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Designing Sport-Specific Programs
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by Jamie Hale
The following is an excerpt from Knowledge and Nonsense http://maxcondition.com/page.php?103
Designing sport-specific programs
Most gyms in the United States offer sport-specific programs. Their idea of a sport-specific program is usually a workout that uses only free weights (which isn’t a bad thing but is only part of the picture). Very few of these programs use agility training models, quickness drills, various forms of endurance, and so on. The majority of these programs don’t meet my definition of sport-specific training.
I’ve conducted MaxCondition Performance Camps around the United States, and I haven’t been impressed with high school, college, or professional athletes’ sport-specific training regimens. The word sport-specific is overused, and in reality, should be called quasi sport-specific because there is only one true sportspecific activity and that is the activity itself. These programs often lack key elements that are important for developing the athletes in question. Below is a list of some of the key factors to consider when designing a sport-specific program.
• Identifying the most important qualities required to play the sport successfully.
• Identifying the most important qualities required to play a specific position.
• Identifying an individual’s strengths and weaknesses (the individual factor is often overlooked because you might see every outfielder on the team performing the same
workout, though their strong and weak points are significantly different).
• Identifying the most common injuries that occur in that sport as well as injuries most common in different positions.
• Identifying movement patterns often performed in the sport and movement patterns of different positions in the sport.
• Identifying primary energy systems used in the sport and energy systems used by different positions and individuals.
I can’t tell you how many high school football teams I have spoken to that don’t perform agility work. Most boxers I speak to still run 3–4 miles per day and perform minimal to no weight training. A common practice among baseball pitchers is to grab the attachment of a cable crossover machine and start mimicking a throwing motion. None of these examples should be part of an intelligently designed sport-specific program. The problem lies in the lack of knowledge of the person designing the program. It’s hard to design a program for boxing if you can’t distinguish between primarily aerobic and anaerobic activity. If the skills coach would refer athletes to sports conditioning coaches, this problem may be solved. That seems logical, but the problem is that the sports conditioning coaches generally don’t have a clue as to what they’re doing either. If your trainer can’t identify at least a few of the factors I mentioned above, get another trainer. If you’re really motivated, do some research. You’ll figure out what you should be doing. And I don’t mean research that you cite from popular fitness magazines.
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