You’ve just come off the back end of a big season…
The body is starting to feel good
You’re pumped to make next season your best year yet
But you don’t know where to start
You look up athlete training on youtube and you see
Funky agility drills
Weighted footballs
Some weird banded exercise standing on a swiss ball
Or my personal favourite…
Some guy yelling at people while they puke and running them until their flat on the ground.
Here’s the thing…
Training to be a beast athlete doesn’t have to be the most complicated or with fancy “sport specific equipment” (side note if somebody tells you an exercise in a gym is sport specific please sucker punch them right away).
It isn’t about working at your hardest possible intensity every session the whole time either. Those guys end up sitting on the sideline hurt from burning out too quickly.
So what do you really need?
If you want to perform at your best in any sport there is a few key foundations that will lead to you having your best year yet. These include development of strength, power and general athleticism and creating a resilient body and mind from the effects of both individual games and the season as a whole.
Let’s break that down a little more including some examples of where you see these guys dominating their sports.
Strength and Power
I remember listening to Mark Bell quoting ‘Strength is never a weakness’ and this definitely holds true when it comes to developing athleticism. If you don’t have a foundation of strength you will not be maximising your power or speed and to top it off, guys who are stronger (when training correctly) tend to not gas out as quickly as weaker athletes as efforts expressed in games are relatively lower than their maximal efforts. Add to this that I’ve never seen a ‘weak’ athlete dominate a sport.
Look at a guy like Greg Inglis or Sam Burgess in the NRL and you will constantly hear about their strength and power that they bring to the field. Sure they probably don’t have the highest squat or bench numbers but these are guys who can express every piece of their strength on the athletic field.
General Athleticism
This is the most underrated piece in the athletic development piece. We have kids in Rep squads at 9 Years old now and only ever playing one sport coincidentally overuse injuries in junior sport are at an all time high and nearly everyone can rattle off at least 5 people they know who has had some form of shoulder or knee surgery as a result of their injuries.
It’s about time we did something to change this and the first key point is going back to a general physical development model. Check out guys like Jared Waerea-Hargreaves who’s 120kg doing handsprings and flips as part of bringing himself back from injury and redeveloping a general athletic base, creating body awareness and it’s not hard to see why he’s a beast on the field when most of the guys around him don’t have near the body control nor the physical strength and power as he does.
Creating a Resilient Body and Mind
So there’s a few pieces to this. Firstly creating a resilient body includes development of strength, power and athleticism like we have already mentioned. It also includes prepping connective tissue and developing eccentric and isometric strength in compromised positions to ensure the body can maintain control in those.
The next piece of the resilient body is conditioning the athlete for the demands of the sport. Now here’s where it gets a little interesting. Most people’s complete approach to conditioning is working as hard as possible until you can’t stand or have to go and puke. Now your body gets pretty good at doing whatever you teach it to do. So if you teach it that every time you get up into high heart rates then the answer is to lay down on the ground and take 20 minutes to recover, what does your body get good at?
How would it make any sense that when teaching the body how to be efficient with energy and to stop us from gassing out we should practice gassing ourselves out completely.
Wouldn’t it make more sense to teach our body how to selectively expend energy when we need to and spare it when we don’t?
Most of us approach this from the complete wrong way. This needs to stop if you want to be performing at your best. Yes there is definitely a time and place for high intensity conditioning but an important piece we need to consider is how we approach those sessions and what constitutes a good workout.
Lastly we need to look at creating a resilient mind. Who’s seen the guy who puts his head down after they fall behind only to give up or the guy who gets complacent with being in front only to lose the game. If you have watched many Wallabies – All Blacks or State of Origin matches in the last few years you would have seen many instances of this.
We want to create the mindset of the guys like the All Blacks or the QLD origin side that no matter where we are at on the scoreboard… We know the win is always possible. How do we do that?
The right training is a great start!
Here’s a foundation of where we begin with our athletes here at Newstrength. Make sure to share this with a friend looking to get started with their pre-season training and keep your eye out for Part 2 of this article where we will be sharing how we develop these qualities with our athletes.
Want More Great Training Info? Click here – Should You Do That Last Rep?