Soccer coach says, "Cross country running ruins explosiveness"

If cross country training truely ruined explosiveness in athletes, you would not have nearly as many shorter distance (400-3k) specialists competing in the sport at the high school and college level. I was coaching a kid who ran cross country for the first time last year and improved his times and marks for all his track events (he is a hurdler, pole vaulter, and 400 runner).

NoFatty wrote:

I can't believe that some people are claiming science as a basis without citing articles.

http://ptjournal.apta.org/cgi/content/full/81/11/1810

This is the one that I found. For our purposes, we can ignore the first part about the way the muscle fibers are classified. You guys should read through it though. It looks like the soccer coach is correct. Fast-twitch fibers can turn to slow-twitch according to this article, but they can't turn back into fast-twitch.

I wish that all posters would be required to submit citations for all the bad information they spread on here.

I didn't read the article yet but I will trust Bud Winter and Lee Evans first. Lee Evans was required, as all the 400 guys at San Jose, to run cross country and he ran 43.8 and won an Olympic Gold, to me case close. He was often quoted as saying that "I hated Coach Winter in the fall but loved him in the spring" meaning he knew that cross helped him. By the way, you look it up I know it's true.

I agree. The issue is less whether the activity of X-C hurts soccer players and more a question of the time spent doing something other than playing soccer, and how that hurts the development of soccer skills. Soccer and ice hockey are unlike baseball, football, and basketball, the later of which one can play on a seasonal basis and still do well. Hakeem Olajuwon didn't start playing basketball until age 15. Something like that could never happen in soccer and hockey. In long distance running, it's possible to start late and do well, but what distinguishes the Kenyans and Ethiopians, apart from certain genetic traits, is that they started working on their aerobic possibilities at a very early age. Finally, and I don't pretend to understand this, endurance in soccer is a different thing from endurance in long distance running. My son, who's soccer fit, can go 70 minutes in HS soccer and 80-90 minutes in club and hold up very well. Put him in a mile or two mile race and he'd fall apart.

Ethan wrote:

Your percentage of Type I and II muscle fibers NEVER change. The only thing that changes is how efficiently that type of fiber utilizes energy.

Wrong and wrong.

First, the size of the fiber is affected by training. Otherwise your body composition would never change. Hence why lifting increases the size of your fibers . . . So that would skew percentage if you have same number of fibers but one set is significantly bigger. I have five kegs of beers and you have five 12oz cans of beer. Who has more beer?

Your type IIa fibers have the ability to act like either Type I or IIb. So if you are training as a distance runner, you will have more slow twitch fibers, than in an untrained state.

While I would agree with some people here that the soccer coaches are bs'ing, the conditioning aspect can be improved easily with only some running, but Soccer is in large part foot eye coordination and that takes a lot of practice (and talent).

Will it ruin explosiveness? not really. maybe 100 miles a week and no soccer for months will. but id say stick with soccer if that's your thing. RULE OF SPECIFICITY APPLIES. if you need conditioning play soccer for like 5-6hours a day or more and run 25 miles per week.

It sounds like in your situation that this is likely BS as you know what you are doing as a coach (hopefully).

However, I think we can all agree that there are a LOT of HS coaches who have no idea what they are doing and that this state could easily be true if that were the case.

I might recommend attempting to open a dialog with the coach who made this statement and see if you can convince them that the athletes may learn and grow from the experience.

If not, cut losses and get over it. Those kids are not going to come out from that Soccer coach if he is not able to be convinced that a sound and well structured training program can assist their abilities as a player.

This same argument (XC kills speed) was given by a club track coach keeping his miler off the local High School XC team...so he would continue to privately train with him. Shame really. He doesn't understand distance training, pysiology and spouting off about things he doesn't know.

I told him he was right, Tergat, Bekele, etc. ruined their speed by running cross country.

I hope you don't coach. Making determinations for good group training based off of the performance of one person is staggeringly stupid. Maybe your boy could have run an even faster 400 if he didn't have a coach who ignored what physiologists were telling him. What if Evans could have run 42.8 with a coach that utilized all the information available to him?

