The Feed the Cats model for training
If you’ve listened to the podcast, you’ve heard the name Tony Holler mentioned a few times by a variety of different guests. Holler is a track coach well known for a training model he dubbed, “Feed the Cats.” He recently published a short article aimed at replacing the existing football model.
While it was geared towards football, the idea is applicable for most sports.
The basic idea is that a lot of us coaches use an outdated practice model in which we focus too much on creating capacity in athletes through aerobic exercise, something we tend to call the “grind.” It’s the idea that, when we lose, the other team must have worked harder, that they must have wanted it more, that their athletes must be better-conditioned. So in practice and in camp, we create athletes with high aerobic ceilings.
But if we want athletes who can perform the task in games (duh), then what we really want to do is focus on building speed and power. And that focus on speed and power will simultaneously end up growing our aerobic capacity, even without focusing on our aerobic capacity explicitly.
Holler argues that the pyramid for practice and performance should look more like this:
