Ask anyone who plays in sports like AFL football and basketball how tough it can be to train for speed and power, yet at the same time try to improve your fitness endurance capacity. Many sports demand that you have high levels of strength and power and be able to sustain these repeated bursts in games that last between 2-3 hours. Physiologically the two processes of building strength, power, and speed versus endurance are completely opposed to each other and training both methods at the same time cancels out their effectiveness. This is the equivalent of trying to be a 100m sprinter and a marathon runner at the same time! All good strength coaches and elite athletes are aware of this principle and know that to improve performance these two opposing methods are best trained on their own which is known as periodization. Unfortunately, sporting codes that run for several months of the year do not allow for this perfect recipe to be adopted. Compromises must be made, and usually, it is strength, power, and speed sacrificed for fitness and endurance. But is there a way you can minimize the losses of strength and power by adopting smarter implementation of your fitness training? This is the question we explore in this article and provide you with some simple ideas you can implement into your training that could be a real game changer.
Strength Training For Sports – Explosive Speed Is All About Learning To BRAKE!
Anyone playing sports at a high level will appreciate the value a strength and conditioning program can provide and understand that training for the sport alone will not yield great results. Devoting too much time to strength and conditioning, at the expense of practicing skills in the sport itself is also a recipe for disaster, and there has been many potential athletes ruin their career from being too good in the gym. There must be a balance between all these variables, as there is only so much time that can be given to training, and more is not better. There is a fine line between over training that is counterproductive and exposes the athlete to injury or illness. Any strength program given to an athlete is to complement the bulk of their training which is built around the skills of the sport. This means that there is only a very small window of opportunity to give the athlete the type of training that will greatly enhance their athletic potential. And for almost any athlete in ball sports, the need to become explosively fast and also remain injury free would be at the top of the list of what they want their strength program to provide. In this article, we will show you that the best exercises and methods we use in our Sports Program for doing this are, and why many athletes may not be getting the most out of their training program.