Think about a snowman. The first snowball is the foundation. If you have a snowball the size of a tennis ball, you’re not going to have a very big snowman. If the first snowball is the size of a tractor tire, now you’re onto something!
Each subsequent snowball needs to be smaller than the one below it, but larger than the one above it. This is how you build the biggest snowman in town. At Perpetual, we view the layers of an athlete in similar fashion. The base—or foundation—for us is nutrition. After nutrition comes metabolic conditioning (metcon). Above metcon is gymnastics/bodyweight and above that is weightlifting. At the top of the pyramid is sport.
Let’s break this down….
Just like you can technically build a snowman with a tennis sized snowball as the foundation, you can also run, do bodyweight exercises, lift weights and play a sport of your choice to some degree.
However, your ability to successfully and consistently compete at higher and higher levels will be directly dependent upon the quality and quantity of foods you are consuming (aka nutrition). It’s why topnotch athletes will often hire their own chefs, dieticians and/or nutrition coaches—because they know that ultimately their output (performance) depends largely on their input (what goes their body).
Above nutrition is your conditioning. Not only does endurance, stamina, hypertrophy, and aerobic capacity expand muscles so that they may become denser and stronger, it trains your body to become an efficient energy burning machine. If a basketball player can dunk and grab rebounds, but cannot get up and down the court, they have limited productivity. Likewise, if a football game goes into overtime and one team is more conditioned than the other, they have the upper hand.
Next is gymnastics, or the ability to efficiently and effectively move your body throughout space. This comes in the form of the staples such as pushups, pullups, and lunges as well as more advanced capabilities in the form of handstands, handstand walking, muscle ups, one legged squats, or at the very advanced level—the vault. What do these things have in common? Balance, midline stabilization, coordination, stability, and proprioception, to name a few. You need to have control over your body and understand how to manipulate and leverage it to accomplish your desired outcome. Not only is this necessary in more obvious sports like gymnastics or ballet, but in every sport to some degree.
Above gymnastics is weightlifting. Weightlifting in essence is the expression of speed, strength, power, balance, coordination, and accuracy. True weightlifting is both technical and raw strength dependent. Not only does a better weightlifter have more explosive power and speed that translates into the sport one chooses, but it is directly affected by the lower tiers as well. For instance, one can assume that, with some training, someone able to power clean a respectable amount of weight can also hit a target with great force….whether it is expressed via tackling a running back or a driving a golf ball.
Our job at Perpetual ends at the weightlifting tier—unless of course the sport the athlete wishes to compete in is the sport of fitness (aka CrossFit).
Once we have developed a strong and vast foundation of nutrition, built their internal engine, developed their proficiency at moving their body through space, and created a dynamic, functional, and explosive representation of strength, we happily hand them off to their respective coach for technical training.
We don’t teach a softball pitcher the mechanics of pitching; we make sure that pitcher is a fully optimized version of themselves. At this point, they’re not only prepared to play whatever sport they choose, but usually the position as well.
By the way….most of us are just playing the sport of life. The principals don’t change.