In the first part of this series, we discussed the importance of asking the right questions in determining how we can most efficiently and effectively improve athletic performance. The first question was: What does the athlete need? In response, we formed three general categories of improvements that the athlete can and should improve:

a) Sport-specific conditioning

b) Sport-specific skill

c) Strength

In Part 1, we discussed sport-specific conditioning. We continue here by looking at the importance of sport-specific skill and strength, and then begin a discussion about a different class of tempting exercises that the serious athletes will learn to avoid.

Sport-Specific Skill

This is non-negotiable and obvious. No matter how advanced a player is, continued skill practice is the cornerstone of competitive success. The issue is never in convincing people that they need to practice their sport and its inherent skill components – the issue is convincing people to practice their sport without tainting that practice by trying to do it in the wrong environment. In other words, practice soccer with a soccer ball, not a baseball (duh). Further, practice with a soccer ball, not a weighted soccer ball. Practice with normal movement freedom, not with weights on your ankles. Practice “soccer movements” on the soccer field by playing soccer and doing soccer skill drills, don’t try to mimic soccer movements in the weight room.

Enough is discussed about this in the two factor model article and the next section in this article. In sum, do not try to combine sport skill practice with the training in the weight room. You will always end up with a severely worse combined outcome than either of the two would have given you independently. Adding resistance to the kicking motion, in other words, is silly. It distorts the very specific motor patterns that you spent years making smooth and second-nature, thereby not at all helping your skill. Zero for one. Further, the weight you can add to resist the motion is so light that it won’t even produce a strength improvement anyway (you’ll learn why this is later). Zero for two.

Skills are by nature specific, and best developed through rote repetition. You do a very specific thing over and over and over again, observing – sometimes unconsciously – how and when you are successful and how and when you are unsuccessful, and then either repeating the same movement patterns or changing them slightly to achieve the desired outcome, ad nauseum, until they give you the outcome you want. This is how you gain proficiency. This is how you gain a feel for the thing. There’s really no way around this (genetics aside).

Getting good at kicking a soccer ball with every surface of the foot, with different levels of power and spin, with different aerial trajectories, with precision and accuracy, takes thousands of hours, and years of experience. An experienced coach can help expedite this process. Still, it takes screwing up so much that you want to quit, but persisting until eventually something clicks. So when you work on your skills, keep it specific to the game environment. Ankle weights make you move more slowly and practice movement speeds you won’t use in competition, in effect causing you to practice moving more slowly.

Strength

Let’s keep this simple: strength is the ability to produce force against an external resistance. It determines how you use your body to influence and master your environment. Never forget that. In sports, the external resistance can be anything on the field – the ball, an opponent, the ground itself. These are all things upon which the athlete can display his strength. If your sport requires the use of force (it does), your sport is dependent on force production. Therefore, in training for strength, force production must always be at the forefront of the program.

The amount of force we can produce is directly related to the amount of resistance that we must overcome. The heavier the resistance, the more force we can and must produce. When we produce more force than the last time, we have gotten stronger. Strength adaptations are, unlike endurance/”cardio” adaptations, very structural by nature – you have to add tissue to what's already there. These adaptations take a bit longer than the metabolic ones achieved during your pre-season conditioning. Think in terms of months and years, not weeks. Strength training is how you add new useful contractile tissue (muscle mass) to your body. You can have just read this one paragraph and be on your way to becoming a better athlete. It really is dead simple. But of course, there is some important nuance.

You’ll notice that, unlike sports-specific skill, there is no “specific” qualifier for strength. This is very important. Strength adaptations are general and systemic. Strengthening the organism as a whole is quite simple. Doing so also strengthens all the organism’s smaller components. The converse, however, is not true. You don’t get stronger at kicking by adding resistance to the kicking motion (recall the skills discussion above). Even if this worked, chopping the body up into specific constituent movements would take forever to train adequately. Inherent in our treatment of strengthening the body is a bias for efficiency. Get the entire body stronger in general, and then the act of kicking becomes stronger specifically. Strengthen the body generally so that this new strength is automatically applied to all of the pre-existing skills to make them more efficient. Strengthen in general and everything specific improves.

So what’s the best way to get generally stronger? Well, we already know that it comes down to producing more force over time. Luckily, experience, trial, and error has helped Starting Strength develop specific criteria for choosing exercises that will give us that biggest return on our training investment. We choose exercises that let us:

1) Use the most muscle mass (more muscle = more ability to produce force)

2) Over the longest effective range of motion

3) With the most weight possible (more resistance to overcome)

4) And thus get strongest.

The barbell is the tool that allows us to fulfill all of these criteria. Other tools (dumbbells, kettlebells, machines, bands, etc) are all inferior. Large, full-body, natural movement patterns work. Isolated, specific ones don’t – they don’t use enough muscle mass, as per criteria number one. Running or kicking with ankle weights can’t possibly get us stronger because according to the third criteria, we need to move a lot of weight. Super heavy quarter-squats don’t work because while a strength adaptation is general, it is specific to range of motion – if you don’t train through a full ROM, you can’t be strong through a full range of motion. Overcoming large stresses requires our entire system to work hard and then adapt. How much stronger can a 3-pound weight make us? Not very. Can you make something difficult with 3 pounds? Sure. Doing 1000 reps of lateral raises with 3-pound dumbbells will be very difficult, make you tired, and produce incredible soreness. But always remember this: difficult is not the same as effective. Neither is soreness.

