Although important, the amount of force that can

be generated is not the only consideration, and this

brings us to the second variable: force application.
The force generated may be quite different to the
amount of force that can be successfully applied.
An easy way to conceptualise this is by thinking
of trying to drive a bent nail into a plank of wood.
Irrespective of the size of the hammer (or, indeed,
the strength of the person holding it), the nail will
not enter the wood with the precision or energy
cost-effectiveness of a straight nail. Thus, the force
generated onto the head of the nail is quite different to the force transferred to the wood. This is an
example of an energy leak. When a leak is present,
less force or speed can be generated, or the metabolic cost of its generation is inflated.
Athletes often are perceived as being unfit if they
labour around the field of play, whether that be an
athletic track, a swimming pool, a football pitch, a
skating rink or a basketball court. Perhaps they are
unfit (the locomotive is not able to continually power
the train), but a bigger problem may be their ability
to transfer force efficiently. Attempting to improve
fitness may be effective in an untrained person,
but highly trained athletes have much smaller
windows for fitness gains. Improving the ability to
run around the playing field or move through the
water may instead rely on plugging energy leaks.
A mind shift may be required in those people
who assume, for example, that the yo-yo intermittent recovery test (or other field tests purported
to examine fitness) is an evaluation of aerobic
capacity. In actual fact, any such test is nothing
more than an assessment of an individual’s ability
to run repeated shuttles. Unquestionably, the ultimate failure point occurs when energy reserves
are depleted such that the athlete is unable to complete a particular repetition in the required time.
However, this does not necessarily mean that the
factor that discriminates between athletes when
completing this test is cardiovascular power.
Imagine you have to water your plants and
that if you fill your 5-litre watering can, you will
have just enough to do the 5-minute job. Imagine
now, that you fill your can but you discover it has
a number of holes in the side and is leaking 200
millilitres a minute. You will be left short. Is this
because the watering can was not big enough or
because it leaked? Seal the leaks, and the watering
can would be big enough.
The same applies to the repeated shuttles
example. If the athlete’s running mechanics were
suboptimal, or if turning technique was poor, irrespective of metabolic capacity, the athlete would
be spending energy reserves at a much greater
rate than a more efficient counterpart. This is the
same as the watering-can example. The limiter,
therefore, may not be the size of the aerobic bank
but the body’s spending habits.
In this instance, if a training programme
addresses the identified energy leaks—the physical
and technical deficits—and the athlete becomes a
more efficient runner, less energy would be spent
per stride. This means that either the number of
strides taken can be greater, or the force applied