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Don't tell him this is a
young man's game
September 19, 2005
By Ann Herold, Times Staff Writer
| Building
power and strength can buy more playing time for almost
any athlete. But volleyball's most decorated veteran,
44-year-old Karch Kiraly, takes that concept to a new
level. |
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TO anyone unfamiliar with his sport, Karch Kiraly's victory
at the Huntington Beach Assn. of Volleyball Professionals
tournament this summer over the best players in the country
might have stirred a Roger Clemens moment. Kiraly is, after
all, 44, turning 45 in November.
But to understand the significance of his victory, picture
this: Lance Armstrong winning another Tour de France —
in 11 years. Andre Agassi winning a major — in nine.
Jerry Rice not retiring and making a Pro Bowl appearance —
in two. They are among the best in their sports, and they
have all defied age. But not yet like this.
Live to 115 and the world wants to know how you do it. Be
a top athlete at a late age and there's a similar curiosity,
mixed with an almost vulture-like anticipation of the end.
Kiraly's longevity is a powerful convergence of nature and
nurture, with the eleventh-hour appearance of a new friend.
About three years ago, Orange County-based trainer-coach Mike
Rangel was convinced he had a program that would benefit the
beach legend. It was based on a Soviet regimen from the 1970s
that had been giving track and volleyball teams a noticeable
edge; it focused on the eccentric muscle development that
is responsible for the legs' explosiveness in pushing off
or jumping. Called plyometrics, it had been adapted by Rangel
to train his son Steffin and other young athletes.
Kiraly had already been subjected to punishing "jump
training," as plyometrics was called then, while preparing
for the 1984 Olympics under coach Doug Beal, leaping over
lines of chairs and jumping on and off a 3-foot-high box.
In his 1999 how-to book on beach volleyball, Kiraly touts
a kinder, gentler regimen of plyometrics developed by a San
Diego trainer. But it still looks like Russian factory calisthenics
compared with the balletic moves that Rangel has put together.
"It's harder to improve once you're in your 40s. I was
looking for something new and fresh," says volleyball's
most decorated player. Rangel's plyometrics "improved
my explosiveness, my quickness in covering the court."
Aging baby boomers can certainly look to Kiraly's longevity
for lessons in their own face-off with aging. For every hour
Kiraly competes on the court, there's an hour of stretching
or plyometric training — "money in the bank,"
as Rangel puts it — that Kiraly draws from. And while
the weekend warrior would like to think that just staying
in the game is enough, sometimes staying in the game means
learning a program to develop strength and flexibility, the
best preventive against injury.
But as well as Kiraly trains, he owes a lot to the fact that
beach volleyball gave him the chance to get off the hardwood
floors. James Worthy might still be playing today, "but
you can't bounce a basketball on the sand," says Bill
Stetson, an orthopedic surgeon who competed with Kiraly on
a team that won the Junior Olympics in 1978. Spared the articular
cartilage deterioration that comes with a gym sport, Kiraly
nevertheless represents the maturation of volleyball, says
Stetson, in which "instead of playing for eight hours
like we used to, now they're training for two hours and playing
less."
How much is good genes is up for debate, although "I
remember Karch having these amazing calves even as a teenager,"
says Rangel, who played for Cal State Long Beach in the mid-1970s
and was noticing this promising kid from Santa Barbara at
the beach tournaments.
"Karch had the strongest legs in volleyball," says
Marv Dunphy, coach of the Pepperdine men's volleyball team,
this year's national champion.
In 1988, Dunphy was head coach when Kiraly and his teammates
took Olympic gold in Seoul. Even then, it was about the legs:
At 6-foot-2, Kiraly was small for international volleyball,
but he made all the difference when it came to beating the
big, bad Soviets.
The Soviet Union. Wasn't that a long time ago?
Winning secret: flexibility
Kiraly's current partner on the AVP tour, Hawaii-born Mike
Lambert, was 11 when a Kiraly-led national team erased the
disappointment of not facing the Soviets in the boycotted
'84 Olympics, beating them to win the World Cup in 1985. Lambert
was 12 when they smacked the Soviets again in 1986 at the
world championships.
But on this late summer morning in Huntington Beach, the
man who remembers pre-perestroika Moscow is having no trouble
keeping up with the one who doesn't. Even Kiraly's footwork
is snappier than his 6-foot-6 partner's. Rangel is leading
the pair through a 45-minute program of short hops, dips,
jumps and crunches that looks graceful despite the 20-pound
medicine balls they cradle in their arms. "If he moves
this quickly with the ball, imagine what he can do without
it," says Rangel. It is a workout Kiraly and Lambert
perform twice a week for nine months of the year and once
a week for the other three.
Rangel knew when he first approached Kiraly that the workout
had to be pragmatic as well as challenging, mimicking the
moves of a tournament player and even the tempo of the game.
The exercises are punctuated by 10-second breaks, roughly
the time that elapses from the end of a play to the next serve.
Rangel times how quickly Kiraly does each exercise; Kiraly,
ever the competitor, loves working against the clock.
While the beach is a more forgiving playing field, it is
still a tough master. The unevenness of the surface is a constant,
subtle challenge to the body's sense of balance, like moving
on the deck of a boat. Now try to jump. There isn't the momentum
that comes from running across a firm surface. You are, essentially,
leaping from a standstill. Now crouch and spring high enough
to get your shoulders over the top of an 8-foot-high net,
where a powerful arm swing can send the ball rocketing 50-plus
miles an hour in a second.
