Sport Specific Training

Sport Specific Training

This is a term that I hear thrown around all the time.  Most parents want to be ensured that the training their athletes are going to get will help them in their sport but most don't understand what they are asking for.   The fact of the matter is that every athlete is better at their sport if they are faster, quicker, stronger, and more durable.  There is no sport where being weaker and slower makes you better.  So if all sports have the same requirements to make the athlete better then what is sport specific training?

This term comes from the ideas that each sport has it's own movement patterns and set of energy demands.  Understanding of the sporting movements and needs of the sport must first be mastered to provide any kind of specific training for a sport.  The fact is that 80% of training is the same for all sports because their is a finite amount of movement patterns and energy demands.  One of the things that makes The Spot Athletics so good at building champions is how we manipulate the other 20% that needs to change from sport to sport.

With that being said you must understand that an athlete should have a mastery of their sport before they start any kind of specific training for that sport.  An 8 year old athlete should not be doing specific training for a sport but rather focusing on building more efficient movement patterns and as many of them as possible.  An 8 year old who is excelling in basketball may end up being short and wrestling in high school.   So our philosophy with young athletes is to develop them to be the strongest and most complete athlete possible, no matter what sport they eventually choose to focus on.  If you want sport specific training for your 10 year old athlete then you are limiting their overall athletic potential and possibly setting them up for injury as they go through their sporting career.  Not only do I suggest against it, but we will not do it here at The Spot Athletics because we care about building champions and this is in direct contrast to that mission.

Now that my rant about young athletes being thrust into sport specific training is over let's focus on how we do it for older athletes.  These older athletes have chosen a sport to focus on and since their motor patterns are mostly already formed we focus on refining these patterns so the athlete can get more out of their body.  This is done through specific exercises that may not even look like they belong in the training for a certain sport.  Yet the part of the body that we are strengthening will transfer over to better performance for a given sport.   A great example of this is the crawling that we have our baseball and volleyball players do.  Although these athletes will never crawl in their sport, they do need to have extremely durable shoulders and rotator cuffs and crawling is one of the best ways to develop this.  Not only this, but it builds great spacial awareness which they will need when they are playing with their team mates next to them.

We manipulate the strengthening component for sport specific training and also the  conditioning component  to help the athlete excel at their sport.  One of the dumbest things that coaches do is run explosive sports for long distances.  I have seen football coaches test 1 or 2 mile runs to see if their players are in shape to play football.  This is a total lack of understanding of the energy demands of their sport.  In football a play lasts for 4-7 seconds and almost none of it is in a straight line.  So how does it make sense to run an athlete for 5-15 minutes and in a straight line?   It doesn't and understanding the energy systems of each sport allows us to develop conditioning that will directly translate into better performance for the given sport.  We don't just condition every athlete the same way, we change the parameters based on the sport.  In combat sports for example the athlete will never run, so we conduct our conditioning through other means that will more directly correlate to performance on the mat or in the ring.

Although the changes that I am talking about may only account for 20% of the overall training, that 20% is the difference between being a champion and wishing you were one.   The fact that we don't just put every athlete through the same workout is just another reason why The Spot Athletics is one of the best strength & conditioning facilities in the world.

In Strength,

JL Holdsworth, The Spot Athletics