Book review: Training Theory, by Frank Dick

I recently took delivery of a handful of books from Amazon that Vern Gambetta recommended.  I rather cheekily put them all into a wish list, sorted by price and bought the cheapest ones first (second-hand, of course).

I have to say, there were items on the list that I would never have read if I had not received the recommendation.  But such is the way of these things and it’s also the point.  If you only ever read the same kind of books and only ever talk to the same kind of people, you’ll only ever know what you’ve always known.

Anyway.  One of the first books I picked up was a very old, ex-library copy of Frank Dick’s Training Theory (affiliate links: UK, US).  I reviewed Frank Dick’s book Winning a little while ago and was impressed by his direct and earnest approach.  I liked his style and I got the strong impression that he really cared about getting good results and not so much about sounding cool.  Which, to be fair, is quite a rare trait.

Training Theory,  complete with old school style graph paper

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So what is Training Theory all about?

Well, it’s exactly what it says on the tin.  It works through a series of chapters and in doing so condenses a huge amount of theory about training into a few brief pages.  Bear in mind, though, that this is a summary of theories that have been formulated about training and training issues and isn’t a manual of how to approach training.  There is a difference.

Also, the training theory is specific to track and field.  This is pretty comprehensive, therefore, for most athletic endeavours, although you would probably exclude weightlifting and powerlifting and you might want to exclude cycling and extra-long distance running too.  But for the middle ground, I figure track and field is a pretty good proxy for most athletic activities.

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What’s it like?

The general approach of the book is very different from the approach taken by many books today.

These days, there is s strong tendency for authors to take one concept or small group of concepts and to expand them slowly, unpacking their various meanings and implications carefully, leaving no point unmade and no stone unturned.  It’s almost like having your thinking done for you.

In Training Theory, Frank just hits you with all the big rocks.  It’s kind of up to you to go away and figure out what they all mean.

In a way, it reminds me of that old saying that if you want to sell an information product about training, you just turn to a random page in Mel Siff’s Supertraining and write a book about it.  You could easily write a book about each of the sections in Training Theory, if you were prepared to think through what Frank is telling you…

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What’s it cover?

The book divides into chapters as follows:

• Introduction – Frank explains by way of introduction the role of the coach.  If only every person involved in teaching sport or training people read and internally absorbed this chapter, the world would be a better place.  Frank asserts that the role of the coach is always that of a creator and never a destroyer and the coach must expand their abilities and horizons to cope with the challenges that the athlete presents.  The athlete must never be confined or limited but allowed to grow and develop, while being guided in the best ways possible.
• The Athlete’s Environment – Frank loads up all the big rocks here, which as a coach you must consider.  He sets the athletic training day in the context of the wider world, where work, family commitments and financial pressures all influence the ability and desire of an athlete to perform.  He covers nutrition and equipment, vitamins and minerals, protein requirements, hygiene and even laundry.  You name it, Frank has thought about it and you need to as well.
• Basic Structure and Function – if you managed to absorb and consider all of the previous chapter, you’d be hard pressed to do the same immediately for the next one.  In this chapter, Frank does a whistle-stop tour of energy systems, the digestive system, the skeletal system, the muscular system and the central nervous system.  Obviously, he doesn’t go into a lot of detail but in terms of hitting the key points, you could do worse than start here.
• Young and Female Athletes – Frank doesn’t let up.  He barrels on with a consideration of factors that affect young athletes, by considering the various rates at which growth occurs for the different aspects of physiology and psychology.  After that, he goes straight into a discussion of the factors peculiar to female athletes, differences to male athletes and the menstrual cycle.  You leave this chapter feeling like you’ve been given a crash course in developmental physiology and comparative biology…
• Terminology of Fitness – Frank gets down to brass tacks and talks about the theories of adaptation, overcompensation, progressive overload and periodisation.  Now we are really talking training theory.
• Development of the Basic Characteristics – now, Frank talks about the various key qualities that make the athlete.  He discusses a number of different subclassifications of strength and endurance, as well as speed, mobility and technical proficiency.
• Planning the Athlete’s Year – finally, Frank returns to periodisation, which he discussed briefly in Terminology of Fitness.  He begins by talking about planning the athlete’s year and compares a single annual cycle with a biannual cycle and discusses the evidence in favour of each.  He discusses how mesocycles and microcycles fit into the annual plan and gives detailed examples of each using different athletic specialities.  It is the detail around the individual programmes that is valuable in this chapter, as for many people, they will have had personal experience of one type of training but not all.  Frank’s experience comes to the fore and he is able to give relevant detail for all types of track and field events.

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I enjoyed reading Frank’s book even though I know I had to work a lot harder to get the most out of it than I would typically expect of a book published more recently.  It’s exactly the kind of book to read when you feel like it’s time to take a step back and consider whether you have all the big rocks in the right places or whether you’ve been concentrating too much on the pebbles recently.