lot of nothing teaches them to endure the monotony inherent to distance running training.  They don’t have the distraction of the Internet or TV or whatever or the short attention span/subclinical ADHD of most in the west.  So they don’t really have a problem with ‘boredom’.  When you’re used to sitting around all day doing jack all, running for 2-3 hours is no big deal; especially given the potential rewards (see below).  Contrast that to folks who must jump through endless hoops just to ‘get through an hour of cardio’ without going nuts.

As I noted above, Kenyans don’t run for recreation, most runners stop running after their competitive career is over (and many do have a short career, whether this is from burnout, because they have all the money they need, or because the talent is so deep that up and comers take over is unknown).  They run to compete and that’s it.  When they are done competing, they are done running for the most part (there are occasional exceptions).  They are plenty active tending to the farm, they don’t exercise for recreation or to keep from getting fat and don’t understand why people in other cultures do.

Some also feel that Kenyan dominance has also instilled a belief that Kenyans simply can’t lose; they go into each race supremely confident of their victory (or at least the victory of a tribesman) so they aren’t hampered by any negative thoughts that might keep them from producing their best performance.  Some feel other athletes simply give up when they see 7 Kenyans at the line; why give it your all if you’re competing for 8th place?  Kenyans in contrast believe they can win and will go as hard as they can as long as they can to make it happen.

In sort of the ‘amusing’ category (and this ties into diet above) that Kenyan runners believe that maize from Kenya (to make ugali) is stronger than maize from anywhere else.  They will often bring a bag with them when they travel overseas and all of the Kenyan runners will get together to mix up ugali the night before the race.  Magic?  Voodoo?  Belief?  It sort of doesn’t matter at the end of the day.  Mojo is mojo and whatever your mojo is, you need it to compete optimally (as I discussed in the section on Random Reinforcement is not Reinforcing Randomly in Because We Let Them: Addendum).

But even that wouldn’t be sufficient, everything I’ve talked about so far, the physiology, location, support, etc., to produce results without another important factor.

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Incentives and Motivation

One question that we might ask is what drives them to go through all of this in the first place.   What’s their motivation to suffer this much, what are the incentives for even trying.  Because without both of those (to one degree or another), nobody is willing to put up with the type of training required.

Make no mistake, sport is part of Kenyan childhood in the schools (for those who can attend school) but that doesn’t explain why the entire country (and the specific groups) are basically just run crazy or work as hard as they do.  So what motivates Kenyans to put themselves through all of this in the first place, to put their life on hold for 2 years to run themselves into the ground?

And, as always, there are a multitude of reasons why they run.  One big clue is that while Kenyans have dominated in races with big prize purses, they haven’t typically done as much at the Olympic level (especially in things like the marathon).  And the reason is simple: money.

Kenya is a poor country and one year’s success on the international running circuit can earn a Kenyan more than they’d make in 10 years of working the farm.  For example, consider that winning the NY marathon is worth $130,000 ($200,00 for a past winner); second place get $65,000.  That’s a pretty big motivator.

In contrast, a gold medal isn’t worth a ton in a culture/country where an endorsement doesn’t mean anything; winning a marathon or setting a world record in one of the big races can be big money so they put their focus where it will pay off.   Winning at running is a way to a better life and that’s often the most motivating thing of all.

Another reason is tradition.  Since Kenyans started winning back in the 1960′s, a feed-forward cycle has developed where Kenyans grow up wanting to be runners and follow the tradition of their tribesmen.  Or they see the money top runners are making and that motivates them.  The end result is the same.  Tons of people enter the sport, into hard training (and there are also training camps and good coaching and all of the other factors) which makes it more likely that potential talent will be expressed and maximized.  As more Kenyans are successful at the world stage, more Kenyans should want to pursue running to try and do the same.  Success breeds success here as kids have heroes to emulate.

Interestingly, one thing that does not appear to motivate Kenyans is national pride, it’s almost never mentioned as a reason to run when they are asked (although they do seem to have a bit of a rivalry with Ethiopian runners who are starting to show stronger results).

During races, while they are always trying to win individually, if the situation won’t allow it, runners will help fellow Kenyans to be victorious, using tactics similar to what is seen in cycling to ensure that a Kenyan crosses first.  But this has as much to do with the community as anything.  If Kenyan runner A helps Kenyan runner B win today, it’s understood that Kenyan runner B will help out Runner A in turn at some later date.  It all comes around when your competitors are also your tribesmen; you have everything to gain by helping out and nothing to lose.

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Let’s Talk About Sex (Well, Gender)

One thing worth noting is that, by and large, Kenyan women have not dominated running to the same degree but even this has an explanation: social tradition. Kenyan females are not supported to become runners in the way that the men are; rather they are expected to become wives and work the homestead/take care of the children.  There is simply not the opportunity for Kenyan females to pursue the sport to the same degree; the few who have had had success which you’d expect because all of the other factors are still present.  But for purely sociological/cultural reasons the numbers just aren’t there to produce true dominance as with male runners.

This is why in the article I cited in Part 1, the author had to rely primarily on one or two non-Kenyan women making the podium to argue that Caucasians still had a chance in the sport.  But the level of talent for the Kenyan women is simply not as deep in the sport of distance running for purely sociological and cultural reasons so it’s not shocking that they don’t take 1,2,3 in most events the way that the men do.  If the same number of Kenyan woman got into running, they’d be likely to be just as dominant for all the reasons I’ve discussed.

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Summing Up

So we have a situation that seems to have developed like this: once a Kenyan was successful, you had a situation where everyone wanted to follow in their footsteps for whatever reason  Undistracted by other sports, this drove tons more into the sport to pursue it primarily for financial reasons, they train like absolute maniacs and coupled with what would appear to be some physiological advantages you get success in spades.  And that drives more success. There are other factors including the lifestyle, psychology, community, support, etc. all that came together in one synergistic whole to create a true situation of dominance.

And currently it’s just one big feed-forward cycle: as Kenyans continue to be successful, the same factors that led to that initial success just push more to success because it benefits everyone to keep it going.  The federations benefit from Kenyan dominance, so do the runners, so does everyone involved.  Which doesn’t mean it will sustain forever; sometimes the most perfect system can collapse for various reasons.  Kenyan society is changing becoming more modernized and Western; fewer are pursuing running and that means that Kenyan dominance may not last forever.

But that is ultimately in the future.  As it stands, what happened in Kenya from about the late 1960′s until now give at least some indication of the factors that can and must come together to generate what is true sporting dominance.  Which brings me, finally, to the final section of today.

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The First Big Punchline, Pay Attention

And before I close this part out, here’s a critical punchline that I need everybody reading this to pay a lot of attention to; and I’m going to beat this into the ground.    Especially since I already saw one truly dumbassed criticism of part 2 where someone seemed to think I was saying that 10 years of GPP and ‘hard training’ was THE key to Kenyan running dominance.   Another was funny enough to call my conclusion ‘simplistic’ despite the fact that I’m not even close to reaching a conclusion.  Ah, the Internets.  Anyhow…

As the authors of the books sourced below have pointed out, many other groups in Kenya/East Africa share one or more of the factors present in Kenya.  Whether it’s altitude or lifestyle or physiology whatever; you can find one or more of the factors I’ve discussed in the other tribes.  Yet none of them have produced in the way that Kenya has (Ethiopia is making big strides in distance running and there is quite the rivalry forming).  Clearly no single factor is sufficient for success, even if they may all be required at the highest levels.  Note those bolded words, they are the important ones.

And this points out to what may be the most important part of this series: looking for a singular answer to Why Does X do Y? is a mistake.  Kenyan dominance isn’t as simple as just physiology, just psychology, just sociology or just anything else I talked about.  Thinking that it is therefore not only simplistic but just utterly wrong.  Rather, it’s the combination of all of those factors coming together in just the right way that produced the end result.  They are all important and success is predicated on all of them being there.

So imagine this vast interconnected web where if you removed any single ‘strand’ everything collapses.  You can have the numbers of athletes, the support, the culture but if the talent isn’t there, you still don’t win.  You can have the culture, the numbers and the talent but if you don’t do the training needed (for whatever reason), you still don’t win.  Even if you have the talent and do the training, if you don’t have the money to get to the events (because the federation provides no support), you still can’t win.  You can come up with any combination of these things, if all but one of the factors is present, you still won’t see the success you’d expect. You need all of them.

Get it?  Just keep this in mind as we move along because while not every system I’m going to present is identical to the Kenyan situation, you will see the same factors coming up over and over and over again in one way or another.  And yes, I know that this is a very roundabout way to getting to the answer of my original question.  Hopefully it’s worth it.  Also, as noted I’ll be a lot less verbose as we go now, spending less time on each individual system or country than I did on this one.

A Final Semantic Note

In a thread on his forum, Olympic lifting coach Glenn Pendlay of California Strength (who’s OL’ing Technique DVD I reviewed previously) apparently took a bit of an issue with the title of this series and my choice of the word ‘suck’ to describe US performance in OL’ing arguing that we do ok just not great.  Fair enough and this is just semantics I suppose.  But compared to where we were in the 60′s (medalling in nearly every weight class) compared to now (winning nothing at all), I stand by my choice.  Anyhow, just wanted to address it sooner rather than later.

As promised, here are a few sources for folks wanting to delve into this issue specific further.

Sources
More Fire, How to Run the Kenyan Way by Toby Tanser.  An eminently readable account of this.  Tanser has spent an enormous amount of time with Kenyan runners and written several books about the topic looking at all the factors that go into Kenyan running success.
The Cybernetics of Kenyan Running: Hurry Hurry Has No Blessing by Randall Mayes.  A more academic look at the topic, a bit dry in spots but a lot of the numbers I provided come from this book (there is at least one other book in this vein).  Get the Tanser book before you get this one.

And that’s where I’ll cut it today.  On Monday I’ll finally move away from Kenyan running dominance to look at a sport I doubt most are terribly familiar with: track cycling and how the UK went from nobodies to dominance in about a decade.  As with the other recent mega-series, I’m turning comments off until the final part.

Read Why the US Sucks at Olympic Lifting: Part 4.

And a question that has been posited since they started winning is why this is the case.   And the answer is not simple.  Demonstrating that, to look at this in the detail I want, it’s going to take me today and Friday to cover factors ranging from physiology, sociology, economics, incentives, and who knows what else.   This should give you some idea of what I’m going to try to address in this series as a whole to answer the original question.

And don’t worry, I won’t be going into this kind of nauseating detail for every sport and every group.  I’m doing it in this first case to try and express the degree that all of these different factors contribute, just to give the scope of complexity of this topic and why simple answers of “Just do this one thing” are invariably so wrong.

In any case, back to the Kenyans.  Over the years folks have looked intensely for the reasons behind Kenyan running dominance and early studies focused, somewhat logically on physiology.  Examination of other factors that might play a role came later.   Today and Friday, of course, I’ll look at all of it.

Physiological Factors

Early studies of Kenyan runners focused on physiology and genetics since they were fairly easy to measure (and physiologists were really getting a hardon for such about the time the Kenyans came to dominance).  However, no real differences in VO2 max showed up.  This is no surprise, at the top levels of endurance athletes there is not only a clear limit to VO2 max but by itself it holds little predictive value for performance.  A high VO2 max is required for top endurance performance but, in and of itself it is not sufficient and this is true in all endurance sports.

