Most coaches are familiar with the concept of workout stagnation, also known as hitting a plateau. In essence, the work out or exercise is no longer producing visible positive results. In many cases you may even get negative or poor results.
However, there is still another element that has typically not been considered. It is the concept of novelty or “newness”. In other words, what are the effects of a brand-new exercise when it is introduced into the program?
In general, when you use a new exercise you’ll get positive results. You’ll get these results regardless of whether the exercise uses the same muscles, uses the muscles in an identical or similar manner or if it even remotely resembles what you must execute in your sport.
Because of the novelty of the new exercise your body responds in a positive fashion. However, the effects are not long-lived. As a result, the initial excitement of seeing great improvement can soon turn to disappointment.
As famous Russian swim coach, Igor Koshkin once stated, “If you start to use standing on the head as an exercise for your swimmers, the initial effect will be remarkable and positive due to its novelty. But its effect will be very short-term because this exercise doesn’t touch on your athletes’ swimming specific abilities.”
Thus, if you see that the exercises that you are using are no longer working, it may be time to reevaluate the exercises that are being used. This however, is not a simple problem. The exercise novelty problem is very complex.
For example, it is not difficult to find an exercise that athletes are not familiar with. It is however, very difficult to find an unfamiliar exercise that corresponds to sport specific physiological, biomechanical and psychological demands.
This is why training specificity is an indispensable factor in sports training. The key is to use exercises that duplicate what the athlete requires in execution of his sports and team skills. This sounds easy to do but it is not.
To create exercises that are truly specific to the execution of the sports skills you must first have a strong background in the biomechanics of sports technique. The reason for this is that all specialized exercises must duplicate the neuromuscular pathway used in execution of the sports skill.
When you understand the movements and muscles involved in execution of the skill then you may be able to create strength exercises to duplicate specific joint actions involved in execution of the sports technique. This may seem like a difficult task and to a certain extent it is, but the results from doing this are truly phenomenal. They have a direct effect on skill execution, unlike general exercises to help the athlete get fit but not to play better.
In order to truly duplicate the movements is often necessary to use nonstandard equipment or specialized equipment in order to duplicate the necessary movements This is one of the reasons why I have created many exercises with the Total Athlete System™. It is the only way to duplicate the exact technique.
For more information on creating sport specific exercises and for examples of sport specific exercises, see the books in the Explosive Training Series. For example, Explosive Running contains exercises that duplicate the exact joint actions seen in the running stride.