The defender on the ground, meanwhile, has about that much
time to assess the direction of the set and what the hitter's
body is telling him and push off that shifty surface quickly
enough to reach where the ball will land.
As he was making the transition to the sand game in his early
30s, Kiraly says, he saw the potential for a long career,
but not if he kept training the way he had indoors. "I
saw other players getting close to it, and I thought I could
do it if I trained right," he says.
Flexibility was key. "When I was with the national team,
I couldn't even touch my toes," he says. So he signed
up with Adrian Crook, a Santa Monica native and career firefighter
who had come up with a stretching program called Inflex. Crook
credits work with a Chinese kung fu master in the 1970s for
his regimen, which focuses on stretches that increase flexibility
— think splits and toe-touching — for greater
range of motion. He's trained scores of athletes in the method,
and Kiraly is still doing a 20-minute Inflex routine almost
daily, 12 years later.
When it comes to sticking with a program, Kiraly is in a
league of his own.
"You always knew he was something special," says
Stetson, a standout collegiate player himself at USC in the
early '80s and now an associate clinical professor in orthopedic
surgery at the medical school there. "He had focus and
determination and an incredible work ethic.
"We were all intense," the surgeon adds, "but
Karch took it to another level."
Robotic control
Karch Kiraly's national team colleagues called him Mr. Computer,
his focus so linear that at times he seemed robotic. Olympic
gold medalist Bob Ctvrtlik "told me that he played with
Karch eight years and he still feels like he doesn't know
him well," Rangel says. Indeed, in those halcyon years
on the beach tour, when Kiraly and then-partner Kent Steffes
were unbeatable, their relationship was so businesslike they
might as well have been wearing suits and swinging briefcases.
Where his father, Laszlo Kiraly, who had played on the Hungarian
national team, was a ferocious, volatile and sarcastic competitor,
Karch was intense and controlled.
He was also, by all accounts, fox smart. He and his dad began
entering beach tournaments when Karch was 11, and the young
player quickly figured out "how he could control the
emotions of his opponents," says Rangel. The adult players
were losing it over losing to a child, "getting angry,
and he was capitalizing on it," Rangel says.
In interviews, Kiraly is deliberate. In goes the question
and out comes the carefully analyzed answer. He has long been
a no-nonsense manager. When one of his wife Janna's horses
became fearful of jumping, he impatiently suggested they get
rid of it. He home-schooled his two sons, Kristian and Kory,
for five years. He taught math, science and composition, and
Janna taught the rest.
So as a more emotional Kiraly emerged, one who was openly
elated at his partner's play, pronouncing the victories "sweeter
because they come less often," a shift could be felt
in the axis of planet Kiraly.
Even as Kiraly and Lambert lost in the finals in Chicago
(a 44-year-old in the finals!), and the veteran was being
asked in the postgame interview about Lambert's dropping him
for a new partner in time to qualify for the Beijing Olympics,
Kiraly was all smiles. It would be good for Lambert. It would
be good for the sport. It was like the aging Agassi winning
the match of his life against James Blake at the U.S. Open
and declaring, "I wasn't the winner. Tennis was the winner."
But here's what Kiraly didn't say: He's looking at new partners,
among them college phenom Sean Rooney from Pepperdine. Oh,
he plans to keep winning.
Getting the jump on elite training
Plyometrics owes its origins to the Soviet Union, which by
the early 1970s had devised a crude training method of hops
and skips with athletes holding bags of sand or tree stumps
or jumping over logs to get exotic results. It owes it name
— derived from Latin for "measured increases"
— to American Fred Wilt, a legendary distance runner.
Plyometrics focuses on eccentric as opposed to concentric
muscle development. Think of a rubber band and its ability
to snap back. This "elastic" energy is what gives
athletes explosiveness in pushing off and jumping, and so
it is critical to such sports as basketball, volleyball, tennis,
soccer and track and field.
Orange County is home of the largest plyometric program in
the country, PlyoCity, run by Mike Rangel. Training is done
primarily at the American Sports Centers in Anaheim, which
has 22 volleyball courts, 16 basketball courts and nine indoor
soccer arenas. Rangel tailors the workouts to the participants.
At PlyoCity, Rangel trains athletes from ages "8 to
58" but focuses on the younger set, going into high schools
to train entire teams. He's worked with a lot of parents too,
he says, "but there are a few movements we don't like
people over 40 to do." The hops, skips, jumps and dips
that make up a plyometric workout might look easy, but they're
deceptively tough, which is why they can bring about a significant
improvement in conditioning without injury. At advanced levels,
however, plyometrics should be paired with weight and flexibility
training for the best results and to prevent injury.
For more on plyometrics:
• Rangel offers programs
of twice-weekly 45-minute workouts at PlyoCity ranging from
$89 to $150 a month.
Call (949) 206-2441 or go to www.plyocity.com.
• "Jumping Into
Plyometrics," by Donald A. Chu (Human Kinetics Publishers,
1998)
• "High-Powered
Plyometrics," by James C. Radcliffe and Robert C. Farentinos
(Human Kinetics Publishers, 1999)
• Some personal trainers
and exercise physiologists recommend plyometrics for such
sports as basketball and skiing. But some fitness experts
warn they can be unsafe. Ask your trainer if this should be
part of your program.
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