There is some indication of improved efficiency (due to a low body weight, very skinny lower legs and other factors), along with very high Type I fiber number (and very oxidative Type IIa fibers) in Kenyan runners and both would be expected to provide a benefit to distance running.

Metabolically, Kenyans appear to produce less ammonia (which causes fatigue during exercise) and they rely more on fat for fuel (and less on protein which is probably why they produce less ammonia in the first place) both which would have benefits for long distance running.  They probably also thermoregulate better due to being tall and lanky (and having evolved in Africa); this is important for long events as once core temperature gets above a certain point, performance simply stops.

Of great interest, Kenyan runners have been found to be able to maintain a whopping 92% of VO2 max for extended periods (most other athletes top out at maybe 87-88%).  Coupled with the increased running efficiency this means that at any given running speed, the Kenyan runners are expending less effort.  And when other runners have hit their limit, Kenyans have another gear to access.  If all of the above is Greek to you, please read Predictors of Endurance Training Performance for explanations of those terms.

So there is certainly at least some evidence to indicate physiological adaptations that would predispose Kenyans towards great running performance.  It’s worth noting that Kenyans who have occasionally tried to cross-over to other endurance sports haven’t had much success since different body types tend to be ideal for different sports and Kenyans don’t have it; they are built to run and that’s about it.  So it’s all just genetic, right?  Well, no.  That may be part of it but separating what is genetic and what is due to their intense training (discussed below) is problematic.

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The Genetic Factor

While on the topic of genetics, there is something interesting worth mentioning  Because sometimes people take the idea that ‘All great runners are Kenyans’ and reverse it to ‘All Kenyans are great runners’ (it’d be the same logical fallacy as saying ‘since all oranges are round, all round things are oranges’).

Not only is that wrong, there is simply no indication that this is the case.  Certainly Kenyan runners are dominant but there are far more Kenyans who are non-runners (or who fail) than there are runners who succeed.  The majority of Kenyans are neither runners nor champions.  It’s simply that the subset of Kenyans who do run well just crush the rest of the world.

I mention this as research indicates that, among blacks, there tends to be more genetic variability than in other ethnicities (again I hesitate to use the word ‘race’).   Basically there is more spread around what might be some average in blacks compared to non-blacks.  You’ll see both more data points at the low end and at the high end for anything you look at.

And the practical implication of that is that you could expect both the best and worst runners to be represented by Kenyan runners.  It’s similar to the way that blacks of West African descent may be muscular, lean strength/power dominant types or suffer from terrible insulin resistance and obesity.  Quite in fact, as discussed in the paper Influence of Racial Origin and Skeletal Muscle Properties on Disease Prevalence and Physical Performance it’s probably the same factors causing both potentialities (i.e. high Type II fiber dominance) and other factors which interact to determine what is ultimately seen.

Basically we would expect there to be just as many Kenyan runners who are terrible as there are who are just incredible.   But it’s this variability that may give the potential for truly superior specimens to emerge.   And since sport only cares about the best athletes (the ones at the opposite extreme or in the middle aren’t relevant), it’s only relevant in that this variability gives that potential for both the worst AND the best.  And the best are all that matter here.

But that can only happen if a bunch of other factors are also present and that’s what I’m going to discuss next.

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Location, Location, Location

Of course a logical place to look for clues had to do with where Kenyans not only lived and grew up but had evolved and this included multiple factors.  An early issue that came up was the altitude factor.   Kenyans not only evolved at altitude but grow up there; this might have an impact on a lot of levels.  But other tribes live/evolve at the same altitude and haven’t produced the same number of runners so there’s clearly more than just that going on.  It may be necessary or helpful but it clearly isn’t sufficient.

It was often argued early on that Kenyans ran everywhere as children but this is far from universally true.  Some great Kenyan runners ran to school, some did not.  However, cars are a rarity, most Kenyan kids do at least walk to school and it’s thought that their hard upbringing gives them a 10 year base (in terms of having conditioned their bodies, tendons, bones and ligaments walking or running on ground) so that transitioning to intensive training is less of a shock.

By the time they are 15 or whatever, they’ve already been pounding the ground for miles at a time as part of their activities daily living.   It’s naturally occurring GPP as a function of the culture and environment.  Contrast that to the US where people take the car down the block to the mini-mart and kids don’t even ride bikes for the most part.

The weather is such that they can train year round.  There has been some recent speculation about Vitamin D and athletic performance and being outdoors in the sun training would contribute to optimal Vitamin D levels.  The same probably applies to Jamaican sprinters training in Jamaica and may be part of their success in the short sprints.  That and the sweet potatoes.

But again there are other countries in the area that share the commonality of location and they don’t produce great runners.   The above is all probably beneficial as hell (certainly it’s hard to be a distance runner in places where you have to deal with months of brutal winter) but it’s clearly not sufficient to produce success.

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Sociopolitical Rhetoric

For political reasons related to having been a British colony, most Kenyans are exposed to either soccer or running at an early age and few other options are available; there simply aren’t any other sports to get involved in or pull talent from running (and soccer includes a lot of running as part of the sport).

Remember, running is a universal sport; all cultures run and it requires little to no equipment so there are no real financial hurdles keeping anybody out.  It’s not like having to pay for gymnastics or ice skating lessons or joining a gym where you often see ‘cultural’ or ‘racial’ dominance simply because only certain groups can afford to do it.

Want to run? Go outdoors and put one foot in front of the other and do it until you don’t do it anymore.  As well, school kids often run in competition fairly early on as well; this is the type of situation that identifies talent and provides kids coming up with an incentive to pursue more training if they show some initial success at it.  Competition starts to identify potential talents and give them some positive feedback for the activity (ribbons, bragging rights, the stuff kids and adults both love).

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It’s the Training, Stupid

Of course, much has been written (much wrong) about how the Kenyans actually train.  The first source below, Tanser is about the most accurate information you’ll find since he’s lived there and talked to the runners themselves.  This is not second hand information.

Because once they decide to pursue competitive running (and they do it only for competitive reasons, Kenyans don’t understand the fascination with jogging for leisure among Westerners) the Kenyans train like absolute maniacs.   Twice a day 6 days a week is normal.  Many train three times per day, some even go four times per day to try and reach the next level.

There’s a funny story in one of the books below about some new runners at training camp, they were up at 8am and saw one of the current champs in bed sleeping. They thought they were ahead of the game out running at 8am.  They didn’t realize he’d already been up at 6am to do his first run and was sleeping before his 10am second run of the day.

But they all end up trying to out-do one another in terms of who can train the most or hardest.  And while this certainly destroys some, the ones who don’t break down simply succeed.  It’s a grinder system to be sure but it developed totally organically without anyone imposing it or putting it in place.  They do it because they feel that hard work will bring success. And once they devote themselves to running, they do whatever it takes.

Kenyan training philosophy seems to have integrated the best part of a lot of different training systems and ideas and it all comes together in a synergistic whole.  Fasted morning runs (followed 4 hours later by a second run which might have some interesting gene expression implications), quality work depending on the specific event being trained for, the single weekly long run, etc.

When they run easy they run ‘very’ easy (they might amble along at 8 minute per mile when they can readily throw off consistent 5 minute miles); when they go hard they run themselves to exhaustion.  They perform workouts that most couldn’t achieve in the first place much less run day after day.  And unlike many athletes who work in the middle zone all the time, Kenyans Keep the Hard Days Hard and Easy Days Easy.  Runs that start out at an ambling pace (not going faster until they warm up) frequently turn into race pace by the end.   They often get volume and intensity in most of their runs.

They use no technology, heart rate monitors are unheard of and unused when given to runners; instead they train by feel.  There is an auto-regulating aspect to their training; when they feel good they go hard.  If that means 4 hard days in a row they figure why not take advantage and go hard.  If they feel worn out, they go easier until they feel good again.  Contrast this to systems where you will run speed work on Wednesday and hills on Saturday PERIOD.

Kenyans don’t lift weights and most are pathetically weak (a single push-up or chin being beyond them).  However, their training is done on soft ground up and down mountains.  So not only are their joints spared the impact of running on concrete (allowing them to train more often most likely), there is automatic stability training (try running on uneven trails sometimes).

The hill work (which Lydiard promoted decades ago) amounts to running specific strength training some of the hills are so steep that they end up on all fours scrambling up the thing.  Coming down is a huge eccentric stress (trivia for the day: downhill running is often used to generate massive muscle damage).  And they do this all the time.   You don’t need special strength training or to dick around in the weight room when you can get the most specific running strength training going up and down the mountain.

They feel that running on softer ground makes them more springy and running is a sport where elastic rebound does contribute (studies have found benefits to plyometric training for runners for example and there may be long term adaptations to things like titin that play a role here).  After a road race on concrete they will find soft ground to do their cool down on to bring their legs back so they can train the next day.

When they race, Kenyans give it their all, with new runners often going out at impossible paces just in case they can hold on (and usually dying on the vine).  The depth of the Kenyan runners is such that they often go 1,2,3. Simply, their slow runners are still better than 99% of everyone else.

Many developing Kenyan runners attend or qualify for training camps (and  a lot of the big shoe companies have set up training camps for Kenyan runners) where they are exposed to the type of training thought to require success. This rapidly weeds out those who can’t handle it; only the best survive.  Some argue that if non-Kenyans could train like Kenyans, they could be competitive.  But without the background, the anatomy (weighing 50kg soaking wet takes a lot of the pounding off the body), the location, and everything else it’s unclear if non-Kenyans could train like the Kenyans.

Quite in fact, when non-Kenyan runners have attempted to train with Kenyans in Kenya, they usually give up after about a week (notably, some Kenyan runners give up a week into training camps when they realize what’s expected by them; they’ve got the background and they can’t hack it).  They simply can’t handle the training.

From a coaching perspective, in addition to feedback from other successful runners, Kenyan coaches now have 30 years experience producing the best runners in the world.  They are located in schools, in the military (another fertile ground for Kenyan running stars), at the shoe sponsored camps.  The coaches know how to produce champions and up and coming runners do not lack for guidance in how to train and develop their potential whether it comes from other runners or the experienced coaches.

And believe it or not, I’m only halfway through and going to cut it here.  And don’t worry, future groups I’m going to look at won’t take nearly this amount of space, time or verbiage.  See you Friday for the wrap-up on the Kenyans.

Read Why the US Sucks at Olympic Lifting: Part 3.

As with previous mega-series, I’m going to turn off comments until after the last piece simply because it will save pointless arguments or questions about stuff that I will almost invariably end up covering before all is said and done.  And then I expect comments and debate and argument in the last section to go totally batshit. It’s the nature of this issue.  And with that introduction out of the way, away we go.

Introduction

Fairly recently, I read a fairly humorous thread on a training forum examining the issue of why the United States continues to suck at Olympic Lifting at the world stage; it was the utter stupidity expressed in that thread that spurred me to bother with this.  Realize that this is not a new topic: I’ve seen it being bitched about and debated nearly as long as I’ve been in the field and it was assuredly going on before that.  It’s an issue that most have some sort of opinion on and many have offered fairly simple singular answers to the problem/question of why the United States suck at Olympic lifting.

Now, in the case of this particular thread, the forum moderator, a simple man with about one tool in his toolbox, gave a very simple answer: American OL’ers need more strength.   That’s it.  We fail to medal and have done so for the past 30 years because our lifters simply aren’t strong enough.

Nevermind that OL’ing at one point did recruit a guy (Shane Hamman, a 1000 lb squatter) with more strength coming out of one leg than most have in their entire body and he still couldn’t medal.  Make no mistake, he held his own at the highest levels but being strong as all hell didn’t put him on the podium.

