Fast Buck vs. Slow Athlete

By Charles Poliquin

The Scam Of SAQ Training Every day in America, countless parents get defrauded of hard earned money by SAQ programs, being promised that little Johnny and little Susie will be turned into star athletes by the SPEED AGILITY QUICKNESS (SAQ) Program also know as your local sports performance center. That is such a crock. I will only pick 3 items because I have no intention of writing a book on it, but I want to at least educate the readers out there on the false claims of popular Hockey training and SAQ programs.

Let’s look at some of the tools they use:

1. Acceleration treadmills – Skating Treadmills

What really irks me is that it is recommended to kids who can’t even squat their own bodyweights while respecting proper biomechanics. Now as a side bar: why is squatting your own bodyweight with correct biomechanics so important. Because it is has been shown in hockey, alpine skiing and soccer to be the best predictor of remaining injury free in the competitive season, whether it is hamstrings pulls, ACL tears or groin pulls. Yet only about less than 2% of adolescents do well on this test when untrained. Acceleration treadmills, besides ruining motor patterns, are associated to increase risk of injury. Skating treadmills ruin motor patterns by creating faulty movement patterns in a hockey player’s stride. Just like high caliber sprinters never run on treadmills, Hockey players should never skate on treadmills. When little Johnny runs on the grass for example, he moves over the surface. On treadmill running or skating, the surface moves from under him. This teaches little Johnny to fire the muscles used in running, sprinting and skating in an improper sequence. Basically you teach your nervous system how to skate two different ways, when you step on the ice the brain doesn’t know if the ice is going to move underneath you or if you are going to propel yourself over the ice. All this confusion between your brain and muscles will lead to decrease speed and power and increase risk of injury.

2. Speed ladders, mini-hurdles etc.

Any PhD in psychomotor learning will confirm this to you: Coordination is 90% established by age 12. So promising improvements larger than 10% is simply fraud. Skills are specific. Getting better at a skill, only means that you are better at this skill. Does this skill transfer to another skill? Probably not, even in a very similar skill. This is why great boxers don’t necessarily make great karate fighters and vice versa. How many skilled badminton players are great at tennis and vice versa? In the case of SAQ training, training on the speed ladder does not improve quick feet for anything else other than the speed ladder. Getting in and out of predetermined patterns done in the speed ladder will not make Johnny a better lacrosse player or Susie a better field hockey player. They will only get better at performing the speed ladder. The same goes for the agility mat. By the way, the speed and the agility mat are not Olympic events.

3. Reaction time drills

Reaction time is improvable 10 % in gifted individuals and 20% in motor morons. The reaction range is typically 0.2 to 0.3 seconds. 0.2 seconds for gifted people, 0.3 for motor morons. The most gifted individuals will have a reaction time of 0.08 second, in 24 years as a strength coach I have only seen two scores on record like that. One of them belonging to the greatest ice hockey player of all times. World class sprinters will get in the 0.12 seconds range. I have consulted in the past for SWAT team selections and rejected 28 out of 30 candidates just based on their reaction times. For example, one police officer had a VO2 max of 65 (which is an excellent score for those who are not familiar with this value, international level mid-field soccer players, ice hockey forwards, and Greco-roman wrestlers have a similar VO2) and could also bench press 380 lbs, however his reaction time was 0.4. Dangerous person to give a submachine gun to! To promise parents a 200% decrease in reaction time is downright fraud or even 30% is highway robbery. Another thing that parents should be aware of is that reaction time is specific to the stimulus, whether it is auditory, visual, or kinesthetic. Kinesthetic reaction time would be the time it takes to react after being hit. So for example, the reaction bands drill popular in SAQ circles is a kinesthetic reaction time drill which does zero to improve your ability to react to a puck, football, soccer ball etc& By the way a famous hockey player had to take time off during the season because one of the SAQ bands snapped away from his partner and broke one of his ribs. He had his teammates cover for him on how he really broke his rib. After he stopped doing SAQ and started training under my tutelage his career blossomed. The only thing that I have seen help improve reaction times is to react to things that move much faster that the need of your sport. My client, goalie John Grahame, of the NHL’s Tampa Bay Lightning, winner of this year’s Stanley Cup, improved his visual reaction time after I recommended that he to do stick fighting in the off-season. If you get used to getting out of the way of a full speed fighting stick, hockey pucks will appear slow. This is why the Canadian National Alpine Team coach used to have the skiers enroll in speed car racing school so that downhill skiing looked and felt like slow motion after that.