Squatting, deadlifting, pressing, bench pressing, power cleaning, and power snatching allow us to fulfill the four criteria. For the athlete, training these lifts makes every movement and action you take on the field better, because you are now capable of doing those specific sport-things with more force. We don’t do lunges because it looks more like soccer than squatting does. Instead, we squat, because we can strengthen the whole body in one movement, handle a heck of a lot more weight than we can on a lunge, move through a long, effective range of motion, and can thus get much stronger with a squat than we could a lunge.

We don’t “target” muscle groups (whether for “activation” work or otherwise), because in the real world and on sports fields, specific muscles work in symphony with the whole system. Instead of “targeting” quads, calves, hamstrings and glutes with quad extensions, calf raises, hamstring curls, and glute bridges, we squat and deadlift because all of the former exercises are inferior to the latter in improving lower body strength based on our criteria above.

We also don’t care about “unilateral training” – training one leg or arm at a time – because, even though there are plenty of one-legged moments in sports, making training look like the sport does not make you stronger. Squatting 315 lb for sets of 5 does far more for an athlete’s one-legged strength and stability than does doing “hard” one-legged Bulgarian split squats holding 65 lb dumbbells in each hand.

But let’s zoom out a bit: it’s almost insulting to us that we must even have the discussion about why strength is important. It’s one of the most obvious things we notice right away about any athlete on the field (or person on the street, for that matter). We always notice the one kid who can never be knocked down, the one whose very presence is intimidating to the other kids. Sometimes, especially at younger ages, this is just the bigger kid. But guess what? The bigger kid is the stronger kid, naturally. I don’t think I need to convince you that stronger is better. I think I need to convince you that what you’re currently seeing at EveryTown PowerHouse Functional Athletic Performance Center is not actually an improvement in strength. Maybe if you’ve made it this far, you’re starting to come to that conclusion on your own. You must then ask yourself, what am I paying for at this place?

As Rip is wont to say, professional athletes don’t take steroids for technique. They take them to get stronger without having to work for it. Recall the steroid parade of 1990s Major League Baseball and all the shattered home run records that it created. Stronger athletes move better and have a more meaningful effect on their environment. Stronger muscles protect their joints better from contact and non-contact injuries. Stronger muscles are themselves less prone to injury. All else being equal, stronger athletes kick, throw, sprint, jump, turn, hit, and get back up after a fall better than weaker athletes. They are in better control and thus far less at the whim of their opponents. Stronger athletes are more confident. Stronger athletes are, in short, better athletes. Stronger athletes are built with the squat, deadlift, press, bench press, power clean, and power snatch. End of story.

What about Speed, Agility, Quickness, Power, “Sport-Specific” and “Functional” training?

Herein lies the real trap of “athletic performance training.” This is the stuff that sells because it’s flashy, fast, exciting, fun, sexy, often high-tech, and highly energetic. It often looks a lot like the sport, so it seems like it would have a lot of carryover to the sport. But I implore you to understand what you’re actually getting from these exercises/methods before jumping in head first (bad pun). Here are three general caveats:

1) These “SAQ” abilities are already being rehearsed thoroughly in practice and competition. The amount that can be improved with extra reps outside of the playing field is negligible.

2) “Speed” is largely determined by how much force you can put into the ground. Remember what improves the ability to produce force? Strength. Getting stronger is by far the best thing you can do for improving speed. That's why sprinters squat.

3) “Power,” or applying strength quickly, is incredibly genetically-determined. Thus, it can’t be improved much by training. However much it can be improved is thanks to an improvement in strength. Strength is inherent in the Power equation, and can thus help to improve it somewhat [1]. Once again, strength is the thing that can give us the change we seek. Further, in training the power clean and power snatch, athletes are doing all they can to continue expressing and improving their power in line with their increasing strength.

Playing soccer at full intensity is nearly all of what a player can do to hone their speed, agility, and quickness. Do I think you should never do sprints or speed work? Well, what is a soccer practice (or game)? It’s a lot of sprinting, cutting, changing direction, accelerating, decelerating, and reacting, done with the ball too. All of these things are already baked into playing and practicing the game – these sorts of rote drills are already being done in practice and performance multiple times a week. You just need to make sure you’re putting in full effort. Do we really need to do more of this same stuff outside of practices and games? “Oh, but we do it with variable resistance bands so it makes it harder,” you say. Have you not been paying attention?

Most of these sorts of activities fall into the general, murky buckets of “Functional Training” or “Sport-Specific Training,” both of which are poorly named. Throw “core training,” “stabilization training,” and “mobility work” into this mix as well under the heading of “things that get too much attention.” The problem with all of these efforts is that either they don’t do what they’re meant to do (i.e. “functional training” does not lead to any noticeable improvement in daily function) or they are a very inefficient means of doing what they are meant to do.

Balancing on unstable surfaces may help your balance to a degree, but the major barbell lifts already inherently challenge and therefore improve balance, and with a much more real-world application. Balancing on unstable surfaces is not a sport, and if it were, practicing that sport would do the job. The problem, in essence, is that these things are exercising, not actually training.

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Notes

[1] Power = (Force x Distance) / Time. The “Force” is a direct result of strength. The “Time” is what we can’t very well improve due to genetic limitations, so the denominator is essentially a constant. Given that “Distance” is also a constant for any given repeatable task, increasing force is what can increase the numerator and thus the overall quantity of “Power.”

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