Because regardless of what many think, maximal strength is only relevant to OL performance up to a certain point; beyond that point it doesn’t help (and may even hurt).  Many OL’ers found this out the hard way in years past, they’d push their squats up to insane levels and their competition lifts didn’t move an iota.  Despite this, this gentleman’s answer was that our lifters needed more strength.  And certainly things would be much easier if it were only that simple.  Just make ‘em strong and watch the medals roll in.

Others have provided equally simplistic answers, usually based on what little they know or think they know about the sport (and what they think the US is doing) or because they simply project their own preferences, ignorance or biases onto the issue.

Some folks think our lifters need more technique work, some think that the drug testing issue is holding us back (it’s certainly not helping that US lifters are tested so often given the rampant drug use in the sport).  Back in the mid 90′s, Louie Simmons argued in the pages of Milo that our guys should go back to training like the Russians did in the 70′s with the conjugate system and endless special exercises with only light work on the competition lifts (nevermind that literally no top OL’ers train like that anymore).  One entertaining book I just read gave a case study of an Olympic lifter who didn’t start progressing until he added 2 months per year of steady state aerobic work.  Maybe that’s what our lifters need: 2 months of aerobic work every year.  Maybe not.

Like I said, everyone has their opinion and usually it reflects whatever simplistic answer that their own simplistic analysis yielded.  As often as not it simply reflects their personal bias and the singular tool they have in their toolbox.   I on the other hand, like to think a bit more comprehensively which is why this series is going to take so damn long to address it all.

Because rather than launching into an examination of Olympic lifting simply to demonstrate my own preferences, ignorance and biases, I’m going to take a different approach to trying to find a solution (if there is one); at the very least I hope to define the problem in totality to answer the original question: Why the US sucks at Olympic Lifting?

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Success Leaves Clues

Because although I have made some joking comments about how Success Leaves Clues and how people tend to cherry pick commonalities to push an agenda, there is some truth to the idea: when a particular end result keeps coming up over and over and over again in different groups with seemingly no relationship to one another, looking for commonalities can be instructive.

And I’m going to approach the issue of US Ol’ing lifting success (or the lack thereof) by looking at countries or groups who have generated consistent success (or outright dominance) in various sports to see if there are any commonalities between them.  Please note that I’m talking about consistent success: a country that generates that one lone exceptional athlete doesn’t really tell us much though I will look at an odd exception towards the end of this nonsense. Rather, when some group is consistently producing folks at the highest levels (or outright dominating a single sport), it’s worth looking at them to see what they are doing.

More importantly, it can be educational to see what disparate groups are doing that is the same or different.  Because if they are all doing the same basic stuff, that gives us an idea of how you produce success. By extension, those not doing those common things aren’t going to have much success (though here I’ll also look at an odd exception).  I’ll be jumping around quite a bit looking at a bunch of different sports as well as countries, the ones that either are currently or in the recent past generated consistent success or outright dominance in sport at the highest levels. Just to see if there are any commonalities (or glaring differences) in how they did it.

Some of these sports/countries will be the ones I imagine most are familiar with; some probably won’t be.  At the end I’ll tie this back into the US OL’ing issue and see if there is anything to be gleaned by looking at it in this fashion.   And that’s why it’s going to take so long to cover it all; that and the wordy bastard aspect of my writing.

Today I’m going to define some terms and then spend the bulk of my time talking about a group that literally came out of nowhere to dominate the entirety of one sport in a relatively short period of time: Kenyan distance runners.

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Defining My Terms

Now the end result I’m going to look at here is at groups (and here I’ll be defining ‘group’ in terms of countries) that consistently put out top performers in a given sport and/or dominate a given activity at the highest levels of sport.  That’s my end metric and again I’m focusing on consistent success or outright dominance, not just the occasional freak exception athlete which comes along every so often (with one exception).

And what I’ll attempt to do is look and see if there are any common factors between seemingly disparate groups (i.e. groups that mostly have nothing in common with one another) to see if they can give us any direction in what might be wrong with Olympic lifting in the United States which I’ll look at at the end.

Where appropriate I’ll provide resources for people who want to delve into those sports or what I’m talking about in more detail.  And, no, they won’t all be Olympic lifting related; that’d be too easy.  And I’m not going to take the easy way out and just say ‘genetics’ or ‘drugs’ are the reason.

Those of you who read the Talent vs. Work series, should realize that we’re looking at an interaction of a lot of different things here.  Genetics are one, training is another, you can’t deny the drug issue.  But in this piece I’m going to look at some other variables including culture, sociology and other factors that all play a role here.  And I’ll start out by describing in detail (across today and Wednesday) one of the most recent sports ‘success’ stories, a place where a group came out of literally nowhere to completely dominate a single sport.

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Kenyan Distance Runners

If there is a single area (perhaps outside of Jamacian born West African Blacks dominating track sprinting) where a singular ethnic group has truly dominated a given sport, it’s that of Kenyan/East African distance runners.  Starting in the mid 1960′s or so, the Kenyans have simply moved to a situation where they absolutely dominate pretty much every distance from about the 800m up to the marathon and beyond.

They hold most of the world records and the number of Kenyans running top times simply dwarfs what any other country is doing.  Let me put this in perspective, in 1999 the number of sub 2:20 marathons run were 34 by American Runners, 7 by UK runners and 222 by Kenyan runners.   In 1999, the Marathon world record was 2:05 so 2:20 is nearly 90% of that record.  And 222 Kenyan records were capable of it (and sub 2:20 just means that they cracked that time, not by how much they cracked it).

Those aren’t typos, Kenya produced 8 times as many sub 2:20 marathons as the US and 30 times more than the UK.   And it’s not as if there aren’t tons of runners in the US or the UK; they simply aren’t producing at anywhere near the level that Kenyan marathoners are. Other countries have the numbers, Kenya has the winners.

As well, almost exponentially, Kenyan dominance has simply increased over the years.  For example, in 1982, two of the top 10 runners (as determined by Runner’s World) were Kenyan; in 1992, 9 out of 10 were. The same pattern is seen in nearly every event from the middle distance on up including steeplechase and cross country.

Kenyan runners simply dominate the sport of running like no other group (again short of Jamaiacan/West African dominance in the short sprints).  But the numbers are even more amazing then this because it’s not just Kenyans doing the domination; it’s actually a sub-tribe within Kenya.  Quoting from my second source:

The Kalenjin tribe has three million people, that is about 10 percent of Kenya’s population.  But this group has earned about seventy-five percent of Kenya’s distance running honor and has won close to forty percent of all the top international honors available in men’s distance running disciplines; cross country, road racing, and track.  The Nandi, a Kalenjin sub-tribe, with roughly five hundred thousand people, account for 1/12,000 of the world’s population.  They account for twenty percent of the top international distance medals.

Let those numbers sink in for a second.  Running is a sport practiced by just about everyone; it’s about the simplest sport around and all countries compete in it to one degree or another which is why looking at comparative results can be illuminating.   It requires literally no equipment as the no-shoe crowd will happily prattle on about.  Everybody runs, everybody can run and there is evidence that humans evolved as distance runners.  If there is a sport unfettered by things like facilities, tradition and all of the other crap that makes these types of comparison problematic, it’s running.

And this small group of people, this tiny single tribe is simply overwhelmingly dominant at it.  Against countries with massive resources, all kinds of sports sciences, all the training, coaching, therapy and drugs that money can buy.  This tiny country, and this sub-tribe within that country, a tiny percentage of the world population and they are absolutely overwhelmingly dominant.

In fact, an article in New Studies in Athletics was titled “Do Caucasian athletes need to resign themselves to African domination in middle and long distance running?”  And while the author bent over backwards to try and say that non-Africans could be competitive (he used an example or two from women’s distance running which is problematic for reasons I’ll address later in the series), I’d have to say the answer is no.   This isn’t a case of a single amazing athlete coming out of nowhere to take over a sport; it’s one where the 10th fastest East African is still faster than the fastest non-Kenyan (in the men’s events).

And since someone invariably brings up an argument akin to “If the Kenyans are so great, why were the great runners of the 1920′s white and Irish and…” the answer is simple: The Kenyans weren’t running yet.  They were doing things like trying to survive and didn’t have time for sports.  Even if they had been running they wouldn’t have been allowed in even if they had (it’s the same reason there were no great black baseball players in the 20′s, they weren’t allowed to play in the white leagues).  The first Kenyan showed up in the late 60′s and since then it’d been an exponential march to total dominance.

To put this in perspective, early on researcher Bengt Saltin once took the cream of the crop of his country’s athletes (we’re talking Olympian level here) to Kenya to run them against the Kenyans.  They were destroyed….by school kids.  The best athletes with the best technology and sport science in existence and they got owned by teenagers.  What’s going on?

And that’s actually where I’m going to stop today.  Yes, I’m a tease.  But the next bit is long and I spent too much time on introductions so deal with it. I’ll pick up on Wednesday to examine some/all of the reasons that the Kenyans appear to be so overwhelmingly dominant in the sport of distance running.

Read Why the US Sucks at Olympic Lifting: Part 2.

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The Role of Positive and Negative Punishment

Using approaches that revolve around reward methods work only when there is some behavior to reward in the first place.  With dogs this usually isn’t too hard since they generally want approval and usually do stuff that you can reward to shape their behavior.  But sometimes there are situations where there is only a negative behavior; not only is there not any positive behavior to reward but sometimes ignoring the behavior doesn’t make it go away.  In a case like that, using punishment (in this case positive punishment) may be the only option left.

For example, some very badly behaved dogs at the shelter are very pushy with whomever is walking them.  It’s most likely a dominance thing and they want to push boundaries (just like humans) and see who’s in charge (this is a topic I’ll come back to below).  They will jump and jump and jump on you and they won’t stop no matter how much you ignore them.  They never give you a chance to reward their being four on the floor and quiet so you can’t use that approach.

One quick way we fix this is to actually stand on their leash so that it’s too short for them to jump without getting yanked.  You have to do this before they jump mind you but a couple of times of jumping and having the leash stop them dead in their tracks and getting yanked usually fixes it since they don’t enjoy it very much.

For dogs who are even pushier than that, volunteers will sometimes have to body check the dog back while making a negative ‘ahh ahh’ noise or ‘no’; this is just a mild form of positive punishment to indicate to the dog that the behavior is inappropriate.  Then when the dog settles, they get positive reinforcement for doing something good.  But those are only for the worst behaved dogs the ones that simply don’t give you enough opportunities to use the other approaches that we try to focus on.

In a related vein, a passive type of positive punishment can be used when teaching a dog not to pull at a leash, or more accurately not to run or lunge.  Some dogs are either very energetic and love to run or only seem to have two speeds: standing in place and running at full speed; neither are behavior we want to encourage while on leash.

When I get a dog like this, or can tell when one is about to do it, I’ll set myself and set my shoulder and just wait.  They will run/surge, hit the end of the leash and get yanked.  Often off their feet, at the least they get spun around and I’ll stand and wait for them to check in with me before letting them move again. It usually only takes a few times of getting the hell yanked out of them to get them to knock it off.  Usually.

Frankly, I can’t think of any situation where you’d use negative reinforcement (removal of an aversive stimuli) with a dog certainly not at the shelter. Because that would entail first applying the aversive stimuli t so that it could be removed as a reward.  And while I’m quite sure some people do train dogs in this way (i.e. folks setting up dog fighting rings or something), it’s almost something I’d rather not know about.  Moving on.

