The Consequences of Training: Transfer of Training
I often talk about the importance of your training off the field of play, and how it sets the table for your success on the field. The things that you do in the gym will have a direct carryover to your sport, and that carryover can be good, or it can be bad. Today we’re going to talk about the consequences of your training habits and the transfer of training.
Transfer of Training
In sports and exercise science, there is a term called transfer of training. Transfer of training refers to the phenomenon where improvements in one exercise or movement translate to improvements in another related exercise, activity, or movement. The easiest way to think of this is gaining strength in the squat will have some positive effect on your jumping abilities. You can put more force in the ground, so now you can jump with more force.
There are a lot of transfers that aren’t really visible on the surface to most people, but they still exist. The movements don’t necessarily have to look like the movements you want to improve, to have carryover. Here’s an example:
You’re an athlete who struggles to change direction with any real authority. You seem to get beat on the field anytime you have to move laterally or multi-directionally. One time last year you even sprained your MCL trying to change directions on the field. You’ve hired a strength coach to help you with this because you see it as a real weakness in your game. Now, there are a few ways that the coach can handle this:
They can get you stronger. The stronger you are, the more force you’re going to be able to handle on the field and we deal with high levels of force when we change direction (a few times your body weight when done at full speed).
They can work to get you more efficient in your lateral and multidirectional movement on the field. Crossovers, change of direction drills, jumps and bounds will all work for this.
They can incorporate slower, and heavier eccentric (negative) squats and lunge variations. Because you struggle to change direction and even get hurt doing so, teaching you to control heavier weights in an efficient manner (with good body position) can have a pretty big impact on your change of direction ability.
Now, none of these approaches are necessarily wrong. They all will work to help you become more efficient in your movement on the field, thus preventing injuries and allowing you to excel in your sport. They can all have positive transfers onto the field if done properly. On the flip side, if done improperly, they can all have a negative impact on your play and rate of injury. This is the importance of movement selection, and positioning/patterning when doing these movements. We’ll talk about that next.
Movement Inefficiencies & Dysfunction
Training is pretty interesting. You’re going to get out of it exactly what you put into it. I tell people all of the time that their training might actively be working against them even if they’re dialed in and consistent with their work. If they’re consistently out of position when training, they’re going to be cued to do that exact same thing on the field.
We’ve all heard the old adage that practice makes perfect. Well, that’s a misguided and wrong statement. Practice doesn’t make perfect, practice makes permanent. And weight training makes this practice even more permanent due to the neurological adaptations associated with load.
How The Squat Pattern Can Injure You
The things you do in the gym don’t necessarily create problems, however, they can absolutely exacerbate movement inefficiencies and dysfunction. Let’s say you struggle to externally rotate your hip when you go to decelerate. Every time you go to slow down and change direction, your foot falls flat, and your knee caves in. We call this a valgus stress/force and it is the number one mechanism of injury for an ACL tear in young athletes.
Now, this can be fixed with proper movement in patterns like squat variations, lunge variations, and hinge variations. Teaching you to externally rotate your hip (drive your knees out), or drive through the outside edges of your feet when you’re performing these movements is a great cue to do the same when you’re on the field performing movements that look nothing like the squat, lunge, or hinge variations.
Adding weight to these movement patterns and doing them in a good position will have an even bigger impact on your moving properly on the field. This added load engrains this movement pattern even further, and allows you to practice doing these movements while dealing with more force (more carryover).
On the flip side, this added load can also exacerbate this movement dysfunction. If you internally rotate at the hips during the eccentric (negative) portion of the movement, you’ll be more prone to do so on the field when slowing down or changing direction (slowing down is an eccentric/negative muscle action). This is why patterning and positioning (and load) matter so much. If you perform movements in the gym in a poor position (or with too much load), you’ll end up getting hurt on the field of play. Every single time.
How A Simple Prone T Can Injure You
This isn’t limited to lower extremity movements either. Another great example is shoulder correctives. Lots of coaches push these on their athletes, and for good reason. With phones and computers and sitting all day, most of us have atrocious posture. We’re internally rotated and protracted at the shoulder (forward rounded upper back). This has to be corrected if we’re going to perform at the highest levels and avoid unnecessary injury.
The reason we prescribe shoulder corrective movements is to correct shoulder movement dysfunction. The shoulder doesn’t operate the way it’s supposed to because length-tension relationships are off, so it needs to be “retaught” how to move. That means even this simple movement needs to really be coached up.
One of the most common movement dysfunctions in the shoulder is for the upper traps to take over scapular retraction. Laying prone on the ground with your arms out like a T, and your thumbs pointed up toward the ceiling should mostly isolate your middle traps. However, if we don’t have a neutral spine, and we don’t depress the scapula then our upper traps are going to take over this movement, which is a shame because that’s already the problem. Doing these prone T’s without enough attention to detail is going to exacerbate the problem, not fix it. This will lead to a greater likelihood of labral tears, rotator cuff tears, UCL ruptures, and shoulder separations.
As you can see, even things that look nothing like your sport can have a drastic carryover to your play. Being in a poor position when training isn’t likely to hurt you in the short term, but it’s very likely to set you up to get hurt down the road.
Everything Transfers, Everything
You need to take your training as seriously as you take your practices and games. The things that you do in the gym will either amplify your abilities or hinder your progress. They can even set you up to get hurt if certain things are done often enough.
That lateral jump where you’re internally rotating your hips on the landing? That’s going to cue you to cut on one leg like that on the field. You’ll be inefficient and more likely to get hurt.
That squat you threw an extra 30lbs on because all your buddies were watching? Better make sure you’re externally rotating your hips (driving your knees out) on the way down because that internal rotation will 100% rear its ugly head on the field of play when you’re landing or slowing down.
Not dialed in when you’re landing jumps? You’re going to struggle to decelerate, change directions, or land on the field. You’re setting yourself up to get hurt.
These are just a few examples, there are legitimately infinitely more. Your body positioning when you train is going to cause you to pattern in a specific way. This will now be the way that you move both on AND off of the field of play. This is why the measure of a strength and conditioning coach can’t really be seen until maybe 2-4 years down the road. That’s when all of these movement flaws will show up in the form of both overuse and noncontact catastrophic injury (like an ACL tear when cutting or a UCL rupture when throwing).
Take your training seriously. Use proper loads, get dialed in, be in a good position, and don’t mail in reps. What you do off the field will transfer to the field, whether it’s for the better or for the worse is 100% up to you.
