If you are an athlete who has played the same sport in high school and college and possibly even in the pros, the odds are that you experienced the same basic type of in-season training. For example, most high school teams today do weight training, basically the same as collegiate and professional teams. Some of the exercises may be different as you move up from high school, but for the most part, the majority of the exercises are basically the same.
You will probably also be doing many of the same types of drills for agility, quickness and game plays. In fact, doing drills is the foremost method used by coaches to improve a player’s performance. Strength training is usually considered most important but doing the drills is the heart of all the programs. Thus, it is common to find many different drills for athletes in almost all sports.
However, by putting a little science into the training, it is possible to improve your competitive performance even more. This can be done by adding specialized (dynamic correspondence) strength and flexibility exercises to the program. Such exercises follow the base conditioning or strength training that is typically done on the teams. The better the shape you are in and the stronger you are, the more the specialized strength exercises can make a difference in your overall performance.
Every coach can create his own specialized exercises that duplicate the joint actions and movements that are needed to execute the skills that the athlete must perform more effectively. As a result, the athletes can develop the feel needed for the skill or action or simply to respond in a manner desired.
Specialized strength and explosive exercises are used most often to improve technique and the physical abilities needed to execute the game skills well. They should be the heart of every strength and conditioning program. They will do more to enhance competitive performances than any other method presently known.
Strength and flexibility exercises that are specialized does not mean that they simply involve the same muscles as involved in the sports skill. Specialized exercises have specific criteria. This includes: 1) the exercise must duplicate the exact motor pathway (neuromuscular patterning) as seen in execution of the skill. In other words, it must duplicate a portion of the total skill as seen in competition.
2) Specialized strength and flexibility exercises must duplicate the same range of motion over which strength is displayed in the competitive skill. In other words, you develop strength in the same range of motion as it is seen in execution of the competitive skill.
3) The specialized exercise must use the same type of muscular contraction as seen in execution of the competitive skill. This most often applies to a strength movement as opposed to an explosive movement.
To duplicate one or more of these conditions for each exercise takes a certain amount of creativity. Not only must you be familiar with the biomechanics of the sports skill technique, but you must be sufficiently creative in order to fulfill one of the criteria stated above. The more you understand what is involved in skill execution, the more readily you will be able to come up with specialized strength and flexibility exercises that duplicate what occurs in the skill execution.
When you are capable of creating such specialized strength exercises, you will see the greatest amount of improvement — improvement that is not only dramatic, but almost immediate. This is the beauty of doing specialized strength exercises.
For more information, see Build a Better Athlete