Strength and conditioning has been a passion of mine for a long time. Since studying for my degree in strength and conditioning in 2011, I’ve helped people improve performance in skiing, kayaking, football, basketball, track sports, martial arts, and more.
Unfortunately, I’ve noticed that there’s a lack of good strength and conditioning guidance for anyone who isn’t already a professional athlete. There are plenty of cool strength and conditioning exercises on social media, but these are often lacking nuance. A lack of nuance can easily lead to training mistakes. One of the mistakes I see most often in strength and conditioning is in the way we apply the concept of training specificity.
While it makes sense for training to be specific to your chosen sport, many people pursue training specificity in ineffective or even detrimental ways.
Here are some of the common mistakes relating to training specificity, and how you can correct them.
Picking Exercises That Mimic Sporting Movements
It’s pretty common to see a well-meaning coach programming exercises that look exactly like sporting movements. These “specific” strength and conditioning exercises usually only differ from the sporting movement by virtue of some added resistance. As an athlete, you may have seen people performing sporting movements with an added dumbbell, barbell, or resistance band. Common examples include punching with dumbbells, mimicking golf swings with cables, and tying resistance bands to just about every movement imaginable.
I’ll admit that this logic is quite appealing. You’re making your sporting movement that little bit harder by performing it against greater resistance. Surely, this creates a stronger, tougher athlete?
Unfortunately, this logic does not always pan out.
Why This Isn’t the Best Practice for Strength and Conditioning
Adding weight to a sporting movement can very easily change the muscle recruitment patterns involved in that movement. There are many reasons for this:
- Slowing down the movement by adding resistance may change what muscle fibres are being trained, so improvements in the weighted version may not cross over to the sporting environment.
- There are movements we perform in sport that become inherently risky and unstable when we add weight to them.
- Adding resistance can alter the timing and co-ordination of the muscles’ contract-relax patterns. Picture a boxer punching with dumbbells: the boxer is now focussing on holding on the dumbbell, meaning they cannot relax the hands or arms at any point in the punch (punching involves fairly rapid patterns of contracting and relaxing for maximum impact and speed). Also, the vertical force of the dumbbells being pulled to the floor by gravity have no “specificity” to training the horizontal and rotational forces associated with punching.
Strength and conditioning research is replete with research showing that traditional strength training is beneficial for athletic performance. This means we don’t have to resort to creative, uncontrollable exercises to get a training effect.
Performing the Sport for Extreme Durations to Improve Conditioning
Taking part in a bout of any sport is physically demanding, and usually results in tiredness. Therefore, many people have assumed that we can increase conditioning training specificity by performing the sport in a way that elicits as much fatigue as possible. For most cases, this means practicing for longer and longer durations, and/or reducing rest. For example, if your sport is played in 5-minute bouts, then the assumption is that 20 minutes of practice at a competitive intensity will make you better-prepared for a competition.
An example here would be a “shark tank,” where martial artists continuously spar fresh opponents one after the other with very little rest. This can turn 2-5 minute rounds into 20-30 minutes of fairly continuous work.
It’s worth noting that we do typically perform long bouts of sporting practice. However, this is not normally intended to function as conditioning training; this is usually technical or strategic work. A well-rounded sports programme needs a clear distinction between the two.
Sport technical training is normally performed at much lower intensities, longer durations, and with more skill complexity. A good strength and conditioning programme will normally take a very different approach to specific conditioning exercise.
Why This Is a Strength and Conditioning Mistake
Our work and work rate are governed by our energy systems. The more work we do without rest, the more we will come to rely on our aerobic systems. The aerobic systems replenish energy at a slower rate than the energy systems we use over shorter bouts. This is why our work rate decreases the longer we exert ourselves for.
If you try to prepare for short, intense, competitive bouts by trying to perform a high work-rate over 20 minutes, you will not be training the relevant energy systems for your sport. Athletes who adopt this practice often feel unfit or unprepared for their sport despite doing hours and hours of training. For conditioning work to be specific to a competitive intensity, you need enough rest to be able to repeatedly work at those competitive intensities.
Trying to make conditioning work as fatiguing as possible is a sure-fire way to detract from your tactical and technical work. This is because learning processes benefit from you being fresh enough to actually process information and make decisions.
Conclusion – What Should We Focus on During Strength and Conditioning Training?
Strength and Power for Sports
Movement is governed by the forces we are able to resist and produce. This is true whether we are interacting with objects and other people, or just moving our bodies. Strength and power training can increase the amount of force we produce and resist, but this is made difficult if we choose exercises that are unstable, complicated, or awkward just because they look like a sporting movement.
By sticking to the principles of general strength and power training, we can improve force production in the areas where we need it most. We can be safer and more effective by focusing on exercises that provide a good base to produce force – this includes traditional barbell and dumbbell exercises, resistance machines, jumping, throwing, sprinting and so on.
6 Things You Need to Know Before You Start Strength Training
As you can see, there are still plenty of ways to improve strength and power performance without trying to mimic sporting movements. These methods can be scaled to any individual and can be highly customized regardless of your starting level, injury status, and sport. Many of my clients are surprised at how much their sport improves when they introduce strength training, like my roller-skiing client Andrew. He has improved his ski times by 5-15% every 3 months over the last 2 years!
Conditioning for Sports Performance
It may seem like we’re doing good conditioning work by making the sport as difficult and tiring as possible, but whenever we do this we tend to put all of our eggs in one basket; either by focusing on the nastiest beasting sessions imaginable, or by doing lots of aerobic work at a much lower intensity than competition level. This short-changes the athlete in almost every aspect of their performance.
Instead, we should focus on exactly what energy systems contribute to their sport. This isn’t always easy, as many sports are affected by more than one energy system. However, once we have established what energy systems need attention, we can tailor programmes that specifically target those energy systems. These often look very different to the sport in question.
There are lot of conflicting beliefs within the realm of strength and conditioning which causes lots of confusion. Luckily, for 99% of cases, mastery of the basic principles will improve your performance above and beyond what you thought was possible. I can help you get started with strength and conditioning training that will transform the way you perform and compete. To find out more, use the contact form below!