For some years now new books and journal articles have been published foccusing on a single word - Athleticism. Reviews in this magazine have discussed the work of Gray Cook: 'Athletic Body Balance', Michael Boyle: 'Functional Training for Sports' Vern gambetta: 'Athletic Developement' all of which received rave reviews. More recently an article was published in the English magazine Athletics Weekly entiteld 'The Exercise Hierarchy' by Luke Scott. (See extract in Round the world - Pge 37) United Kingdom Athletics (UKA) has created a four tier strata lokating all known exercises/drills used in Track and Field. The highest strata contains demanding, challenging activities that are ultra sports specific resembling the event movement and requirements as closely as possible to attain the maximum transfer of training effect to competitive results. This classification system has been heavily influenced by the work of former Soviet hammer thrower - Dr. Anatoly Bondarchuck. Ironically, the good doctor was flogging his work in Australia after the Cold War ended and ATFCA was one of the very few to respond by printing 'Longterm Training for Throwers' in 1992. There are two major concers re the urgency for replicating the event movement as the sole reason for selecting an exericse. The first is the danger of muscular imbalance. As athletes mature they dimish the time spent on general preparation and increase the specific work. This increases the risk of injury in the mature athlet as the balance is lost between agonist and antagonist exercise. In the case of undertaking Olympic lifting and the variants available, the new UKA tier system dems cleaning, pressing, snatching, jerking to be non specific and they have been removed from the top tier. Such a loss is the second cause for concern. There are two reasons to complete an exercise. The first is its value to the event of movement - bench press for the discuss throw, step ups for the high jump and so on. The second is an exercise may not resemble the event movement but it produces the athletic quality required. The beauty of the Olympic lifts is they have to been completed at maximum speed to be successfully executed. Surely this means power - overcoming the highest resistance at the highest speed an athlete can induce. The following article entiteld ATHLETICISM is based upon dynamic exercises. The loading is not significant, but the dynamic execution is paramount. Most athlets cannot increase the loading in their resistance training after several years of training. Stagnation occurs. Progress would necessitate completing auxiliary exercises to benefit the prime lifts. Athletes are not weight/power lifters. We must draw from such sports but not enslave ourselves to them . The specificity in mind, split lifting is strongly advocted in this article and not squat lifting as in squat snatch and squat clean. Specialist weight lifters use squat lifts exclusively but athlets and coaches should be drawn to what is specific to us. This article provides a sequential approach to the acquisitation of athleticism by skipping, split jumping, Olympic lift variants, power jumps and timed speed lifting
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