Hopefully you’ve had an opportunity to listen to this week’s episode of The 10 Minute Strength Pod, but if you haven’t you can check it out here. We touched on sport specific training and what it isn’t. Here in this article we’re going to go into a little bit more depth about it!

Transfer of Training

Transfer of training may be the most important aspect of your training plan. In sports, transfer of training refers to the influence of previous experience on performing a skill or the learning of a new skill or on performance of the same skill in a new context. This influence can be both positive and negative.

What does this mean? Well, essentially it just means that your physical preparation is going to have carryover to your sport, and whether it’s a good or a bad carryover is up to you as a coach. The stresses and movement patterns you help create in the weight room will absolutely have transfer to the field of play. Here’s a couple examples both good and bad:

• That squat with the internally rotated hips you’re allowing your athletes to get away with

  • This loaded movement is teaching your athletes to rest on their joints with a valgus stress at the knee when decelerating. This can and DOES lead to non contact ACL tears and hamstring strains when decelerating, landing, and even accelerating.

• Landing without paying thought to decelerating properly. Landing and allowing the end range of your joints to stop the descent

  • There’s a HUGE training effect to landing. Letting your joints take the brunt of the stresses involved with landing (upwards of 7 times our body weight) is going to lead to them being out of position and setting themselves up for overuse injuries down the road.

• Those protracted bench press reps you’re allowing athletes to get away with when they fatigue, but you gotta get them reps ammirite?!

  • Staying healthy on the field of play involves teaching your athletes to find stability in chaos like they’ll find on the field. That loaded and protracted position on the bench press is going to cue them to do the same on the field of play, leading to higher injury potential.

• Landing in an athletic base

  • This is a good cue! Teaching your athletes to decelerate properly is going to have nothing but good carryover to the field of play, and help keep them healthy.

• Keeping hip/knee/ankle alignment throughout EVERY movement

  • Hip/knee/ankle alignment is paramount to maintaining good positioning in the gym. When we lose this it’s because we’re losing hip positioning and it will cue your athletes to internally rotate the hip in order to find stability under load. Even when doing dumbbell rows, bench pressing, etc it’s important to maintain this positioning.

• Performing a plank and allowing your athletes to rest on their lumbar extensors instead of engaging their anterior core muscles

  • The plank is an exercise that has been completely bastardized in this industry and is performed wrong the majority of the time. Allowing your athletes to get over extended in their lumbar spine, while protracting at the shoulder to find stability is going to cue them on the field of play to do the same.

• Performing lateral tube walks while reaching with the foot instead of the knees

  • This movement is meant to be performed by abducting and externally rotating the hip, and in reaching with the foot you’re actively internally rotating the hip in an effort to move sideways. THIS IS A TERRIBLE CUE FOR YOUR ATHLETES and literally the opposite of how this drill is meant to be performed. This is an easy drill to cue, and lack of attention to detail with this movement is LAZY and will lead to injury down the road.

Everything we do in the gym does one of two things: 1) it cues us to have good or poor movement patterns, and 2) it either exacerbates or undoes everything we do throughout the day. This is one of the reasons that attention to detail with even “remedial” or basic exercises is so important. If you’re letting your athletes get away with broken movement patterns while loaded in the gym, it’ll come back to bite you in the ass on the field of play in spades. Good and bad, your training will have transfer to the field of play.

The goal of every physical preparation coach and program NEEDS to be to give your athletes as large a pool of movement patterns to pull from as possible. Sport in it’s most simple form is a movement problem solving endeavor. The more movement patterns your athlete has at their disposal, the more likely they’re going to be able to solve these problems. If all you have is a hammer then everything becomes a nail, and sport’s are full of nuts and bolts so get a better tool box!

What Are the Ramifications of Training Too Specific?

Sport specific training is a term that’s been completely misinterpreted by many people including athletes, parents, students and even practicing personal trainers and strength coaches. To someone who doesn’t understand the physics of movement it’s easy to get lost in training for sport, thinking that if we need to get better at a movement on the field of play that we should load it and perform it in the gym. This thought process isn’t just going to lead to undesired outcomes in the weight room, but you’re going to hurt your athletes either in the gym or on the field of play.

Most sport movement is fairly specialized (think pitching, hitting, shooting, skating, etc), and these movement patterns should be mastered on the field of play. As physical preparation coaches it’s our job to create an environment to make our athletes “bigger, faster and stronger” so they can excel on the field of play and master those sport movement patterns, NOT to try to increase sport movement skill capability off the field of play.

To understand this try to think about squatting and the progression it’s going to take in the gym. Your current max is 200lbs and we’re trying to drive that number up to 225. Now if your max is 200 and I put you under 225, you’re either going to battle through it in a poor position, be really short in your range of motion, or its going to bury you. If you get through it in poor position or even with a super high squat and create a new max, you’re going to be constantly training at percentages that are outside your capability leading to faulty movement patterns. This same exact thing happens when we load sport movement patterns. It causes compensatory movement dysfunction, which will destroy movement patterns necessary for the field of play.