I did note a human example of negative reinforcement, consider a coach who always has his athletes run wind sprints at the end of practice for punishment.  Then on a day when they gave the much desired (but impossible) 110% effort, he says “Good job guys, no wind sprints.”   That’s an example of negative reinforcement, the removal of a chronic punishment.   I imagine similar things go on in a military setting, groups getting a reward (via negative punishment) of not having to do PT that day or whatever as reward for a particularly good whatever.

But clearly there are situations where punishment (either through negative reinforcement or positive punishment) can be required.  Before moving on, let’s look at the issue of reward vs. punishment generally.

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The Carrot or the Stick

At a fundamental level, behaviorism rests on either use rewards (providing or taking them away) and punishment (providing or taking them away) to shape a desired behavior.  Put differently,  you can try to shape a behavior and get someone or something to do what you want either because it wants to (i.e. because it wants to please you) or because it fears you.  Call this motivation with the carrot (reward) or the stick (punishment).

I can’t claim to have looked into the topic of behaviorism enough to know whether there is any sort of consensus as to whether reinforcement or punishment methods are either inherently superior or work better comparatively.  I suspect that this is where things get as complicated as you want to make it.

Some of it depends on how you want to be seen.  Do you want to engender obedience/proper behavior out of someone wanting to please you or because they fear you?  Consider two different managerial styles.  The American way is usually that you only hear from your boss when you’re getting yelled at.  Obedience through fear of punishment and it leads to good behavior but workers who hate their bosses. Contrast this to a manager who, at least sometimes, gives rewards (financial, otherwise) for good behavior.  So that you’re not just getting called into his office to get called to the carpet.

You more or less get the same end result but perhaps with happier more motivated workers.  In the first place, you’re likely to get a worker who does nothing more than the bare minimum, whatever it takes to avoid punishment. They have no reason to work above that level because there is no chance of reward.  So why would they bother.  Contrast that to the second situation, knowing that there are rewards for extra good performance leads to folks willing to go the extra mile.

But before looking at some very specific examples to try and clarify some of this, there’s one more issue I want to look at which is that humans are not exactly dogs.  Yes, the principles of behaviorism are the same but there are nuances worth considering.

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Humans Are Not Dogs

As I mentioned in a previous part of this series, shaping a dog’s behavior is a bit different than what you can choose to do with humans.  Certainly you may be working against instinct/imprint or long-held behaviors in both cases but with the dog you can’t really sit it down for a heart to heart and tell it “Ok, if you don’t stop pulling at your leash I’m de-adopting you.” because it won’t understand anything beyond ‘blah blah blah, food now’.    There is also the issue of long-term vs. short-term results and/or changes and what you’re trying to accomplish.

At the shelter, the dogs are there until we get them adopted so we automatically focus on the long-view.  We want to train them and for them to love their future forever family.  So we use an approach focusing almost exclusively on positive methods (using punishment only when needed) to achieve that.  When someone adopts a dog, presumably the same situation is in place.  Assuming they plan to keep the dog and want it to love them, focusing on reward based methods (positive reinforcement and negative punishment) is probably the best choice; using punishment only when nothing else will work.

It’s worth noting that the dogs don’t have much choice in either case as to what they do.  They can’t escape the shelter and short of running away, they are in their forever home unless they get taken back.   They either respond to the training you’re doing or not.  And since they have a pretty strong drive to please their masters, usually they respond over time.  Basically the situation and the internal motivation to make master happy dictates the methods that seem to work best.  You can focus on positive methods because of the specifics of the situation.

But with people, that’s not always the case and things get more complex.  As above, issues of your motivation (to change their behavior), their motivation (to change their behavior), what actions they can take if they don’t want to change their behavior, as well as what end result (do you want them to like or simply fear you) determine what mix of activities or behaviorist techniques might be ideal.  Let’s look at some different examples below: personal training, coaches of athletes, the military and finally interpersonal relationships.

Personal Training
Personal trainers, and this is just a statement of fact, are often working with people who don’t really want to be there.  As well, the voluntary nature of a client hiring a trainer (and the fact that, in a sense, the trainer is the client’s employee) can make this one tricky.  Certainly we’d all love to use a variety of positive reinforcers to keep our clients showing up on time or making progress and trainers use a variety of approaches to do this.  You might offer a free sessions if they make 10 no-misses on time or whatever.  Or have a ‘Client of the month’ board with pictures and results. Whatever it is you provide a reward (tangible or otherwise) to promote behaviors you want to see increase.  And this is great when there are positive behaviors to reinforce but we all know that’s not always the case.

Sometimes you have clients that are screw-ups.  Late to every workout, or miss every other workout (somehow ‘emergencies’ always seem to come up but this is just indicative that the training isn’t really important to them), every trainer reading this has had at least one of these.  And here you can’t use positive methods because there is nothing to reinforce.   Only punishment of some sort has any chance of working.

This assumes that you care about getting your clients results.  If you don’t you can let them do whatever they want and just keep taking their checks; just realize that this hurts you in the long run because, right or wrong, potential clients judge you by your current client’s results.  If half of your people aren’t getting anywhere because they are screw-ups and you’re allowing it, that can cost you in the long run because it’s costing you potential clients.  And realize that this client will invariably complain to you about a lack of results 8 weeks down the road despite having done nothing you asked and missing most of their workouts

Just realize that the client is just as likely to leave as not if you start beating on them or enforcing punishment.  Especially if they don’t want to be there in the first place, especially if they figure they are the boss because they are paying you.  Putting them on alert that if the behaviors don’t change or there will be consequences is just as likely to drive them away as not.  Which may or may not be acceptable depending on how many bills you have to pay.  But sometimes, with the real screw-ups, it’s the only option you have left.  I’ll come back to this.

Training Athletes
While superficially similar to personal training, a coach or trainer working with athletes is often in a very different situation indeed. The main difference being one of motivation.  There is also the issue that, as often as not, the athlete seeks out the coach for very specific purposes. Alternately, coaches are in a situation where athletes are coming to them through school or whatever.  The end result being that the coach is very much in the power position; the athlete either wants to be there or has no choice in being there (to keep a scholarship or whatever).  The coaches can more or less use whatever mix of techniques that they prefer and the athlete can either fall in line or go elsewhere.

And you will probably see, on average, sports coaches using the greatest variety of the different forms of behaviorist techniques.  Positive reinforcement such as a special shirt or putting the athlete’s name on a special board (what high school doesn’t have 300, 400, 500 bench club) can all act as rewards for athletes who are putting in the effort.  Even a hearty ‘good job’ when the athlete really puts out in training or competition can go a long way with certain types of athletes.

Many coaches will use various forms of punishment but sometimes the reasons are a bit more obscure than punishing just to punish.  Team coaches, for example, often want to bond the players to one another and that means giving them a common enemy: him.  If they all hate him because of the punishment he’s inducing with workouts, they bond together and that forms a good team.  Using punishment in a deliberate way also ensures that the athletes see him as the alpha male so that they’ll just shut up and listen. Sometimes that’s for the best as athletes who want to think often get themselves into trouble.  They need to shut up and Just Do the Program.  Establishing himself as God (or at least God’s right hand man) through punishment methods helps to accomplish this.

In other cases, coaches may have to punish athletes for being late to practice (sending them home or what not depending) to get them to fall into line.  I’ve already described the odd example of how a coach that routinely gives his athletes a miserable drill at the end of a workout could apply negative reinforcement by not having them do it after a particularly good workout.  Other athletes might be motivated by negative punishment, having something that they enjoy taken away when they screwup.

Of course, coaches also may get to a point with certain athletes (often the prima donnas or always gonnas from the Talent vs. Work Series) that nothing works.  The athletes are constantly late or miss workouts, can’t be bothered to warm-up, are always making excuses and just not towing the line.  Not only does this hurt the coach’s reputation, these types of athletes often negatively impact the other athletes.  Either they figure they can get away with it because another athlete is or the bad athlete is just a negative influence.   When nothing else works, the coach has to move to the ultimatum option.

The Military
The military is probably the closest situation to what we have with the dogs in that the recruits are there and don’t have a lot of options (unless they want to go AWOL).  As well, since the military needs bodies, they can’t just get rid of everybody who won’t fall into line (har har).  So the focus tends to be on the long term.  However, the approach seems to be pretty different because of the specific goal outcome.

With the dogs, we want to teach them to like people and be happy in their home.  In the military, you’re training warriors who need to not only have the bonding of a sports team (meaning that the drill instructor needs to give them a common enemy, him, so that they’ll bond to each other as brothers) but to be ready to be pretty damn violent towards other humans (the enemy).   Given that it’s also a strict hierarchy, dominance patterns have to be instilled so that the soldiers will follow orders from their higher ups.

And inasmuch as I know little about the military, the primary focus would seem to be on a variety of punishment methods as the major method.  Certainly positive reinforcement (and I imagine some occasional forms of negative punishment, not having to do morning PT) might be used in the form of promotions or whatever.  But the main focus seem to be either on positive punishment (screw up and you or your team pay for it) and negative reinforcement (screw up and you lose something valuable to you like leave or something).  Which all makes perfect sense in the context of the situation (the soldiers don’t get to leave) and what they are trying to accomplish (make them mean).

Even there I imagine they face situations where a solider is just so intractable bad that extremes have to be used to get them to fall into line (again, har har).   Hang on, I’m getting there.

Relationships
Here I’m referring to both romantic relationships as well as friendships since those are more similar to one another than anything else.  We might include family here but that just gets way too complicated and emotional.  Here we have arguably the most complex of all of the situations for reasons that are worth looking at.

With the exception of family (where there is often a sense of ‘obligation’ to put up with someone and this causes people do put up with a lot of crap with family members), in a friendship or romantic relationship you have a situation where both individuals are voluntarily entering into the situation.  And strictly speaking, both can cut bait and leave at any time. And there’s an old joke that the person in power is the one who’s willing to walk away and that’s 100% true. Because the one who is willing to walk is the one who dictates what’s going to happen.

Now in an ideal situation, both individuals are happy with the situation as it stands, everybody is doing the right thing in which case there is really no issue to be had.  Which isn’t to say that there won’t be blips in the road, someone does something that the other doesn’t like, it’s brought up momentarily and dealt with and everyone moves on.

Remember the context of this series, we’re talking about people doing things that you don’t like (because you let them) and how to fix it by either rewarding behaviors that you like or punishing behaviors that you don’t.  If there’s nothing to fix, it’s not an issue. That’s the ideal and when it happens it’s awesome.  Also, unicorns.

Which doesn’t meant that what I’ve talked about may not be relevant from time to time.  If someone does something you particularly like, you may want to reward them to make it occur more often.  You might think of a traditional ‘reward’ given by women to men for buying them jewelry. Ahem.

Positive reinforcement rarely hurts so long as it’s not done so constantly as to become meaningless. If you’re getting a gift for someone every damn day, the reward doesn’t mean anything and they learn that they can do anything and still get rewarded.  Wrong lesson.

The same would go for negative punishment.  Often a partner or friend will take away something that the other enjoys as a form of punishment.  Withholding sex comes to mind as an easy to understand example.  That’ll usually get someone to step into line…or find someone else to have sex with.

