Every off-season athletes are looking to get bigger, stronger, and faster! Naturally an off-season program will include hitting the weight-room to increase the athletes strength and hopefully some size. After a few months of hard training, you’ve dropped your body fat, increased your strength, and are ready to kill it this season.
Is That Enough?
Everyone knows that strength is a necessity to most sports but has it become overly emphasized? In my experience working as a personal trainer and performance coach, most high-school athletes are pretty strong or have the capabilities to gain strength quickly. But bigger and stronger doesn’t mean better on field sports performance, despite what unqualified personal trainers and fitness magazines may say.
Sports Performance relies well beyond weight-room strength. Let’s take a linebacker for example, say the linebacker gains 8lbs of mass, increases his max lifts by 5-8%, but his vertical jump, triple jump, 10yd, and shuttle run speeds maintained or dropped, than in my opinion the performance coach or personal trainer did not train the athlete very effectively. For better on field performance, we need the athletes body to be fully efficient, that means adding on size just for the sake of adding on size will more than likely make the body less efficient. Think about, you’ve now added on more weight for the athlete to carry through the course of the game, which can then force the athlete to work that much harder to accelerate and decelerate. This athlete may need to gain size but every pound gained should’ve helped increase not only their strength but also their movement skill.
With that said, here are a few aspects an athlete needs:
Sport Movement Efficiency
One off-season I had an athlete come up to me and say that she gets the same workout from running on the treadmill that she does working in our off-season program. Unfortunately this athlete was focused on her heart rate, how many calories she was burning, and how “tough” the workout was. What she didn’t realize was that we were getting her body prepared for the many demands of her sport from cutting, lateral deceleration, acceleration to deceleration, defensive reaction, etc… Unfortunately this is all too common, people assume performance training should equate to general workouts = burning calories or the feeling of throwing up for the effectiveness of training, which is VERY far from the truth.
Take for instance, If I had you run 800 meter repeats with 1 minute rest x5 rounds. You’re probably going to be huffing and puffing at the end of this. But did this better prepare you for any type of cutting movements or reactionary movements? Absolutely not. The prerequisite to high performance is power and EFFICIENCY of effective movement patterns. This why you’ll see many wide receivers go through their routes for timing, foot placement efficiency, and for the route to become automatic. I’ve had the pleasure to watch many great wide receivers and the pro-bowlers were the ones that knew how to control their foot placement to not show any sign of their route.
Let’s also take a boxer for example, if you watch a boxer train they are constantly doing foot work and shadow boxing drills. Clearly movement is VERY important for a boxer, the wrong step can help the opponent anticipate a move or place them in a vulnerable position. Take this same boxer out of the ring and mainly emphasize on strength, what do you think will happen?
Relative Power
Relative power is how much power to weight ratio the athlete has. The greater the relative power the more efficient the athlete is. Going back to cutting, a wide receiver that has good movement but has less relative power will have a harder time stopping to then quickly change direction, versus one that has a high amount of relative power. This is why it’s so important the athlete does not have extra weight that is not contribute to their sport performance.
The common misconception is that an athlete who has great size will have great power, yet we see many sports such as Weightlifting or Muay Thai where the athletes have great relative power:
Imagine if this fighter focused solely on hitting the weights all summer, would he still have enough coordination, relative power, and shin density to repeat this?
Strength
While the post may seem like I’m not a fan of weight-room strength, I completely respect and understand the importance of overall strength. However, I am saying that I find many unqualified personal trainers, strength coaches, or performance coaches, emphasize too much on strength. There is no doubt that an athlete needs strength BUT the athlete also needs sport movement efficiency and relative power. And as we mentioned earlier the strength and sized gained should NOT take away from the athletes on field performance but only increase it.
Finally let’s put this to rest, just because an athlete is strong does not mean that they are a better athlete. Clearly there are many other variables from position demands, sport skill set, conditioning, movement efficiently, etc… I’ve seen MANY great athletes that were not exceptionally strong yet had all the other skill sets to be pro-bowlers, hall famers, medalists, etc… I’ve also seen many athletes that were exceptionally strong and conditioned but did not have the right specific skill sets to excel.
Conclusion
Many personal trainers, performance coaches, and athletes alike need to check the ego at the door. The goal is to make athletes that are efficient at their sport not better in the weight room. Yea it’s cool to see an athlete break weight room board records and so on, but you’re doing them a disservice by not prioritizing their position and sport specific needs first. I understand the pressure by coaches and parents to see higher numbers in certain aspects which you can prioritize to a point but it’s also our jobs as performance coaches and personal trainers to educate the athletes, head coaches, and parents of the actual needs of an athlete.
Train smart,