NoFatty wrote:

I can't believe that some people are claiming science as a basis without citing articles.

http://ptjournal.apta.org/cgi/content/full/81/11/1810

This is the one that I found. For our purposes, we can ignore the first part about the way the muscle fibers are classified. You guys should read through it though.

Am I missing something here??? Great article. But did you read it?

NoFatty wrote:

It looks like the soccer coach is correct. Fast-twitch fibers can turn to slow-twitch according to this article, but they can't turn back into fast-twitch.

Umm... except that's not at all what the article said.

"Regardless of the classification scheme used to group muscle fibers, there is overwhelming evidence that muscle fibers—and therefore motor units—not only change in size in response to demands, but they can also convert from one type to another. This plasticity in contractile and metabolic properties in response to stimuli (eg, training and rehabilitation) allows for adaptation to different functional demands. Fiber conversions between type IIB and type IIA are the most common, but type I to type II conversions are possible in cases of severe deconditioning or spinal cord injury (SCI).

"Less evidence exists for the conversion of type II to type I fibers with training or rehabilitation, because only studies that use denervated muscle that is chronically activated with electrical stimulation have consistently demonstrated that such a conversion is possible."

and, earlier in the article:

"This histochemical analysis led to the original division of muscle fibers into type I (slow) and type II (fast). Currently, muscle fibers are typed using 3 different methods: histochemical staining for myosin ATPase, myosin heavy chain isoform identification, and biochemical identification of metabolic enzymes."

Must be why David Beckham never made it after running cross country. Won the Essex schools 1500 as well.

Irving Babbit wrote:

An earlier poster who says those in HS should not specialize in a sport, and should try out many sports, is an advocate of mediocrity--a jack of all trades and a master of none.

What % of your HS players of any sport go on to get scholarships in that sport? (not D3, not Ivy League, bet get their schooling paid for). For those it makes sense to specialize, the others (the vast majority) would probably benefit by trying a few sports if that is what they wish to do.

I agree with you on this, but, and I don't speak for Irving, it's often very hard to know how good someone will be in something until he dedicates himself to it. My son is a pretty good soccer player, and he'll surely play D III, however, when he was growing up, there were several boys just as good as he was. My son was also good at baseball and basketball, but we both thought (he's small) that if he wanted really to excel at a sport, soccer would be it. So he gave up baseball, basketball, and volleyball, and just played soccer (of course, he still shoots hoops in the backyard). Those other boys kept playing several sports through HS, and now they are decent in several sports, with no chance of playing any of them in college, but they've never had the experience of playing at a high level. Of course, maybe that's not as important as playing several sports, but one shouldn't lose sight of the fact that something important is being lost. By the way, here's a video of Mark Wetmore (CU) on the issue: http://www.flotrack.org/videos/speaker/1-mark-wetmore/4626-be-lopsided

I sure as sh*# didn't run no cross country.

Gwen Hardesty -> Coogan did not run track/XC in HS; she played soccer. When she went to college at Smith (DIII), she won the 3000m multiple times but not sure if she did as a freshman. She took a year off from Smith and went to Harvey Mudd (CA) and ran for CMC/Scripps. She did ok, making the 10,000 team despite going to grad school in math (PhD in number theory, I think).

I can say that I bet you have never been to a xc meet at all. Top notch xc runners do explode...I suggest you go to a xc meet and watch these runners. They are amazing with the amount of speed and endurance.

im a senior been running xc and track my years in higschool and im gonna play soccer this winter for the hell of it. ill report back in 6 months

Elaine wrote:

I can say that I bet you have never been to a xc meet at all. Top notch xc runners do explode

Well that must make a horrible mess.

And, Elaine, I think it was fairly obvious that I was kidding in my first post and using a different definition of the word "explode." Sorry you didn't understand that.

My daughter runs XC two nights a week and practices soccer with her club 2 nights a week. Her soccer coach is very happy with her level of fitness and I don't think she has lost any speed. I believe she has an excellent XC coach that does at least one practice a week where they exclusively work on speed. She is only a freshman, so we will see how this translates in to spring HS girl’s soccer. Thanks for all the great discussion.