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Matching Type of Sport and Type of Tests

This is an excerpt from New Functional Training for Sports 3rd Edition by Michael Boyle.

In the early 1980s, professional sport teams and top amateur and professional athletes began to seek training advice, often from the wrong people. Professional teams and sport federations often contracted with exercise physiologists with little or no experience in addressing the needs of athletes in speed and power sports. Generally, these physiologists were endurance-sport athletes.

Rather than evaluating athletes and prescribing training in a manner most suited to speed and power sports, the exercise physiologists applied the same generic protocol as they did for all athletes:

1. Test the athlete.
2. Analyze the tests.
3. Draw conclusions.

It was a classic case of “when the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”

Unfortunately, this very simple method for attempting to improve athletes’ fitness and performance was filled with flaws, many of which continue to plague strength and conditioning professionals three decades later.

“Fitness testing” was almost always a bike-based test of maximal oxygen uptake, or V̇O₂max. Speed and power athletes generally perform poorly on these tests of steady-state aerobic capacity. Worse yet, V̇O₂max tests are generally performed on cycle ergometers for simplicity’s sake, but athletes in speed and power team sports may not regularly train on a bike. The conclusion, based on V̇O₂max scores, was usually that the athletes were unfit, and the plan to make them fit always emphasized the improvement of the athletes’ aerobic capacity. The rationale was that a player with a higher maximal oxygen uptake would be able to play longer and recover more rapidly. All of this seemed scientific and valid. However, there are a number of reasons why this approach does not meet the needs of athletes in speed and power sports:

• Athletes in sports that use primarily fast-twitch muscle fibers and explosive movements generally perform poorly on tests of aerobic capacity. This is not a new discovery.
• Even well-conditioned athletes in sports of an intermittent nature (i.e., most team sports) may not necessarily perform well in steady-state tests of aerobic capacity, particularly when the test is done on an apparatus (such as a bike) that is not the athlete’s primary mode of training. Runners will do best running, rowers rowing, and cyclists cycling. A nonspecific test yields at best a nonspecific result.
• The prescription of steady-state, long-distance training to improve the fitness or aerobic capacity of fast and explosive athletes often detracts from, rather than enhances, the physiological qualities that make these athletes special.
• Explosive athletes frequently develop overuse injuries when required to perform extensive amounts of steady-state work. It is not uncommon to see a program of steady-state running produce injuries such as plantar fasciitis and iliotibial band syndrome.
• The equipment (such as bikes, steppers, and rowing machines) used to improve aerobic capacity may in fact contribute to overuse injuries. Lack of ground contact force and of hip extension and hip flexion can set a ground-based athlete up for numerous injuries.

The simple logic is that cyclists should ride bikes, rowers should row, athletes who have to run fast should run fast on the ground, and athletes who have to jump should jump. Cross-training may be a good idea in limited volumes but should be used as an active-rest or injury-avoidance tool. Too much dependence on any equipment can have a musculoskeletal price.

More Excerpts From New Functional Training for Sports 3rd Edition

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