be_sport_specific

There are many questions that strength coaches have to consider when they prepare weight programs for their athletes. There is one important question , it’s if the program is specific enough for their athletes.

To do so, strength coaches need to know, not only the specific needs of the athlete, but also the requirements of the sport. It's important for strength coaches to ask questions to technical coaches to know the techniques used by the athlete.

To show the importance of the specificity, we will go over different examples and different approaches that will clarify the fact that sometimes it’s easy to pass beside what we really want .

The first big example which comes to mind is the bench press used for testing strength in most sports. Like in football , the use of bench press testing done by most University football teams or pro teams puts a lot of pressure on athletes and by the same way on strength coaches. Being a football coach myself I had to fight the point that the bench press has nothing to do with most of the sport technique. By trying to improve their bench press athletes pass beside their real needs.

First we have to understand that in most sports, it’s important to stabilize our multi-axial joint to have good uni-axial movement. Like in skiing, skating and sprinting ; the trunk, shoulders, hip and ankles need to be stabilized to have good and powerful stride.

Take a look at the next examples, that will help to improve stability in those activities.

Take as an example the specific needs of a football lineman. The understanding of his blocking techniques will bring us the fact that his needs will be more on an incline close grip (the arms moving close to the trunk) dumbbell press on ball exercise with neutral grip (called “football press” for my athletes see figure 2.) than on the bench press.

The use of dumbbells, because you have to balance it in a separate hand, will bring the stabilization need for his shoulders; the ball exercise will put him on an unstable environment and by same time make his trunk work to stabilize him. The angle of the incline position is to make him work from a low to high arm push position (the way we ask him to use his arms when he blocks in pass protection) and the neutral position of the hands is the way to use hands when he uses that specific block. So as you can see, find an exercise that looks as close as possible to the real technique. It could have a good effect on the athletes' performance.

Because of the importance to have variety in a strength program, it is necessary to vary some components of that exercise like alternating the movement of the arms, changing the angle of the trunk position, changing the tempo (speed of the contraction) changing the hands position etc….. But keep in mind that in this specific case the core exercise will be the football press and we will use, as example, the bench press as an auxiliary exercise.

The use of different unstable tools should be a primary concern to create stable action or movement. Tools like ball exercise, sitfit and feet platform will be really helpful in obtaining our goal of stability. Variety is the key to training success.