And there are clearly times for positive punishment. Someone does something that they are not supposed to, one or the other of the partners invokes a positive punishment of some sort (You’re sleeping on the  couch tonite, that kind of thing).   Just basic behavioral techniques to either promote or an extinguish a given behavior that is either desired or not desired.

In terms of negative reinforcement, removing an aversive stimuli, as usual I can’t think of a lot of examples.  One might be letting someone off from doing something they don’t want to to (don’t have to cut the lawn, don’t have to go to the party with coworkers) in the first place.  If you’re using chronic aversive punishment with a friend or SO, you’re either in some sort of dom/sub relationship or abusive.  In that case, removing the abuse briefly (not beating your SO) could be a form of negative reinforcement (mind you, for a submissive who likes being abused, removing abuse is negative punishment; you’re removing something that they enjoy).

Of course, folks tend to push boundaries in interpersonal relationships, although to varying degrees.  Dogs do it, kids do it (usually when they hit the toddler stage and again as teens), people do it. A classic example between men and women who have just started dating is something called the shit test.  This is when individual in a situation does something just to see if the other one will let them get away with it.  It’s traditionally used by females against a guy they may or may not be interested in.  It’s a way of seeing if he’ll put up with crap or not and she’ll test him in some stupid way or another.  And if he lets it slide, she learns that she can walk all over him. He also trains her that she can get away with anything without consequences and that’s bad.

You only get respect if you require respect and failing a shit test is a straight line to not being respected (the same goes if you let your dog push you around or if you let a client or athlete get away with something they shouldn’t; they learn that there aren’t consequences and they stop listening because they know that don’t have to).  Yes it’s stupid but it happens.  A shit test has to be met with immediate positive punishment of some sort or there will be a loss of respect as she learns that she can walk over him (I wasn’t joking when I said that dogs, like athletes, kids and girlfriends like boundaries and this is an example of that).

Friends shouldn’t do this to their actual friends but I’m quite sure it goes on.  But this is usually a case when someone has a confused idea of what a friend is and lets someone call themselves a friend who is just a manipulator or a user.  We’ve all known that guy who always borrows money from you or asks for favors but never seems to be able to help you out in any meaningful fashion (the one you’ve helped move 16 times but who ‘just doesn’t have time’ to take you to the airport who doesn’t have the money they owe you but just bought a new Iphone; you know the guy).  You may be their ‘friend’ but they sure as hell aren’t yours.  They just use the word to get what they want out of you.  And they do because you let it happen.

Perhaps the biggest complication of the interpersonal relationship is that, in premise, both individuals are free to leave at any given time.  Practice is a different thing mind you but in premise either can leave.  And when you mix that with emotions (or simply time invested; the gambler’s fallacy) people often start to overlook negative behaviors or let them slide out of fear that they will lose the other person.  This actually holds for other situations and many fall into the same trap that I’m going to use towards the end of the piece.

At the extreme of relationships, most have found (read: put) themselves in a situation with someone who is just a user, a manipulator, an abuser, where the other person continually does something that you dislike.  A boyfriend or girlfriend who takes advantage of you in some how, or a cheater, or a liar or whatever.   And that brings us to the next to last topic.

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When It Reaches The Point of No Return

It would be ideal if you could get everybody to act right just with a simple combination of positive and negative reinforcement and positive and negative punishment applied properly over time.  Also, unicorns.  Because the reality is that, in many cases you reach a point of no return.

Where everything you’ve tried has failed and there is some behavior that is simply too odious to be acceptable (or where gentler approaches to changing it have failed).  You might not have a positive behavior to reinforce, or the negative behavior is just too consistent.   Where you reach the point that the behavior is simply so unacceptable that it either has to change right now or you’re done trying.

Universally this will be a case of eliminating some behavior (of a client, athlete, SO) that you dislike and where the only way you really have to do it is through providing extreme and immediate negative consequences (positive punishment).  Mind you, sometimes you put yourself in this situation.  If you see a behavior that you dislike early on and you either let it slide (passive reinforcement) or worst yet reinforce it by rewarding it, you’ve contributed to the problem.  Ideally when something unacceptable comes up, you should stop that in its tracks immediately and at the first sign.  Also, unicorns.

This does actually happen with dogs. I’ve mentioned that the Austin Human Shelter is a no-kill shelter.  This actually means we try to put down 10% or less of our dogs.  And the only time it happens is when a dog has a completely intractable behavior problem.  Usually involving biting people. Something that can’t be trained out of it. There’s just no other solution and it has to be destroyed.  But this is very rare.

I’m sure in the military, there are folks so useless as to be untrainable, who simply can’t be worked with for whatever reason who get booted for the same reason.  Too dumb, too stubborn, too unteachable.  They are sent away.  Or, if my military friend’s general bitching is accurate, they are promoted.

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The Talk (TM)

But like I said, humans aren’t dogs and you can do something with humans you can’t do with dogs: have a little sit down.   So consider the situation where you’re a personal trainer who’s fed up with a screw-up client, or you’re a coach fed up with a screw-up athlete, or you’re in a relationship and you’re fed up with what your SO is doing.  Or fed up with something that they’ve done (if you were smart enough to catch it on the first time and it was bad enough for you to have this major of a reaction).

And you decide that it’s unacceptable and is going to stop and it’s time to have The Talk ™.  During The Talk ™, you calmly and rationally express to them the situation, effectively “Ok, here’s the deal. I am unhappy with your actions.  It is unacceptable and will not continue and you have two options.  Either what you’re doing stops now or I’m [pick one] firing you as a client, firing you as an athlete, breaking up with you, we’re no longer friends.”  Sometimes it’s easier with a letter or email because face to face conversations can get emotional and yelly.

Note that, like with the consistency issue with dogs, ideally this should be done pretty much at the first instance of  something you dislike occurring.  Letting someone get away with something a half-dozen times before you put your foot down only teaches them that they don’t have to worry about it until eventually comes around; as I said above you were part of making the problem worse by letting it happen.  The first time they step out of line, you need to stop it.  But if you don’t, the above still works.

Now, this is predicated on your being ready and willing to enforce the punishment.  If you aren’t or can’t and/or they know it, you’re going to make it worse.  Because they’ll learn soon enough that you’re bluffing. This is actually far worse than just letting it go.  You can only lay down a final consequence if you’re ready to go through with it.  Whether you don’t act at all or try to bluff you’re still letting it happen and have no one to blame but yourself.

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And Here’s What You Can Expect

When you do something akin to the above, you can expect a handful of possible responses.  One is that the person goes “Ok, I agree that I was out of line, I won’t do that again.” and they actually don’t do it again and you can hopefully both move on with your lives.  I was once late for skate warm-up in my first year, I didn’t realize how long it took.  My coach told me “You need to be here at least 45 minutes before ice time to get warmed up.”  I said ok and was never late again except for a couple of real emergencies (like when my car blew up).  I didn’t have to hear it a second time but that’s not the norm in my opinion nor experience.

How likely the above is to happen depends on the situation, how important keeping you (as friend, coach, trainer, lover) is compared to changing the behavior.  How serious they are taking your consequences (i.e. do they think you’re going to go through with it).  All of those myriad variables that make interacting with humans both fascinating and annoying as hell. It’s complicated.  Mind you, sometimes people will only pay lip service to changing.  Or they will give it an effort but it fails.

That’s the second thing that commonly happens.  Once put on warning, folks will at least pretend to put in some effort (or they will try to bs you with a lame ‘Well, I’ll try to do better’ which simply means that they are saying what you want to hear but don’t intend to do a damn thing).  Usually this lasts about 2-3 weeks which is the approximate length that the average screw-up can get it together.  And then you will see the same old habit starts happening again; the client starts being late, the athlete starts shirking warm-ups, the SO starts behaving badly over time.  Alternately they just go immediately back to the old behavior and do it again.

At this point you have multiple options although you really don’t.  If you want to perpetrate the pattern, you can give them a third chance.  And a fourth and a fifth.  And just recognize that every time you let them ‘try for two weeks’ and then go back to their old crap all you’re doing is telling them that there aren’t really consequences, reinforcing the behavior in a twisted way. Without actual consequences there is no actual change and if you keep letting them slide after trying for two weeks, they realize that there aren’t consequences.  Or you can do what you should but most don’t: you enforce your consequences.

On this note, I should make a quick rant about actions vs. words.  It’s very very easy to tell someone what they want to hear but only dumb people think the words are meaningful. The actions are all that count.  An athlete or trainer who keeps telling you “I’m trying to get here on time” but it always late is just making noise.   Ignore the words, pay attention only to the actions.  Either the actions change or they don’t.  Pretending doesn’t get it done.  Moving on.

Make no mistake, everybody screws up, sometimes folks don’t know that what they did was unacceptable if they weren’t told upfront. You can’t hold them accountable for not knowing something bugged you.  That’s why you have to tell them and put them on warning that it doesn’t happen again or there are consequences.  And they make a half-assed effort to fix it and then do it again.

And that’s when you should walk.  You fire them as an athlete, client or girlfriend/boyfriend and fill their position with someone who doesn’t give you a headache.  Because they have just established that they are either unwilling or unable to change the behavior that you dislike.  And either way it’s a deal-breaker.  So you enforce your consequences and move on.  At that point, you’ve used up your options.

And then there’s the last possibility, and the one that may occur as often as not is that they will hear you out and go “Ok, I find your terms unacceptable, I’m gone.”  They find another trainer, another coach, another person to get naked with who will put up with their crap.  Or they say “I’m not willing to change that behavior.  Tough.”  At which point you have to enforce your consequences.

Make no mistake, this is as likely an outcome as them actually changing their behavior although, again it depends on the specifics of the situation as to whether or not this is more or less likely than them staying and changing (or trying to change the behavior).  Keep this in mind as I make one final detour and then wrap this mess up.

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Doing The Wrong Thing for (Seemingly) the Right Reasons

Everything I’ve discussed is oh so easy to discuss in abstract terms and even easier when we are giving advice to others about what to do.  Guys will tell a friend “Yeah, man, kick that chick to the curb, she isn’t worth the hassle.” all while dating a girl who’s 10x as awful.  Some of this is related to the issues I discussed in How to Be Your Own Coach.  It’s easy to be objective about someone else’s situation, less so about our own.  We rationalize, we justify.  We make dumb excuses.

But there is more complexity.  Often we don’t act or punish negative behaviors for reasons that we think are right but really aren’t.  We do it for emotional reasons, or out of fear.  For example, some people won’t check leash pulling because they ‘don’t want to hurt the dog’.  They think the dog is choking because it makes little noises when they stop walking in the field and they don’t want to hurt it.  Not realizing that the dog isn’t in pain and they are doing it no favors.  And they end up not fixing a damn thing and wonder why their dog is out of control.

Or consider a parent who doesn’t feel good punishing their kid.  Or a situation where the punishment is inconsistent: dad lays down the law and mom doesn’t enforce it.  Not only does this send a bad message to the kid, it results in someone who knows there are no consequences to their action.  Parents are wired to love their kids and don’t like to see them hurting or punished.  But sometimes that’s the only thing that sends a message.

Because if you bail out their screw-ups or allow them every time, all the kid learns is that there are no consequences to their actions.  And that results in badly behaved people.  I had a friend years ago whose daughter was really messing up, getting arrested.  Eventually the friend let the daughter sit in jail overnight.  Was it hard to do?  Yes.  Did it get the girl to straighten up?  You bet your ass it did.  Sitting in jail over night sent a powerful message that there were real consequences to her actions.

