Is your Training Sport Specific?

In an athletes early stages of growth and athletic development, almost anything we do in the gym will have at least some sort of positive transfer to the sporting arena. For example, a weak athlete who builds lower body strength will almost certainly improve their speed without doing any sprint specific training. However as the athletes’ strength and power develops we are required to expose the athlete to ‘special’ exercises designed to maximise a positive transfer to performance in a given event.

Case study: A 27 year old, 80kg rugby athlete with a 1RM Deadlift of 180kg

If this athlete focuses on building max strength and over the course of a pre-season block increases their 1RM by 10kg we are unlikely to notice a great difference in rugby performance and then we also must consider the time, effort and risk that comes with training for these strength gains. When aiming to maximise positive transfer to competition the aim is to find exercises with minimal risk vs reward that will expose athletes to similar conditions as their sport. When looking at exercise selection the question we must ask ourselves is not simply ‘will this improve performance?’, but ‘Is this the most efficient use of my time?'

One of the first principles of training that a new coach will come across is the SAID principle (Specific Adaptation to Imposed Demand), put simply, you get better at what you do. If you want to get better at basketball, playing basketball will provide the fastest results. However, this will only take you so far, in order to continually improve and reduce injury risk, we require a range of focuses within our program.

Bondarchuk classification system

Dr. Anatoliy Bondarchuk classified exercises into four distinct categories based on their level of direct transference to sport performance.

This is broken down into competitive exercise, specific development exercise, specific preparation exercise and general preparation exercise.

Competitive exercise - This includes competing within your chosen sport as well as training drills such as small sided games.

Specific development exercise – This is exercise that closely mimics the sporting action. E.g. A basketball athlete completing an explosive barbell step-up.

Specific preparatory exercise – These are exercises that utilise the same muscle groups as the sporting activity. E.g. The same basketball athlete completing a back squat.

General preparatory exercise – This includes exercise that uses different movement and systems to the sporting activity E.g. The same basketball athlete completing push-ups

Dynamic correspondence

Dr Yuri Verkoshansky went a step further with his findings in the area of specificity with the introduction of dynamic correspondence. Verkoshansky found that ‘specialised’ exercises adhered to a specific criteria. This criteria described within dynamic correspondence helps us determine whether or not an exercise is considered specific.

This criterion includes:

• The direction of force (where is force being applied, vertically, horizontally, etc.)

• The amplitude of force (how much force is being applied)

• The dynamics of effort (E.g. plyometric, ballistic, etc.)

• The rate of force production (How much time do you have to apply force into the ground, opposition or object)

• The regimen of muscular work (What type of contraction is utilised. Isotonic or isometric)

• The direction of force (where is force being applied, vertically, horizontally, etc.)

• The amplitude of force (how much force is being applied)

• The dynamics of effort (E.g. plyometric, ballistic, etc.)

• The accentuated region of force development (wherein the movement is the highest amount of force produced)

• The rate of force production (How much time do you have to apply force into the ground, opposition or object)

• The regimen of muscular work (What type of contraction is utilised. Isotonic or isometric)

Let’s use the example of the barbell hip thrust. For a while, many coaches believed this exercise to have a strong direct impact on sprint performance. Now, whilst the hip thrust is a great strength builder for the lower body and posterior chain (muscle groups highly important during sprinting), if we look at the above criteria, it does not rate highly on the scale of specificity and would most likely be used within a general preparatory program.

Final notes

• Specialised exercises should make up a small percentage of an athletes program and this percentage is lower in beginners. The earlier the training age, the more progress we can find in low hanging fruit such as building strength, movement efficiency, running and jumping.

• The amount of specialised training will also change based on the phase of training. Throughout the off-season and early pre-season, general preparatory exercises will take priority to allow the athlete to build a larger base from which to develop.

• When it comes to field and court sports it can be difficult to draw correlations between training and performance due to the tactical, technical and psychological factors involved.