It is interesting to see how sports training has developed over the years. Athletes and coaches are always looking for ways to gain a competitive edge over the other guys in the field. That field includes both individual and team sports. The changes brought about ultimately spill over to the private sector and the result is that athletes of every level are beneficiaries. Who has not heard the motto, “Train Smarter, not Harder.”
Which brings me to Coach Bonheim. I was on Liberty’s inaugural wrestling team. Let me state this up front. I was easily the worst guy on the mat. Just ask anyone who was there, they’ll tell you. But I digress. That first season our practices followed the pattern that I had come to know from my extensive one year of wrestling experience in high school. Basically, work, work, work. We would do conditioning exercises, work on moves, and wrestle. Every day. The second season our modus operandi changed dramatically. We still worked like crazy. But at the start of that season Coach said, “All right, we are going to do something different this year.”
The ‘something different’ was along these lines. Every other practice we would only wrestle. He might have us begin with a 1 minute session, then two, then three, then three again, two and one. Sometimes he would double them up. In between each session we would walk in a circle and check our heart rate. Actually he had one of our number checking his heart rate. When it dropped below 120 beats per minute, we got set up to go the next round. By the end of these practices we would spend some 40-45 minutes wrestling.
The in between days would be spent, after initial warm up exercises, practicing moves. Just moves. We might begin with takedowns, then mat work. Over and over again.
What did this do for us? It allowed time to recover from the intense physical demands of the hard practices, and inculcate a new skill set during the easy ones. This style fits with what is known about the bodies’ response to exercise. Generally, it takes up to 48 hours to recover from a maximum effort. That off time would be spent doing lighter work. I thought it to be a great strategy, and I wound up being in the best shape of my life. My resting heart rate back then was 50. (It’s a respectable 55 today.) Granted, I was still the worst wrestler on the team, I was just better at being the worst. That was the year I started travelling with a singing group and had to quit the team.
It turns out that Coach Bonheim was a graduate of UCLA, and had studied under a guy named Laurence Morehouse. He mentioned Dr. Morehouse a couple of times during practice and the classes I took from him. An internet search led me to a 1975 People Magazine article about Dr. Morehouse where he was promoting his book, Total Fitness in 30 Minutes a week.
Wait, what? 30 minutes? A week? This was during the era when aerobics studios were springing up all over the place. Kenneth Cooper’s best-selling book “Aerobics” was first published in 1968. In that era the accepted wisdom was that adequate fitness requires a minimum of three thirty minute cardio sessions a week. And here was Dr. Morehouse saying you could stay fit in one third of that time. A radical idea.
Today the prevailing fitness wisdom is along the lines of shorter, more intense sessions. Forget about how long I need to work out. How short can I go and still achieve fitness goals? Modern day research suggests that a single 4 minute high intensity exercise session can produce the same changes in the body as 40 minutes of steady state exercise. This was demonstrated by a number of researchers, like Dr. Izumi Tabata, the Japanese speed skating coach who has those timers named after him.
What are the benefits of this type of training? Among other things, better oxygen uptake by the lungs, expressed as VO2 max, better insulin metabolism, added strength, and an increase in mitochondria in muscle cells. How efficient!
Back to Coach Bonheim and the wrestling team. He was having us do high intensity workouts, and believe me, wrestling is a high intensity activity, decades before this research was known. How did this new type of training affect the team? The first season, we placed fifth at the National Christian College Athletic Association tournament at Messiah College in PA. The next year they were third, and the following two years placed first. Bonheim was named Coach of the Year.
It is obvious to me that Coach was on the cutting edge with his training methods, he was a HIIT innovator and years ahead of his time.
