General Physical Preparedness
As August begins, our minds turn to sports. High school athletes are reporting for training, college athletes have moved back to campus and things are almost into full swing. I wanted to take this time to talk about the general physical preparedness (GPP) of the athlete going into the season.
Disclaimer, I am not a professional coach, all my thoughts are based in the research of injuries, injury prevention, biomechanics and physiology performance. These are not sport specific concepts.
Now that I have addressed that, back to general physical preparedness or GPP. This is another way to say what shape the athlete was heading into the season. Many athletes and coaches alike view the early part of the season as the time to “get into __x___ sport shape”. They bury athletes in sprints and suicides and weight lifting, and on and on. They throw cliches around like “you have to work harder than the competition”, “we are making boys into men” or “practice hard so the game is easy.” I have a couple issues with this. First is, when you rapidly increase the amount of work that you are asking an athlete to do, you get injuries. The first few weeks of every high school football season is often littered with “pulled” hamstrings, hip flexor issues, sore shoulders and sore backs. All this tells us that we are pushing athletes too hard. If people are getting injured in practice or practice is making them so sore that they cannot practice at 100% the next day, it is too much. If an athlete enters the season with a higher level of GPP, they are much less likely to get injured, they will have more playing time and be able to compete the whole season. This means training in the off season. Off season training does not have to be killing yourself the whole year. An athlete should pick a couple goals and work towards those. Two or three days a week of training are plenty if the work being done is of a very high quality and pointed at a goal.
In my eyes, in season practice should be aimed towards developing the sport specific skills needed to execute the game at a high level and doing just enough strength and speed work to maintain what was built in the off season.
So what should we be working on in the off season to prepare for sport? To answer this, I look back to the basics of exercise physiology. There are only 9 adaptations that can come from training and they are skill/technique, speed, power, strength, hypertrophy (muscle size), muscular endurance, anaerobic capacity, maximum aerobic capacity, and long duration endurance. For off season training you want to pick what your worst categories are and compare them to what the best in your sport do. However, for most contact sports, there are a few absolutes, it is always better to be stronger, it is always better to be faster, and having some form of conditioning is very beneficial. Now we must realize that the training for each of these is very specific. Take speed for example, in order to get faster, we must train at top speeds. How fast people often ask, the simple answer is as absolutely as fast as the athlete can do. If we are training at 80%, we don’t get faster, we get better at running 80%. This means that for true speed work, the rest intervals must be very high, and the volume very, very low. You will be doing 2-4 sprints total in a session and take 3-5 minutes of rest in between sprints. The athlete needs to be 100% recovered so they can go at 100%. As soon as an athlete feels fatigued, they cannot achieve maximum velocity and you are no longer training top speed. There is some benefit to training anaerobic capacity (think repeated runs until you puke) but they do not make you faster. They make you better at doing work while being exhausted and suffering. That is a fine adaptation if that plays a role in your sport (think hockey). For strength, we have to move very heavy things. These are sets done in a repetition range of 3-6. This means that doing your 4 sets of 10 isn’t going to be very efficient at making you stronger. The point being: be very specific with your goal so you can be very specific with your training and not waste any time.
All of this rambling boils down to a few points, if an athlete comes into a season in better shape their injury rates are lower, and their performance is better. If athletes come into a season in good condition and well physically prepared, practice can focus on skill and technique development, with a little time devoted to maintaining that level of fitness.