With personal training clients, the trainer is usually afraid of losing the client and/or income.  They don’t set boundaries because, as likely as not, the client will just leave.  This is a real fear and whether or not it should impact things depends entirely on the trainers finances and ability to get new clients.  As I mentioned, keeping screw-ups in your stable can hurt in the long run because others simply see that you can’t get results.  Firing the screw-ups may hurt in the short-term but it will pay off in the long term.

Coaches of athletes are usually pretty good about not allowing shenanigans because they know it helps nobody including themselves, the athlete or the team as a whole.  But some do.  My own coach, technical master that he was, was terrible at handling people.  He would only give consequences to those of us who didn’t need them.  He had athletes miss 80% of their workouts, show up late, skip warm-ups, skip drills, skip cool-downs.  By letting this happen without consequence, he told them that they didn’t have to make practice, or warm-up or cool-down and he’d still coach them.  So why would they magically stop doing it?

One time an athlete showed up to practice complaining that he was too tired to train.  And then spent the hour skating around the parking lot.  Bottom line: if you’re too tired to train, you’re too tired to be at practice.  Coach should have sent the guy home and imposed punishment on all of the others for their constant screw-ups.  Send them home when they are late, extra drills or forcing them to do warm-ups, firing the total screw-ups.  But he did not.  And the lesson sent was a bad one.

All they learned is that no matter what they did, it didn’t matter, he’d coach them regardless.  So they walked all over him.  Worse yet, their bullshit affected those of us (such as myself) who were serious.  Because practice got disrupted, we had to alter things to make up for the screw-ups.  He was teaching them that they, as screw-ups, got more preference than the serious athletes.  That’s backwards.

Now my coach’s rationale was seemingly good, he was doing what he thought was right for seemingly the right reason.  He loved speed skating, a small sport with few people.  He wouldn’t come down on his athletes for fear of ‘losing them to the sport’.  He was afraid they’d quit if the imposed punishment or consequences.  And he was probably right.  And I pointed out to him repeatedly that anybody who was that big of a screw-up was no ‘loss’ to the sport.  Not only would they never get anywhere, but they brought nothing to the sport except their drama, excuses and bullshit.  But he never listened (and I reinforced his bitching by listening to it every year).

You’ll note that the military doesn’t have the issue. They effectively own their recruits.  The recruits can’t leave and that means that the military can do whatever it damn well pleases in training them.  And what they do works.  There’s a lesson in that.

And then there are interpersonal relationships. We let SO’s and friends do things we don’t like for various reasons.  Emotional attachment, fear of being alone, because we’ve invested so much time into the relationship or friendship that we want to ‘give it some more time’ to see if it can be worked out (the gambler’s fallacy), because we don’t want them to suffer or be unhappy or deal with the consequences or their actions.

So we have a ‘friend’ living with us not paying a penny of rent.  We don’t kick them out because we don’t want them to ‘have to live on the street’.  So we coddle and enforce their bullshit by letting them stay without having to contribute. Not recognizing that perhaps living on the street for a few days would make them realize a powerful lesson about getting their act together.

We fail to realize that not setting our foot down and providing consequences simply makes the situation worse.  Not only does it bring you continual stress, all it does is reinforce their actions because you’re unable or unwilling to act (it also does them no favors because they are never forced to examine their damaging behaviors, knowing they will get bailed out).

Because if you let something happen, it will continue to happen.  Expecting it to magically change without some form of consequences is idiotic.   Because no-one has any reason to change a behavior if you don’t give them a reason (read: consequence and here that means punishment) to not changing the behavior.

We are afraid of that last reality of giving a final ultimatum and consequences when things get to bad: that the person will simply leave.  But in doing so we fail to realize the most important part of this.

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The Problem is Solved Either Way

When things reach the point of no return, where every gentle approach to behavior change you’ve tried has failed, you are left with exactly two options.  You can let it keep going on in which case you have no room to complain (you’re letting it happen) or you can provide a “This changes or we’re done” ultimatum.  That’s it.

And while I provided a multitude of possible outcomes of such a talk, there are really only two of them. Either the behavior changes or it doesn’t.  If it does, fantastic, problem solved and you can get on with your lives.  Here I’m assuming it changed for real, not just 2-3 weeks before coming back but that just leads back to the “It changes or else.”.

But what if it doesn’t?

Either the person says “I find your terms unacceptable, I’m done” or they don’t change their behavior and you cut them off.

Here’s what you have to realize: either way the problem, the negative behavior that you didn’t like, is fixed from your standpoint.  But you’ll argue that the person is still acting the same way. Yes they are.  But there’s zero you can do about that.  All that matters is that you’re not letting them do it to you anymore.

Whether they change the behavior or go inflict it on someone else, YOUR problem is solved because you don’t have to deal with it anymore.  The screw-up client, the screw-up athlete, the screw-up SO, the screw-up friend that was causing you nothing but grief.  They aren’t your problem anymore whether they change the behavior or leave.  Your problem is solved either way.

Because the reality is that you can’t always change their behavior.  It’s not something you can control.  All you can control is how you respond to it.  You can try to change it with various forms of reward and punishment, sometimes all you can give is the ultimatum.  And you can’t even control their response to that.  All you can control is how you respond to their response.  Which is why you have to be ready to enforce the consequences if (when) they don’t change.  And yes, it will feel like a loss.

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But, It’s Really No Loss

The other thing people fail to realize is this: If they were a screw-up client and you ‘lose them’, well it’s no real loss.  They weren’t going to get results or help you build your business; you may be losing some short-term income but that’s it.  If they were a screw-up athlete and you ‘lose them’, it’s no loss.  They brought nothing to the sport and weren’t doing anything to make your life as a coach easier (either through stress to you or destabilizing the athletes on the team who weren’t screw-ups).

If it’s a friend who does nothing but take advantage of you without ever being there for you and you ‘lose them’, it’s no loss.  They weren’t your friend in the first place; they used the words but the actions didn’t match.  You don’t need them in your life and should only surround yourself with friends who are actual friends.

And if it’s an SO who is doing something you find unacceptable and you ‘lose them’, it’s no loss really.  Why would you want to be with someone who treats you badly or does things you don’t like?  Go find someone who doesn’t do that (yes, I realize that there are contingencies where it isn’t this simple: kids, etc. just focus on the principle here) and get rid of the person who doesn’t.

That’s why the family issue is so complicated; it’s a lot harder to walk away from folks you’re related to or simply cut them out of your life.  Which is a lot of why family generates so much bullshit and drama; family members don’t think they have to worry about you telling them off or cutting them out of your life.  They know (or think) they can get away with crap so they push it as far as they can.

Because here’s the other thing it often takes folks a while to realize:  screw-ups never seem to have a problem finding someone who will put up with their bullshit.  The lame client will find a trainer to let their crap slide. An athlete will find a coach who will let them goof off or simply surround themselves with people who tell them what they want to hear as they fail to succeed.

A friend who does nothing but take advantage will have no problem with finding someone else to take advantage of.  The girlfriend or boyfriend living with you who’s not paying rent (but who seems to have money for useless stuff) never seems to have a problem finding someone else to put them up.  Crazy girls or boys will always find someone to put up with their bullshit.  There are plenty of people in the world willing to let these folks get away with crap and let the behaviors slide without consequence.  Just don’t let it be you.

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Summing Up: Don’t Let Them Do It To You

You can’t control what other people do for the most part.  They are going to do what they are going to do and that’s what they are going to do.  However, you can control is what you do in response.  And regardless of how you approach it, if there is a single message in this ovewritten series it’s this:

If they are going to act badly no matter what, just make sure that you don’t let them act badly towards you.

Because if you let them get away with their behaviors without consequence, you are just as responsible for the behavior as they are.  They were wrong but you were willing.  And it only happened because you let it happen.  And that’s the punchline to this whole thing even if I got off on an absurd tangent about behaviorism.

People do things we don’t like for one reason and one reason only:

Because we let them.

And the only way to stop that, in an ultimate sense is this: Don’t let them.

And comments are now turned on, I’m sure they will be fascinating.  GO!

In Because We Let Them: Part 2, I looked at a handful of other concepts including ensuring that the action you think you’re using is actually the action that’s being interpreted and whether the lesson that your’e actually teaching is the lesson you’re teaching.  Finally I looked at the critical importance of consistency (especially in terms of punishing undesired behavior) and the idea of NILIF: Nothing In Life Is Free.  The dog has to do something to get something.

Today I’m going to tie all this together with a very detailed look at how we change the behavior that I started all of this with at the Austin Humane Shelter; to whit I’m going to look at how we correct leash pulling which is the question I started this series off with.  Mainly it’s just to illustrate how the different types of behaviorism can play a role.  It’ll also show the role of the lesson that’s being taught along with the issues of consistency and NILIF.   On Friday I will wrap this up (I have no choice) and look at some more human examples.

A Quick Clarification: It’s Not Mere Behaviorism or Even Sheer Behaviorism

I suppose I should address one thing since it came up on the support forum (where someone did something I asked them not to do, started commenting on what they thought I was saying instead of waiting for me to say it).  Essentially they commented that they ‘thought that the idea that behaviorism alone could explain human behavior had been disproven years ago’.

Two things that are related: first I never said that behaviorism alone explained everything.  Quite in fact, at least with dogs I mentioned that behaviorism is being used to alter a dog’s instinctual behavior suggesting that at least those two factors are at play; it’s instinct is affecting behavior but you’re using behavioral techniques to modify that.

Humans have some instinctual/genetic drives too driven by a variety of things (for example, the human sex drive gets turned on and driven pretty hard at puberty).  There is also the issue of imprinted behaviors, things that get locked into place based on early experiences that tend to impact on behavior rather strongly down the road.  Those clearly contribute to overall behavior.  It’s not mere behaviorism or even sheer behaviorism as one of my favorite authors used to put it.

But instinct and imprinted behavior fall into the category of things you can’t control.  Yes they contribute but you can’t change them readily if at all so they aren’t worth worrying about in this context.  You can’t control someone’s instincts for the most part (an extreme example would be one of chemical castration where a sex offender’s sex drive is removed through hormonal means) or their imprinted behavior.  What you can control is how you respond to it.  That’s where behaviorism comes in since it describes the methods and means you can use to try and impact on a behavior to modify it to your desired behavior.

That is, what you can control is how you modulate or modify them.  And that’s where behavioral techniques of varying types come in. And anyone who doesn’t think they work should look at the military, child rearing or the school system all of which have used behavioral techniques of varying sorts to turn people into perfect killers, kids, students. Or at least attempted to.

And with that said, let’s look at the issue of leash pulling again along with some different ways folks have gone about correcting it, along with what we specifically do at the Austin Humane Shelter

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Correcting Leash Pulling: Part 1

As I explained in Because We Let Them: Part 1, the fundamental reason that dogs pull at their leash, from their perspective, is that they enjoy it.  They like the pressure of the leash on their neck due to something called the oppositional reflex.  Since you can’t change their inherent dog nature, all you can change is how you respond to it in order to change (or ‘shape’ in behaviorist terms) their behavior to something you consider more appropriate.

Now, fixing leash pulling has been approached from a lot of ways.  First I’d mention that the absolute WORST way to try to fix leash pulling is to pull the leash and try to drag the dog towards you.    Because while this seems like a type of positive punishment (you’re punishing the dog in your mind by yanking it towards you), it’s actually just acting as a positive reinforcement for the dog.

