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Sport-specific conditioning

This is an excerpt from Strength and Conditioning Coaching by Michael J Boyle.

As you may already know, I hate the term “sport-specific training” and rarely use it. However, when it comes to conditioning, training should be as sport-specific as possible. At a bare minimum, conditioning should at least be specific to groups of sports. When developing sport-specific conditioning programs, the key is to look at the field, the substitution patterns and the energetics of the game. It’s not how far athletes run in a game, but at what pace and over what time period.

Distance running advocates often default to the mileage covered in a game as rationalization for long slow distance conditioning. However, as they like to say in the NFL, upon further review things change a bit. In a game like soccer, a player can easily cover five kilometers in a game; however, the majority of the distance covered is actually walked, not jogged or sprinted. In conditioning, specifics matter.

The process of strength training and conditioning for many sports has progressed from a Stone Age approach of utilizing training camp to get in shape to a more modern approach based on the utilization of in-season and off-season training programs. We now have GPS units and heart rate monitors to quantify lots of what “we thought.”

Unfortunately, conditioning and conditioning testing continue to be controversial. Some coaches are bringing back the long slow stuff and touting “Zone 2 work.” Other coaches see conditioning tests as a game of “Can You Top This.” If your team does two 300 shuttles for testing, another team will out-work you and do three. If your team runs 16 110s, another team will run 32. Conditioning testing has moved from an evaluation of preparedness to a contest of excesses.

Conditioning isn’t meant for mental toughness; it’s meant to create preparedness for practice and game situations. If we’re injuring our players or making them slower in the conditioning process, we aren’t enhancing performance—we’re detracting from it.

More Excerpts From Strength and Conditioning Coaching

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