I started to notice that there were these drastic differences in how all these athletes seem to meet the energy demands of their sport, and team sport athlete’s in particular were very very different then say a 100 M sprinter vs. a marathon runner.

This is one of the top 10 presentations we have had at The Seminar, and really was a break out session for Ben Peterson. This presentation is a step by step break down of his dissertation, and it did not disappoint.

Ben starts out discussing what he was looking at: VO2 Peek, and O2 Kinetics. This ties right into a change in how we look at athlete’s both in how they produce energy, and how we, as coaches, define these situations. This discussion includes research references in reference to many of the thoughts on fitness and energy system work that may not be completely correct. Ben then dives right into the meat of the talk, and that is Repeat Sprint Ability (RSA).

Ben breaks down what RSA is, why it’s important, and the role of the energy system. This leads right into why he chose to look at this for his dissertation, and what the imitations of were to looking into it. Most of the limitations were based on past misconceptions of how the body metabolizes energy, and him working to “correct” these misconceptions. This was problematic because it’s extremely controversial, and has been somewhat bastardized because different positional athlete’s in different sports are being characterized by similar tests. This, as we know, is incorrect, because there is a necessity of specificity for the evaluation of each athlete because even just adding a ball to a soccer player (as Ben discusses) completely changes how an athlete produces energy in a test. This lead him to build his own test for ice hockey players, and this test was the basis of his dissertation.

Ben breaks down everything of his study and his test. This includes how they developed it, what they were looking at, and what the test actually was (he did name it the “Peterson On Ice Repeated Shit Test” which is awesome). This test took him 6 months to come up with, and we were lucky enough to have Ben share all the in’s and out’s, why’s and how’s to everything about it.

I know coaches are saying “but it’s just an ice hockey test”, and they’re not wrong, but what this can do for all of us is that we now know that we can come up with specific tests that are based around what our teams do, in the specific systems they run, and come up with a valid and reliable measure of their “fitness.” That, is priceless, but it’s not where he finishes.

Ben then touches upon how this test has lead him to looking at developing energy systems in a new way. His ideas of “push-climb-stretch-pull” based on the individual athlete’s metabolic responses to work is ground breaking, and one that has had a massive impact in how we prepare our athletes (I even wrote about it here: https://cvasps.com/uncategorized/follow-up-friday-how-dr-petersons-presentation-connects-in-with-our-programming/) His discussion includes a specific breakdown of how to implement each of these methods including the HR zones, modes of conditioning to utilize, and how to program it. This is a fantastic method of GPP that multiple coaches have had immense success with.