There are many studies out there about the most common injuries for athletes based on sport and position. So, you should understand what injuries you need to work to prevent.

You can add training into your program to strengthen areas that can help prevent those specific injuries. For example, in some sports, ankles, knees, and hips are the most commonly injured. So, in your sport specific training, you could practice bending and absorbing the shock these joints sustain during sport.

While general training is great for overall fitness. It does not address the specific needs of athletes participating in sports to reduce injuries.

Therefore, sport specific training is essential. The best place to start when designing a sport specific training program is by determining the basic qualities that your sport and position demands.

Consider what energy systems are used. Is there running, jumping, lunging, rotational movement, single-legged, or double? You should have a comprehensive understanding of the movements involved in your sport and in your specific position. Choose weights and plyometrics that are functional to these movements.

Next, we recommend assessing your current fitness abilities in relation to the items above. Determine which areas need improvement and which areas might only need maintenance. Design a program with a focus on improving the areas that are lacking and maintaining the areas that you are excelling in.

When designing a program, you must keep all these items in mind. Also, consider that almost all athletes require explosive power, muscular endurance, and maximal strength. You can train for explosive strength, for example, by adding a sport specific action, such as sprinting or jumping, directly after a lift.

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Katie Vincent Ryland Rees Josh Morrissey Georgia Ellenwood Kasia Grunchalla-Wesierski. In addition, joint ranges of motion in the training should be at least as great as those in the target activity.

General exercises are essentially conventional strength-training exercises and may consist of either compound or isolation movements using free weights, cables, or machines.

In most cases, general exercises create a more ideal environment than specific exercises for stimulating increases in overall muscle strength and size. Therefore, these applications offer general transfer into improvements in human performance by increasing muscle hypertrophy, motor-unit recruitment, bone density, and connective tissue strength, which can improve overall health and reduce injury risk.

On the other hand, because these exercises do not necessarily reflect the specific force-generation and neuromuscular coordination patterns of many common movements in athletics, their positive transfer into improved performance potential is less obvious.

That is a false belief. Granted, the further an exercise gets away from replicating the specific force-generation patterns of a given movement, the less directly it carries over to improving the neuromuscular coordination of that movement.

It simply means that the less specific an exercise is, the more general it is. Each of these types offers a unique set of benefits that transfers into improvements in performance. Working on sport skills with specific exercises is not the same thing as working to improve specific force-generation and neuromuscular coordination patterns, which transfer into targeted athletic movements.

Loading specific sport skills in this manner misapplies the principle of specificity and rests on a misunderstanding of how to properly use specific exercises. In other words, when training focuses only on what an exercise looks like, one can easily make the mistake of loading sport-specific skills instead of working to improve the specific force-generation patterns used to perform sport movements.

The problem lies in the fact that sport movement skills involve accuracy components that are not just similar but exact. For example, consider studies of the use of weighted bats in baseball. You can test this effect for yourself: Shoot 10 free throws with a regular basketball, then take 10 more shots with a 2-to 4-pound 1 to 2 kg medicine ball.

After shooting with the medicine ball, go back to the normal basketball for 10 more shots. Your first few shots may go over the backboard because shooting the much lighter basketball involves a different fine-motor sequence than shooting the medicine ball.

Learn how I how I quickly and easily create programs that get results and keep clients coming back for more by downloading my 2 must-have programming charts and watching the included video lesson.

And much more! Sports Specific Training: The Right Way. Transfer For Improved Performance The goal of exercise programming for enhanced human performance is to maximize training transfer.

Unfortunately, most strength training programs fall well short of what an athlete requires…. While these types of training have their place, strength training for sport consists of a more refined approach than simply lifting heavy weights as many times as possible. This article outlines the concept and the benefits of a periodized strength training plan.

This is the most effective approach to strength training for sport. Not only does it help in the prevention of over training, it gives the athlete the best chance of peaking physically at the right time. The principle of specificity states that training should mirror the demands of the sport as closely as possible 1.

Bodybuilders tend to isolate a muscle group and work it to exhaustion. Athletes on the other hand should train movements rather than muscles. A simple example is the vertical jump. The muscles involved in this action calves, quadriceps, hamstrings, gluteals etc. could be trained separately with exercise choices such as toe raises, leg extensions, leg curls, kickbacks and so on.

A more appropriate exercise however is a barbell squat, which closely matches the movement pattern of the vertical jump. Athletes must divide their time and energy amongst various types of training — endurance, strength and power, speed and agility, tactical etc.

By choosing only the most appropriate resistance exercises volume can be kept to a minimum saving energy for other types of training. This has led many coaches to incorporate Olympic weight lifting into their strength training programs, almost without question.

The rationale is that just a few Olympic lifts will build all-round strength and power. Whilst exercise such as power cleans can be beneficial to some athletes, for many there are more specific and more appropriate options 2. Many of the sample strength training programs within this section of the website consist of relatively few exercises.

