Selecting Exercises

Article by Ed McNeely and David Sandler

There are two dominant schools of thought on how to choose exercises for a weight training program. There is the generalist camp, that believes in training general physical abilities that are common to many activities. These people often say they are practicing functional training. There is also the specificity of training camp that believes in mimicking skills while under load. To fully understand how to design a strength training program both view points need to be considered.

 

 

Specificity of training has a variety of meanings and can be applied to energy systems, movement patterns, and speed of movement. In simplest terms specificity means training for the specific demands of the sport or activity by simulating all or parts of the performance during a training session. The concept of specificity is based on transfer of training, which refers to the amount of fitness improvement that carries over to competition. For instance if you increased you bench press by 100% but only increased your playing ability by 2% you would have had a 2% transfer of training. Proponents of specificity believe that the more closely you simulate a sport movement the greater the transfer of training. There is ample evidence to support this notion both in the motor learning literature and anecdotally. Think about the tennis player who takes up squash for the first time. They will be relatively successful the first time they play squash because the movements they use in tennis are close enough to those used in squash that there is a high level of transfer. This is not to say that the tennis player will become a top squash player it is only meant to highlight the idea that by training movement patterns that are close to those of your sport you can affect an improvement in your sport.

 

In terms of plyometrics, specificity would mean creating drills and exercises that copy all or parts of the movement patterns most used in a sport. For instance a volleyball player would do standing vertical jumps at a net with their hands up in a blocking stance rather than using the arm swing typical of vertical jump. They may also prefer to do a two step vertical jump that simulates the approach and take off rather than a standing vertical jump. A baseball player may opt for throwing a heavier ball or swinging a heavier bat, in an attempt to use the same movement patterns they do in their sport.

 

One major disadvantage to building a program solely using specificity is that many sports skills are changed when they are attempted under heavier loading. While many people feel that swinging a heavier bat during the off season will increase strength and bat speed in reality the heavier bat changes batting technique enough that there is actually very little increase in bat speed as a result of training this way. In some extreme cases sports skills can be changed enough that when the athlete switches back to training with normal loads they find their skills have changed, often for the worse as they have adopted the pattern they learned under heavier load.

 

Many sports have very unpredictable movement patterns. A running back never knows how they are going to have to move on any given play. A wrestler never knows what position they are going to find themselves in. This can make it difficult to design a specific program that addresses all the movement patterns an athlete needs, causing some important but uncommon patterns to be overlooked.

 

 

Many types of training can create similar adaptations in the body’s systems. For instance both long distance running and interval training improve the cardiovascular system, enhancing aerobic fitness. Those who favor general physical abilities training base their programs on the weakness of specificity, believing that sports skills cannot properly be simulated under loaded conditions and that combining specific skill work with training of the body’s physical systems will allow the physical conditioning to best transfer to performance. Again, there is both a sound scientific basis and anecdotal evidence to support this method of training.

 

Coaches who focus on general physical abilities will use a variety of drills and exercises to address common movements seen in a variety of sports. They would include vertical, horizontal, and lateral jumps in a plyo program as well as a variety of full body drills, combining jumps and throws designed to train the body’s ability to produce force very quickly. While the notion of combining the physical training with skill work is sound it is often impractical. Once an athlete leaves organized school programs they spend long periods of time away from a coach who can guide them through skill training sessions. When this occurs general physical abilities training can actually cause technical problems by creating bad habits when sport specific skills are performed. One example of this is the volleyball player who spent the summer away from her team because of an internship at a law firm. She did a lot of vertical jumps, box jumps and other general drills with a personal trainer and actually improved her vertical jump as measured during testing in training camp. Unfortunately she had also picked up the habit of swinging her arms very vigorously to try to get more height on a jump. As a result when she was jumping close to the net she was constantly getting called for net fouls when her arms hit the net. It took almost half the season to break her of this habit and get her to have better control of her volleyball specific jumping skills.

 

 

As is often the case when developing training programs, if you are dedicated to solely one type of training you are probably doing your athletes a disservice because the best training programs are an amalgamation of a variety of ideas. This is definitely the case when trying to decide to use specificity or general abilities training. In fact the two schools of thought are actually much closer together than most people think, particularly when accompanied by a good sport analysis. In fact in some cases what may appear to be general training is in fact specific training and vice versa  as this example demonstrates; Olympic weightlifters do little to no sprinting or jumping as part of their training yet there are many stories of weightlifters, who weighing over 300 lbs and being under six feet tall can easily dunk a basketball or who can sprint 10m faster than most sprinters. These abilities are due to their explosive training with very heavy weights, giving credence to the idea that training the ability to maximally recruit muscle fibers quickly is a general physical ability that improves performance in any skill requiring explosive power. At the same time those who are proponents of specificity are quick to point out how closely the second pull phase of a clean or snatch is very similar in technique to a vertical jump.

 

So before deciding to favor one training philosophy over another take a careful look at both and keep an open mind to the strengths and weaknesses that are inherent to any training methodology.