Why?  Because the dog likes the pressure in the first place. The more you pull against it, the more it will pull against you and what most find is that the dog stops pulling when they stop pulling.  This ties in with what I talked about in Because We Let Them: Part 2, often the lesson you think you’re teaching is not the lesson that’s being taught.  Dragging a dog by the leash is not teaching it to follow you or not pull.  Rather it’s teaching it to actively pull against you.

There are other solutions.  Choke chains and prong collars have been used for years.  Effectively they are meant to act as a positive punishment to try and correct the behavior.  Shock collars would also be in this category.  With the prong collar, the dog gets a sharp poke in it’s neck if it pulls or lunges, a clear form of positive punishment.

With the choke chain, the user can apply a choke to the dog for punishment; with the shock collar you hit the button and give the dog a mild shock.  Basically it’s obedience through fear.  Which is fine if you want your dog to fear you.  Assuming you like your dog and want it to like you…this might not be the best way to approach the issue.  There are better, more humane ways, and I’m going to tell you about them in a second.

I’d note that with real problem leash pullers, we use something called an EZ-walk collar.  This is a brilliant invention that you put on the dog that throws the pressure of the leash down lower on their body.  Basically this instantly removes the reinforcement that dogs get from leash pulling because the pressure isn’t where they like it.

I’ve seen dogs literally change completely when you put an EZ-walk collar on them.  They’ll pull like maniacs without it and stop completely with it; mind you, every dog is not this extreme.  But it usually helps to at least some degree.  Some dogs even get to the point that just putting the EZ-walk on them without attaching your leash is enough, they’ve associated the harness with not pulling and they stop.  Pavlov would be proud.

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Why the Austin Humane Shelter Focuses on Reinforcement Methods

Now, as I’ve noted, and I’ll come back to this below at the Austin Humane Shelter we try to focus on positive reinforcement and tend to avoid using either negative reinforcement (removing a chronic punishment) or positive punishment if we can absolutely avoid it.  There are a couple of reasons for this.

The first is that it’s a HUMANE shelter and, generally speaking, using a lot of active punishment isn’t humane, especially if you can achieve the same results without doing that.  That is, the end result of using punishment or reward may be identical but they teach different fundamental lessons.   Constant punishment generates behavior out of fear of consequences; using reward generates behaviour out of desire for reward.

Since we work from the assumption that most people adopting the dog are going to love it we don’t want the dogs to act a certain way out of fear for people.  We want to train the dogs that people bring good things..  In that sense, we’d rather have dogs do what they do out of love/for reward than out of fear.  Using constant punishment to get a dog to step into line teaches it that people bring bad things. That’s not the lesson we are trying to instill.

Mind you, there are certainly situations, such as police or military dogs, where I’m quite sure it’s necessary to teach the dogs to be violently aggressive on command and in certain situations (I’ve joked that I want to train ALFIE! to only be aggressive towards hippies).   Ours isn’t one of them.  And while I’m quite sure that others (think folks who run dog fighting rings or are training their dogs to attack or whatever) deliberately focus on punishment methods to make their dogs mean and violent towards humans, well…let’s just move on.

Also make no mistake, there are situations where some form of mild punishment is the only way to get something accomplished.  Higher level BRATT’s will use these forms of mild punishment, checking a dog with the leash, being more forceful to get very out of control dogs to stop doing something that can’t be corrected otherwise.  Since today is going to be too long, I’ll start there tomorrow.  But that’s usually a last resort and only used when there are no other options.

Instead we use a combination of ignoring bad behaviors positively reinforcing good behaviors and you’d be surprised just how far that can take you in training dogs.  Since most dogs seek approval from their masters, it’s fairly easy to use manipulation of rewards (providing it or taking it away) to get them to do what you want.  Humans aren’t always quite so easy and I’ll come back to that in Part 4 of this series.

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Correcting Leash Pulling: Part 2

So let’s look at how we correct leash pulling at the AHS as this will demonstrate most of the concepts I’ve discussed so far.  First we’ll define the desired behavior as walking without pulling against the leash.  We’ll define the undesired behavior as pulling against the leash.  So the ultimate goal is to reinforce the first behavior and extinguish the second.

The two things you need to keep in mind are that a) dogs like going for walkies (I’ve taught ALFIE! that ‘cardio’ means going for a walk and his ears perk up whenever I say it to him) and b) they like the pressure of the leash against their neck if they pull.

And it you let them walk while pulling, they have no reason to stop doing it.  Again, you are reinforcing both behaviors by letting it happen.  You may not be actively reinforcing it with treating it or whatever but reinforcing it you are.  More importantly, you’re coupling the behaviors by allowing the dog to do one thing it likes while doing another thing it likes: walking while pulling.  In fact, over time you can expect the leash pulling to worsen since they are getting reinforcement that it’s ok every time you walk them.  What to do?

We are actually taught three different approaches to stopping leash pulling; I’ve only ever bothered to use two of them and won’t bother describing the third.  They all have the same basic goal which is to not only not reinforce pulling but to reinforce walking without pulling (please note that teaching a dog not to pull is not the same as teaching proper leash walking, that’s a whole different kettle of fish).  The two approaches I primarily use are changing direction and ‘being a tree’ both of which accomplish the same thing slightly differently.

Changing Directions

Changing direction is the easier to understand.  Let’s say you’re walking your dog in one direction and it’s pulling.  All you have to do is take a hard right or left turn and change the direction of walking.  This automatically puts the leash on slack as the dog changes direction as well to match you.  They get to keep walking but you’ve removed the pulling aspect of it.

They no longer get reinforcement for pulling but they are getting reinforcement via walking (with the leash loose).  If/when they run ahead of you and start pulling again, you change directions again and you keep doing this, basically removing the reward for pulling (by eliminating it, negative punishment) while allowing them to walk (positive reinforcement).  Mind you, this requires a field large enough to do this; it doesn’t work if you’re walking on a sidewalk or road.  But it does work.

Being A Tree

Arguably more powerful and more relevant to what I’m trying to explain with this series is the ‘be a tree’ approach so I’ll detail this more.  With ‘be a tree’, when the dog starts pulling you simply stop walking and stand in place.  Let’s think about what this is in behaviorist terms.  Basically, it’s negative punishment. The dog likes walking, the dog likes pulling.  But now it doesn’t get to do either.  You’ve removed two things that the dog likes.

Let’s look at what happens next.  First the dog will usually keep pulling a bit against you.  But you’re just standing there so it can’t move forward.  So it stops pulling and stands there.  Eventually it starts getting frustrated, looking around and wondering what is going on.  It wants to go walkies and you’re not letting it.  Mind you, this can take a while and this is where you have to use your big human brain and be more patient than the dog.  Wait it out.

Ideally the dog will come check in with you voluntarily.  You can facilitate this by calling it’s name ONCE every 5-10 seconds or so and making the kissy noise (as a friend said to me “dogs love the kissy noise”).  When it comes to you you can click or ‘yes’ treat it.  This also trains the dog to come to you on command.  But keep in mind what I talked about in Because We Let Them: Part 2 about the lesson you want to teach.  If you call the dog repeatedly and then treat it when it comes the 6th time it hears it’s name, you’re teaching it to ignore you the first 5 times.  Call ONCE every 5-10 seconds and treat it only when it comes back after a single call.

And now that they are close to you and the leash is loose you start walking them again.  Aha, see what we’ve done?  Now we’ve given them negative punishment for pulling (by taking away both walking and pulling) but they are getting positive reinforcement for walking with a loose leash (the reinforcement is getting to walk).  You’ve separated the two behaviors because the dog only gets to walk when the leash is loose.

And of course they go right back to charging ahead and pulling again. And you stop again.  And they stand there, get frustrated, check in, and you start walking again with the loose leash.   As they pick up on it, they usually start checking in quicker and quicker as they learn that this gets them to get to walk again.  And this goes on until you or the dog get tired of being outside in the heat.

I’d note that dogs don’t have an infinite attention span, usually we are told to only work on a new skill or behavior for 5-10 minutes at a time or the dog gets bored with it.  Frankly, you’re better off working with your dog multiple times daily or every day for shorter periods than trying to get it all done at once.

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So What’s Going On?

So let’s sum up.  The dog wants to walk and pull, two things it enjoys.  When it does this, you don’t let it walk, two forms of negative punishment. When it checks in or the leash is loose, you let it walk.  Which is positive reinforcment.  And every time it pulls you stop walking, taking away something it enjoys.  Every time.

This is part of the consistency issue.  You don’t let the dog walk while it’s pulling EVER or you just further reinforce pulling.  If it pulls, you stop moving (or change directions).  When the leash is loose you let it walk.  And mind you it has to do something active, checking in or moving towards you so that the leash is loose to get rewarded by getting to walk again.  If it doesn’t do something, it gets nothing.  That’s NILIF.

And somewhere in their little doggie brain, an understanding along the lines of  ‘Hmm, I like pulling but if I pull I don’t get to walk.  And I like walking.  But if I don’t pull I get to walk.  And since I really like walking…..’  starts to develop.  Or whatever dog thought processes are (it seems to revolve around food, ball, toy, food again and poop if ALFIE! is any indication).

Mind you different dogs pick this up at different rates and some dogs are just so driven to pull (because they have high energy and just gotta sniff that patch of grass RIGHT NOW) that you only correct it to some degree but it’s all about progress.  But hopefully the point is made and the above does work over time.  But only if you apply it consistently.

And that’s how you fix leash pulling, an example of using positive reinforcement and negative punishment to shape a behavior.  You can also see how we ensure that the right lesson is being taught (by only calling the dog to you once every 5-10 seconds until it learns to come to you on a single command), how consistency plays a role and how NILIF is incorporated.  And this approach can take you pretty damn far with dogs.  But not always: sometimes there is no other option but to punish.  And that’s where I’ll start on Friday.

But before finishing today, since this series is too text heavy, here’s red light/green light and stare with ALFIE! Yes, my house is messy.

Read Because We Let Them: Part 4.

In any case, the 4 major approaches to behavior modification I presented were (with some definition): positive reinforcement (providing reward), negative reinforcement (removing constant punishment), positive punishment (providing punishment) and negative punishment (removing a reward).

For each, I gave some dog and human related examples of each and I’d point folks to that article for details.  Simply, each can be appropriate under certain conditions and sometimes a mixture may work better.  I also looked at a few nuances of them that will have a bit more relevance today especially the whole concept of how random rewards can be more positively reinforcing than anything else.

Finally I talked about a fifth powerful approach to changing someone/something else’s behavior and that was to simply ignore it.  This works best when someone is simply looking for A reaction but where the specific reaction is irrelevant.  In this case simply responding at all (i.e. to a troll on a forum) is all the reinforcement that they need; ignoring them completely works better than anything else.

Today I’m going to briefly cover some other principles that are relevant and important, again, it’s clear that the topic of behaviorism can and does fill entire books.   Then I’ll give a detailed example of how we apply all of this to stop leash pulling to put it into something approximating a real world situation.  I’ll wrap up on Friday by trying to make things a bit more generally applicable and talk about humans, clients, etc. and how to go about using this stuff to deal with behaviors you want to change (in others).

There are a few more very important concepts that we regularly use at the shelter that I think are worth talking about, at least in brief and that’s what I want to do next.  I’m going to try to avoid too many endless examples, today will be too long as it is.  I’ll show some application on Friday.

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What Is Your Action Actually Doing?