This is deliberate and while it may seem unbalanced at first glance, it takes into account other training the athlete is expected to complete. Unlike bodybuilding, where the only aim is to increase the size and appearance of muscles, strength training programs for sport ultimately must develop either explosive power or muscular endurance 2.

However, rather than immediately embarking on a program to improve either or both of these fitness components, a more effective approach is to first build a solid foundation….

Basic Strength Basic strength training programs adapt the body for more strenuous resistance training later on. The less experienced an athlete is, the more time they will need to spend developing foundational strength before progressing onto more advanced forms of resistance training.

But even experienced athletes should set aside some time during the year to complete a phase of basic strength training. It can help to redress some of the muscle imbalances that inherently occur with competitive sport. Hypertrophy Some athletes will benefit from increasing their lean body mass by adding extra muscle bulk.

However, the number of athletes that require hypertrophy training or a phase of bodybuilding is far fewer than most would expect.

Larger muscles are not necessarily stronger and more weight — even lean, active weight — can be a hindrance in many sports.

Maximal Strength Bodybuilders have exceptional muscle mass but they are typically bigger than they are strong. Maximal strength training programs do not necessarily increase the size of a muscle hypertrophy but they do lead to neuromuscular adaptations that are favourable to most athletes.

Even endurance athletes can benefit from maximal strength training 5,6. Explosive Power Just as an athlete can be extremely muscular and lack an associated level of strength, they can also be exceptionally strong but lack significant power.

Most athletic movements occur much more rapidly and demand significantly more power than lifting maximal loads. If maximal strength is not converted into sport-specific power, athletic performance will not improve — certainly not to the extent that it could.

Muscular Endurance While many sports are dominated by powerful, explosive actions some athletes are required to overcome a relatively low resistance but for a prolonged period of time.

Just as power athletes should convert maximal strength into explosive power, endurance athletes should aim to convert maximal strength into muscular endurance. Of course, many team sports require a combination of the two — power and strength endurance — and developing both simultaneously without one negating the other requires careful consideration.

To promote long term training improvements and avoid over training, an overall training program can be split into specific periods, each with their own objectives and set of training parameters.

This concept is called periodization and it is the most effective approach to planning strength training programs for sport. The overall training program usually taken as one year long can be split into set periods and usually consist of the:.

By co-ordinating the different elements of a strength training program with the phases of a typical season, the athlete can reach a peak for the start of the competitive season and most important parts of year. Just as an overall season is split into distinct periods or phases so is the development of sport-specific strength.

As mentioned earlier, it makes sense to develop certain types of strength before others. Here are the phases, in order, of an overall strength training program which also lasts a year and how they should coincide with phases of a typical season above:.

One side of the body may become stronger than the other, agonists may be overly strong compared to antagonists and smaller muscle groups are often neglected. Left unchecked these imbalances can compound and may lead to chronic and acute injury.

They also replicate the specific force production patterns of the bench press. The funny thing is that all these assistance exercises happen to replicate some aspect of the bench press. Assistance exercises are just sports-specific exercises for powerlifting.

What I do is apply this same logic towards assistance exercises to sports-specific exercises for other sports.

The goal of exercise programming for enhanced human performance is to maximize training transfer. Some exercises provide obvious and direct transfer to improved performance in sporting actions and overall functional capacity, whereas others provide less obvious transfer—that is, indirect transfer.

These two categories of exercise—specific and general—offer different benefits; more specifically, each type benefits certain interdependent components of fitness and performance that the other category may miss.

Specific exercises provide obvious and direct transfer to improved performance because they are based on the principle of specificity. That principle has been defined very well by Dr. Although all athletes should use well-rounded, whole-body exercise routines, supplementary exercises specific to the sport can provide a training advantage.

The simplest and most straightforward way to implement the principle of specificity is to select exercises similar to the target activity with regard to the joints about which movement occur and the direction of the movements. In addition, joint ranges of motion in the training should be at least as great as those in the target activity.

General exercises are essentially conventional strength-training exercises and may consist of either compound or isolation movements using free weights, cables, or machines. In most cases, general exercises create a more ideal environment than specific exercises for stimulating increases in overall muscle strength and size.

Therefore, these applications offer general transfer into improvements in human performance by increasing muscle hypertrophy, motor-unit recruitment, bone density, and connective tissue strength, which can improve overall health and reduce injury risk. On the other hand, because these exercises do not necessarily reflect the specific force-generation and neuromuscular coordination patterns of many common movements in athletics, their positive transfer into improved performance potential is less obvious.

That is a false belief. Granted, the further an exercise gets away from replicating the specific force-generation patterns of a given movement, the less directly it carries over to improving the neuromuscular coordination of that movement.

It simply means that the less specific an exercise is, the more general it is. Each of these types offers a unique set of benefits that transfers into improvements in performance. Working on sport skills with specific exercises is not the same thing as working to improve specific force-generation and neuromuscular coordination patterns, which transfer into targeted athletic movements.