Another problem with training sport movement skill in the weight room is that they’re already getting PLENTY of volume for that stimulus on the field of play. Athletes skate and run MILES, shoot hundreds of pucks, shoot hundreds of baskets, etc in practice alone, adding more volume to that movement skill is not only unnecessary but its going to EXACERBATE any movement dysfunction that they already have. Work on basic movements like pushing and pulling, hinging and lunging, jumping and landing to create strength and power. This strength and power from these basic movements will carry over to those sport movement skills without hurting your athletes.

The takeaway here is STOP loading sport movement skill patterns in an effort to be “sport specific” in your training. It will lead to stagnated training intensities, dysfunctional movement patterns and overuse injury. Be a better coach.

Using Balancing Modalities and Calling it Sport Specific Training

This section is going to be short and sweet.

• Balance modalities have been shown to decrease ground reaction forces, create dysfunctional movement patterns, and even lead to soft tissue injury. All undesired outcomes if we’re trying to excel on the field of play

• If you’re not strong enough to maintain good positioning on one foot, you’re not strong enough to balance on a balance modality without finding stability at joint end ranges instead of with the muscles

• What’s sport specific about balancing on a pad or ball? When’s the last time you played your sport on a waterbed or during an earthquake….?

• There is NOTHING sport specific about balance modalities, move on

Sport Equipment in the Gym

Many coaches will have you use tennis rackets, hockey sticks, baseball/softball gloves, etc in your training in an effort to make it more sport specific. This is absolutely an exercise in futility. The piece of equipment you’re using is going to cause you to move in a way that is undesirable. For example:

I used to work at a facility attached to a tennis and golf academy. While I wasn’t a fan of it, we used agility ladders in the tennis academy warm ups because the coaches insisted on increasing their “foot speed,” and we figured the easiest and best way to incorporate this useless piece of equipment was to use it in their warm ups. Now if you’ve ever seen tennis players move off the court you’ll get this, but they literally don’t move their arm that would typically be holding their racket. It’s almost like their sport has forced them to move inefficiently and carried over poor movement patterns into their training. These same coaches demanded that we have them hold their rackets while going through these “foot speed” drills. Well, what happened? After a lot of arguing with said coaches we gave in out of fear of losing our jobs and these kids STILL move like garbage to this day. They’re inefficient at delivering force into the ground and reacting off that force. Having them hold their racket was a major selling point for the academy and summer camps, they could tell the parents “even our fitness training is tennis specific.” The kids lost out on valuable movement skill, so these coaches could have their selling points.

Incorporating sports equipment into physical preparation is always a bad idea, and doesn’t make your training any more valuable, in fact it makes it worse.

Rotational Movements that Mimic Your Sport Movement Skill

“You cannot fire a cannon out of a canoe” - Charles Poliquin

If you play baseball, golf, tennis or even hockey it seems like it would be a good idea to train rotationally. After all, all of these sports include a good amount of rotation and it would make sense to increase your power in the transverse plane, and even to help “undo” some of the one-sidedness of their sport. Hold up! The above quote from the late, great Charles Poliquin is important to keep in the back of your head when looking at physical preparation for these sports. If we haven’t mastered the saggital plane (linear), we cannot move forward to the transverse plane (rotational). If your base level of strength isn’t high enough in exercises like the squat and lunge, rotational movements won’t do anything outside of creating dysfunctional and compensatory movement patterns that will inevitably lead to non contact injuries on the field of play. You have to graduate to these rotational movements, we cannot start there. If your sports performance coach has you concentrating on rotational movements early on in your training as a way to make it sport specific, it’s time to find a new coach.

What Does Sport Specific Training Actually Mean?

• Training for the physiological demands of your sport

• Engraining proper primal movement patterns

  • Push, pull, hinge, lunge, bend, twist and gait

• Tackling the mobility demands of your sport

  • Sport itself can creat compensatory movement patterns and tightness. Some of this is ok as its beneficial on the field of play, however not tackling these issues WILL lead to injury

• Creating enough (and the right kind of) work capacity for your sport and training

  • Running miles while good for your heart, won’t get you where you want in sport. Every sport has different energy system demands and that should be the basis of your training

• Getting stronger

  • Strength has a positive effect on EVERY SINGLE physiological adaptation that we’re chasing for sport. Strength also creates resiliency in our tissues, leading to a lowered likelihood of injury on the field of play

• Becoming more powerful

  • Power translates to speed, and speed is hard to game plan against

• Becoming faster

  • See above

• Decreasing the likelihood of non-contact injuries on the field of play

This is what sport specific training looks like. Notice that there’s precisely two parts of this that will change based on sport: work capacity/conditioning and mobility. That’s it! Everything else really stays the same when we’re talking about long term athletic development. My tennis players and my football players all squat to help increase strength/power/speed, but their mobility plans all look very different. My hockey players and my golfers all push a sled to increase work capacity, but their work times change as we get closer to their seasons. My baseball players and basketball players all jump and land, but their corrective exercises tend to look incredibly different. All athletes need mostly the same stimuli off the field of play to excel on it, especially early on in their training. The sport specific aspects of their training are so minute (although still important) that if you walked into a session with athletes from different sports in my facility, you’d think they all played the same sport. This is what we want when it comes to sport specific training.

When training for sport, it’s important to understand how this training is going to affect you on the field of play. Don’t get confused here, EVERYTHING you do in the gym is going to transfer to the field of play, the question is do we want the transfer that we’re producing?