One important concept, that I brought up very briefly in Because We Let Them: Part 1 is that of what the behavior change strategy you’re employing is actually doing.  Because sometimes, and this is more the case with humans than with dogs (humans being marginally more complicated), you get a situation where what you think you’re doing isn’t what you’re doing.

The example I gave before was an athlete who equates ‘more/hard work with success’; for that athlete a coach’s strategy of eliminating wind sprints (negative reinforcement, removing an aversive stimuli) could be taken by such an athlete as negative punishment (removing something that they enjoy). What is meant to be a reinforcer, for that athlete, ends up being a punishment.

Here’s a less obvious example, aimed more at the personal trainers.  Let’s say you have a policy (as most do and more should) that if a client is 15 minutes late (but shows up) they get sent home or get an abbreviated workout.  This is meant to be positive punishment, right?  You’re actively punishing them for being late in hopes that it will prevent them being late.

But let’s say that that particular client is one who doesn’t want to work out in the first place.  They could very easily parse what you see as ‘positive punishment’ as positive reinforcement.  In their mind, they got rewarded for being late; either they got sent home and didn’t have to work out at all or only had to work out for a shorter period.  (I actually had a client like this once, she saw only having a 30 minute workout as a ‘bonus’ for being late since she didn’t want to be there in the first place).

Your ‘punishment’ is actually a reward to them; what do you think will happen to their lateness?  What do you think would happen if, in contrast, you subjected them to the worst workout they ever experienced with the understanding that every time they are late they are going to suffer.  Given an actual consequence, one of two things is going to happen: either they will stop being late (to avoid punishment) at which point you might find a way to positively reinforce being on time…or they will find another trainer.  Either way it’s not your problem anymore.

But my point is that humans are crafty and psychology can be tricky with a lot of individual difference that make things more complicated than they often seem.  Sometimes the message you think you’re sending with a given approach isn’t the one you’re actually sending.

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What Lesson Are You Actually Teaching?

A related example comes straight out of dog training but applies to humans as well: often the lesson you think you are teaching is not the lesson being taught.  For example, when people are trying to teach their dog to sit they will stand there and yell ‘sit sit sit sit sit’ at the dog while doing a variety of things ranging from pushing the dog’s butt down while pulling up on a leash to using a food lure to get the dog to sit back and down.  What most fail to realize is that dogs know how to sit, often you can just wait for them to do it spontaneously and then treat it.  Soon the dog will start sitting to try and earn a treat.  Then you add the command later.

In any case, let’s say that on the 5th ‘sit’ the dog sits and you give it a treat.   Most would think that the lesson they just taught was ‘sit’. But the actual lesson taught was that the dog can ignore you the first 4 times and still get rewarded for sitting on number 5.  Assuming you want the dog to sit on command, that’s the wrong lesson to teach or reinforce.   They can’t get the idea that they can ignore you, eventually listen and still get rewarded.  Cuz then they start getting uppity and you don’t want an uppity dog.

Here we get into timing: dogs have a working memory of about 5 seconds.  If you don’t treat or punish within that time frame, they have no conception of what they are being treated or punished for and it doesn’t do any good. This is why yelling at your dog when you come home and find poop on the floor does nothing; they have no clue why you are yelling at them and you should realize that it was YOUR fault for not getting them out on time, not THEIR fault for having to poop.  It only works if you get them within about 5 seconds.

Now, if you catch them doing something wrong and punish and/or reinforce immediately, they can make the association.   So if you catch them chewing your shoe (that they think is a toy), you can take the shoe away (negative punishment) and give them an appropriate toy (positive reinforcement) with lots of praise.  This teaches them that chewing shoes is unacceptable but chewing their toys is the right thing to do.

It also means that if you’re trying to teach your dog to do something on the first command, you give the command ONCE.  And if it doesn’t work, you need to wait 5-10 seconds for the dog’s brain to reboot and then try again.  Then 5-10 seconds more when it fails the second time and try again.  And then after 10 minutes of getting nowhere you give up and realize that you should have gotten a cat.

Mind you, here humans are vastly different because, in premise anyhow, they can link reward or punishment to an act that occurred long ago.  Anybody with a girlfriend knows that they are still paying for that thing they did at that party….4 freaking years ago.  And you can invoke punishment or reward for acts that didn’t occur immediately because you can explain that ‘I’m giving you consequences for something you did last week’ and, being big brained humans, they can link the two non-temporal events.  In premise they can anyhow.

Ok, that was a big tangent. My point is that you need to make sure that the lesson you think you’re teaching is the actual lesson being learned.  Sometimes what you think is going on and what someone else thinks is going on aren’t the same things and the lesson gets garbled.

In any case, this leads to the next bit of importance.

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Consistency

Anyone who has trained dogs knows that the absolute key to training is consistency.  At the shelter, there are two upshots of this.  The first is that all BRATT’s are trained to use the same cues in the same way. A given dog might be walked by upwards of 20 people in a given week.  If we all used different training cues or words or approaches, all the dog would get is confused.  Even if someone comes in with 3 decades of dog training, it doesn’t matter; they do it the AHS way or not at all. It’s for the good of the dogs.

Trainers or coaches working in a situation where athletes may be working with different people on different days should consider this; if your approach to coaching and cueing isn’t standardized in the facility with everybody teaching everything the same way, you will confuse people.  Because if trainer A teaches one style of squat and trainer B teaches another, or even if they both teach the same style but they teach with different cues, people don’t get the consistent input that they need for things to make any sense.

So one trainer is telling them to look down, another to look up.  Or one is cueing to ‘move the knees out of the way’ and the other is saying ‘push the floor away’ on a deadlift or clean. And the athlete/client just gets confused because the cues aren’t consistent (note that sometimes hearing the same thing differently can actually help with learning because people understand one cue better than another).

But far more important than this (and any parent who has argued with the other parent about punishment knows this) is that things like rewards and punishment must be consistent.  Now, as I mentioned, there is some benefit to random rewards, it tends to be more reinforcing than constant rewards AFTER the behavior is established.  So you reward the hell out of it until it happens consistently and then you go to a random schedule to reinforce it further.

In direct contrast, the application of positive punishment (if you use it) or negative punishment must be consistent and applied 100%, it  can’t just be done some of the time.  Simply, if you let the dog (or athlete, or child, or girlfriend) ‘get away’ with a behavior you’re trying to extinguish the lesson doesn’t take.  Because the lesson you end up teaching is that they can get away with it some of the time.  And depending on the person or dog, they may see how much they can push their boundaries. Worse yet, you may end up accidentally creating a random reinforcement schedule by allowing it to occur.

Here’s an example: bored with ‘sit’ and ‘free’ with ALFIE, I have taught him to play red light/green light. Red light means sit and stay until I give him the command to move with green light.  I use this in a variety of situations, at doors (this is to teach him to never run through a door without permission) and at intersections (so in case he gets off leash I can stop him before he gets into traffic).   I use it for other things.

So when I take him to potty or out to walk, I’ll get in front of him, open the door and give him a red light command.  He has to sit and stay.  Sometimes I’ll give him a ‘stare’ command (most use ‘watch’) which means he has to make eye contact with me.  Then I’ll give him green light which means he can move/go through the door.

But from time to time he’ll get rambunctious, he’ll see a squirrel or just not be paying attention and he’ll move without the green light command.  And I will stop him, make him go back inside, red light him, get a stare out of him and then green light him.  He doesn’t ever get to go chase, or potty or whatever if he broke red light without being given green light.  Because then he learns that it’s ok to ignore me and not listen to commands.

Do keep in mind that, with dogs, we are trying to teach them to do things that not only aren’t necessarily automatic but that we can’t explain to them.  I can’t sit the dog down and go “Look, I don’t want you to pull at your leash and if you don’t stop doing it, I’m going to take you back to the shelter.”  It’s behavior change through rote repetition and that affects how you do things.  You’re having to get them to do the behavior (or stop doing another one) over time.

As I’ll come back to in the final part of this mess, with humans, you can sit them down and put it in those terms “I dislike it when you do X, and if you do X again, I’m [pick one] firing you as a client, firing you as an athlete, breaking up with you, beating you with a wooden spoon, etc.”  You don’t have to spend 3 months applying the various behavior strategies (necessarily) in certain situations because you can simply make it an issue of “Do this or else.”  Assuming of course you’re willing to enforce the ‘else’ bit.  But that’s tied in with this: any consequence you give in a setting like this has to be applied consistently.  It can’t be done sometimes or the person just learns that they can get away with it sometimes.

And in some situations with humans you may be looking at something where there’s an issue of consistency and applying rewards and/or punishment in certain specific fashions.  This is how schools work, and raising kids.  There will be other situations that arise where you’re looking less at extreme consequences and more at trying to engender longer term beahavior change.  And that’s where the consistency issue applies.

But again, with dogs it’s a bit more complicated.  So while I may only reward desired behaviors randomly with ALFIE , I always make sure to give consequences for undesired behavior either through positive punishment (which I use exceedingly rarely and will talk about in Part 3) or through negative punishment (not letting him do something he enjoys).

He can’t learn that his actions only sometimes have consequences but that’s exactly what happens if you’re not consistent with how you apply this stuff, especially the punishment options.  Because without consequences there is no change in behavior and without applying the consequences consistently, the message gets completely garbled.    But it does bring me to the final general concept we use at the shelter which is NILIF.

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NILIF

NILIF stands for Nothing In Life Is Free and everyone reading this should burn it into their brain because it applies to so many things.  In basic terms it means that a dog has to work for a treat; we don’t just treat dogs for the sake of treating.  Yes, fine, we pet on them and love on them because that’s what keeps them healthy and teaches them that people bring good things for being good doggies.

But in terms of actual food treats or whatever, they don’t just get them to get them.  Rather, they have to do something good to earn them.  This is just a simple way to teach them that, generally, their actions have consequences good or bad.  They have to do something to get something.

Because if you reward all the time, without any sort of context for it, the reward becomes basically meaningless.  It would be like telling an athlete ‘good effort’ all the time even if it isn’t.  The words lose their meaning because they are given without being earned.  So in the kennels, a dog has to show us four on the floor and quiet to earn a treat.  If they are up on the cage or making noise, they get nothing (negative punishment).

If we’re training them to do something, they have to show us the behavior, or at least part of it to get a treat.  They don’t just get a treat for being cute (ok, not usually).  Nothing in life is a free: it works with dogs, it works with athletes, it works with SO’s. To get a reward (or avoid punishment if that’s your approach), they have to earn it.  If they just get it to get it (and here I’m assuming you’re actively trying to change a behavior, not just doing something nice for someone you care about or whatever) no lesson is learned.

Note that the same would hold true for punishment.  If you just punish all the time regardless of action (think about a parent that spanks their kid for just about anything), it becomes meaningless noise (and look at how well behaved the kid who get spanked all the time are).  The kid knows that it’s coming no matter what they do so there’s no point in doing anything differently.  If, instead, punishment only comes in response to specific things, the lesson is heard far far louder.  I got exactly one spanking in my life and I will NEVER forget it.

And wow did this get long fast.  So I’ll cut it here.  Tomorrow I’ll give a detailed example of how all of the information in the previous two parts fits together by showing you how to stop a dog from pulling. On Friday I’ll wrap it up and show some other application to training/coaching and life in general. Yes, I’m wordy.  Probably because people keep reading my stuff and positively reinforcing my wordiness.  See what I did there?

Again, comments are being turned off until the final part on Friday.

Read Because We Let Them: Part 3