Thursday, July 26, 2012

OLYMPICS/ Sports share training regimens, data to win medals

When Japan's national judo and wrestling teams were training together at a joint camp, the wrestlers were quickly and easily tackling the judoka from behind and taking them to the mat.

When Shinichi Shinohara, head coach of the national men’s judo team, suggested that all athletes wear a judo-gi, or judo uniform, wrestlers were easily thrown.

“Wrestling involves a lot of pushing moves, but judoka pull opponents to throw them. I learned a lot from this experience,” says Saori Yoshida, gold medalist in the women's freestyle wrestling 55-kg division at both the 2004 Athens Olympics and the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

Athletes and coaches of different sports have been converging at two publicly funded facilities to learn from each others’ training methods.

Members of Japan’s national judo and wrestling teams, which aim to win medals en masse as they have in the past, held a joint training camp at the Ajinomoto National Training Center (NTC) and the Japan Institute of Sports Sciences (JISS)--both located in Tokyo’s Kita Ward--between late last year and early this year.
The two sports are similar in that they involve fierce grappling, both standing and on the mat. But the training regimens and basic movements differ greatly. By training together, team officials hoped that judoka and wrestlers would motivate and learn from each other.

In another cross-sport sharing experiment, Masaaki Sugita, a Mie University professor of sports science who accompanied the national men’s soccer team to the 2010 World Cup Games and contributed to the Samurai Blue’s advancement to the top 16, is now working with the women’s marathon team that is aiming to regain Japan’s past Olympic glory in the event at the London Olympics.

When working with the national soccer team, Sugita used urine tests conducted in the 1990s on the track-and-field team and succeeded in managing the soccer players’ conditions. For the upcoming Olympics, he will be using that experience to give feedback to the long-distance track-and-field team. He has been conducting 11 types of urine and other tests and inputting the results on his smartphone and other gadgets to collect and analyze data daily since last year.

Efforts transcending various sports and experts began on a full scale in 2008, when the NTC was built. What served as a role model was “Team Kitajima”--the team of coaches and other experts who analyzed swimming and training methods to support Kosuke Kitajima, the Beijing and Athens Olympic swimming gold medalist. Kitajima’s four gold medals attest to the success of these cross-sectional joint training and analysis.
Norimasa Hirai, head coach of the national swimming team, who used to coach Kitajima, says, “We can’t aim for gold medals without the (facilities and experts at) JISS or NTC.”

Hirai himself is learning from his interactions with athletes in other sports such as Yuki Ohta, a fencer who won the silver medal at the 2008 Beijing Olympics' individual foil event. Hirai says that watching the training sessions of other sports has benefited him.

“Surprisingly, I had very few opportunities to meet athletes from different sports. Here (at the NTC), I see other athletes all the time just being here so I feel the unity among members of Team Japan.”

Basketball player Yuko Ohga also appreciates the sense of oneness. For 10 weeks after undergoing surgery on her right instep, she was doing her rehab sessions at the JISS.

“Rehab is really hard and lonely. But when I saw athletes in other sports training to their physical limits, I couldn’t complain,” she says.

Ohga recovered enough to play in the final Olympic qualifiers that were held starting in late June, although Japan ultimately failed to win a ticket to the Olympics.

No comments:

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...

Popular Posts