A common thing we see in the sports performance world is an athlete that wants to start training to improve one specific aspect of their sport. Maybe it’s pitching velocity, or jump height, or sprint speed.
This is something we do in advanced athletes all the time. But, for others, a general approach is needed first.
Here’s how we approach this in our athletes and ways you can help athletes with their specific goals.
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#AskMikeReinold Episode 286: Helping Athletes Reach Specific Sport Goals
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Show Notes
Transcript
Grace Suggs:
Okay. Brad from Florida, I see a lot of athletes that are looking to improve one specific thing about their sports performance. For example, pitching velocity, jump height, or sprint speed. How much focus do you spend on this one aspect of their goals versus just a generalized training program?
Mike Reinold:
Awesome, great question, Brad. I like this question, and I think we’re starting to see this more and more as the youth sports movement right now and everything in early sports specialization, everything like that. There’s so much more focus on them improving, not necessarily just becoming an athlete, but improving on a skill over and over again. And there’s probably nobody that knows that better than Dave Tilley who’s probably been on the opposite side of too much specificity. And then I’m sure Diwesh can talk a little bit about too much generalized too, but I don’t know, Dave, I don’t know. You want to start this one off Dave and just say from a gymnast perspective, when somebody comes to the gym to train, oftentimes they’re thinking, “I want to get better at my one event or this one specific skill that I can do with my body.” Maybe you can comment on some of the pros and cons of that approach and then maybe Dewey can jump in with some generalized stuff.
Mike Reinold:
Dave you’re muted. I think it’s the first time you’ve ever done that, by the way. You’re a podcaster pro.
Lenny Macrina:
Why you muted?
Dave Tilley:
Yeah. I think it’s interesting here because it’s actually funny. Diwesh and I are kind of seeing the sport itself change, particularly in gymnastics, because of what you guys did in baseball we’re taking those principles and we’re trying to apply those to gymnastics because we’re going through the exact same thing that you all are, which is a crazy amount of injuries, a lot of young kids getting burnt out, people who are not really happy with their experience and their career later in life. And it started with the college transition because the athletes would finally kind of maybe get exposure to strength conditioning or the weight room and stuff like that in college and they would come home, they’d want to keep doing that. Or we were somehow convincing them enough to try it in the summer. And so we see these super high level division one elite gymnasts come in and they strength train at Champion once, maybe twice per week. And it is the most vanilla, basic, squat hinge, super low level three to four sets stuff like repetition. It’s not hard at all.
Dave Tilley:
But their sport performance goes enormously through the roof because it’s the first time they’ve been exposed to a proper dosage of loading, of proper loading. Don’t go down the physiology rabbit hole, but we know a lot of those type two fibers and a lot of those things that they’re maybe not tapping into, they’ve optimized the technique bucket and the sport specific bucket and the actual mechanics of their skills so much in the last 18 years that there’s not a lot of room left in that bucket to put more on top of before you start overloading with injuries and kind of like sport specific pathology. So when we add a little bit into their general bucket, not only do they get time away from the sport to reduce their risk of maybe overload, they build their capacity and they build a lot of really beneficial stuff that then they go back maybe in a couple months to school and they go, “Whoa, I feel really good.”
Dave Tilley:
We have some juniors that have been working out with us for four or five years. They’re juniors in college, which is traditionally, in gymnastics, when you feel the absolute worst at the very tail end of your career. And they’re like, “I actually feel the best I’ve ever felt and I’m performing at a very, very high level.” So that’s the base five years ago we started. But now as we slide back down, we’re starting to educate the younger 10, 11, 12 years. I just worked with a 12 year old elite gymnast who had an elbow issue and a hamstring thing. And I was like, “Listen, you’re so talented and you have so much possible potential here.” I’m like, “The best thing you can do is pump the brakes a little bit, work on a proper balance program here and think about the long game.”
Dave Tilley:
And I think now we’re seeing young parents looking up to the college programs or to things that maybe aren’t great outcomes and seeing like, “Okay, this can trickle down to we know the research supports 12 year olds doing a proper lifting program.” And now it’s becoming an issue of, “Okay, how do I find a great strength coach? What’s the best program for a gymnast versus a baseball player versus a track person?” We joke behind the scenes all the time at Champion. It’s a blessing and a curse being tip of the spear because there’s no research to pull from and be like, “Oh, gymnast do this and it works.” But at the same time, it’s exciting because we can offer somebody something very, very low hanging fruit to make them better as an athlete, which is that more of the general side, balancing that throughout the year.
Mike Reinold:
I like that. And you know what? I think, though, with your specific example right there is, you have people that are already really good at something and you’re layering some generalized training on top of that to make them maybe more resilient, to increase their body’s capacity, or to make them… I do think it probably… It does everything. It helps their performance.
Dave Tilley:
They do get faster. The numbers [inaudible 00:06:52].
Mike Reinold:
Yeah. So, but I think you’re in a unique setting where you’re coming with somebody that is already highly specialized in a skill and then layering general on top. And maybe that’s going to be the conclusion of this episode is that’s the answer too, is that it depends on the person in front of you. But all right, Diwey, let’s flip it. You got a 13 year old kid coming in here and all he wants to focus on is on whatever, vertical jump height or whatever, pitch velocity. You see that a lot in baseball.
Mike Reinold:
Yeah, he just wants one thing. And then it’s funny too, because sometimes when you get into the youth, you talk about the parents are involved too the parents sometimes come in and say, “Well, no, he needs to jump higher. I’m watching the games and he doesn’t jump as high as all of his teammates.” And you’re just like, “Oh boy.” And then they see you working on low level squat patterns for a month and they’re like, “When are we going to start jumping?” But dude, let’s take the exact opposite. Let’s take somebody that isn’t highly specific at one thing and wants to get highly specific. What would you do different for that person?
Diwesh Poudyal:
Yeah. So, first I want to acknowledge what Dave said because I think it 100% depends on the person’s training agent, how much of an expert they are in their actual sport. Because yeah, that person’s going to need way less sport specific stuff because they’re probably missing the more general stuff. Now for our 13 year old, that is always going to be general because he’s so young or she’s so young and they haven’t had that much training in their sport and in a weight room setting. We got to kind of attack it from every quality. So we can’t forget about all of our general strength training and our basic patterns like squat hinge, lunch, push, pull, carry, all that stuff.
Diwesh Poudyal:
Now with that said, I think we do introduce quite a bit of the actual sports specific. And I don’t necessarily like calling it sport specific. Let’s call it task or activity or quality specific. Because if someone wants to jump higher, that’s not really specific to basketball, you know what I mean? We start introducing jumping or power movements or apply metric movements in different positions, planes, and with different symmetry of limb. So whether we’re talking about a split stance or true single leg or bilateral. So we attack it from building a good general base while at the same time working on that specific quality. Because that’s where a lot of people… And I’ve gotten this question quite a bit too from parents and even some people online and stuff, is they’ll start talking about, “All right, when we start breaking it down into our strength phase or let’s say our general phase, we’re trying to just build capacity and strength.”
Diwesh Poudyal:
It’s not that we’re not doing any jumping or sprinting or anything like that. It’s just we have a little bit more of a heavier dosage in the strength stuff, a little bit more dosage in the more general movements, while at the same time they are doing jumping, they are doing sprinting. They are throwing med balls around. But if we come to a period of time, or let’s say a period of year, where we’re trying to get an athlete really prepped for their sport, maybe we just flip flop that a little bit where the volume of jumping, med ball throwing, sprinting and stuff just picks up a little bit more and the strength training volume dips down a tiny bit. So that’s kind of how we wave it up and down. It’s not that one goes away and the other one completely takes over. It’s just we kind of wave what happens or what’s there in the program a little bit more versus what’s in the program a little bit less.
Mike Reinold:
Which makes sense. And put it all together. All of this makes sense to the person. I think more importantly is I think a lot of people understand that we have to build a base before we really work on some specificity or it’ll just be challenging to maximize the efficiency, the output of that person. For example, jumping higher, running faster, all these things. You’re not going to do that if you’re weak. You’re not going to do that if you can’t take that strength and make it explosive. So I think a lot of us get that. I do think sometimes in our profession, sometimes we get a little too maybe we’re seeing that 20% of our program at Champion that’s specific on social media. And then we’re thinking that that’s the big major emphasis of our whole program because they’re seeing that one specific med ball rotation throw that our pitcher does and they think that they’re not doing all that groundwork beforehand. Maybe that’s part of it too.
Mike Reinold:
But I think the real issue here is with the athlete and the parents and coaches and sport coaches. It’s probably about understanding the buy-in and stuff. And I think that takes two things that we do really well and Diwesh has really built out with our strength and conditioning department here is, one is communication. We have to explain to the person, “Oh, you want to jump higher?” Or, “Here’s the steps that we take.” And we talk about a success path quite a bit here at Champion on how we get our people, our patients, our fitness clients, our sports performance clients from where they are to where they want to go. And we talk about that success path, “Oh, you want to jump higher?” Or, “You want to play basketball in college.” That’s great. But, step one of that process is this, and this is where you are in the success path. I want to see you elevate across that path. So I think the communication is big.
Mike Reinold:
The other thing we do really well here too is then we quantify and we show them that. So we’ll measure their jump height, for example. We’ll measure way more than that. That’s misleading. But we’re looking at their force output, everything that we can potentially do for this person. But then we’ll show them after a few weeks of generalized training how that’s starting to clean things up, that’s starting to get more output. That’s starting to give them the results that they want. And then I think they understand the program a little bit. Does that make sense?
Mike Reinold:
So to me, it’s about Dave understanding where that athlete is in time. If you’ve been over specialized, you probably get a little bit more generalized. I think that’s an important concept. But then for that younger person, it’s taking that general bucket that we work on and actually starting to produce results that’s going to get that buy-in, that’s going to ignite that excitement out of training in their sport development over time, because they’re going to start seeing the results. I think that’s pretty cool. So just to kind of add on a little bit there too, I think the answer is always going to be, “It depends, Brad.” I don’t think it’s always that simple. But to me, it depends, but we also have to be really good at communicating and showing the person that, and I think it’ll go really well.
Mike Reinold:
So awesome. So great question, Brad. I like that. That was a good sports performance related one that I think a lot of people probably deal with. And I think sometimes it’s physical therapists too when we’re working in the performance world, we get hung up on one thing, we’re working on one aspect, and I think sometimes we miss a little bit of the generalized too, so maybe that’ll help. But really appreciate the question, Brad. Thanks for asking. Again, if you have a question like that, head to mikereinold.com, click on that podcast link and ask away. And we will be sure to keep pumping these out. Subscribe, Apple Podcast, Spotify, rate and review it. We’ll see you on the next episode. Thanks so much.
