Evolution
I've been thinking a lot about training specificity lately, and how to make my training more efficient by eliminating that which doesn't offer some hope of transfer. Came across a thoughtful piece by Mark Twight. Here's a teaser:
If mere fitness were the dominant contributor to success in a sport then the fittest would also be the best. But over and over I have seen incredibly fit athletes – by all measures and testing – lose to less fit athletes who have better technical (neurological) skills. It happens in climbing all of the time. It happens in jiu-jitsu. It surely happens running, cycling and Nordic skiing. Great technique differentiates athletes at the highest level; most top tier athletes share similar degrees of fitness. This being the case, technical training must take precedent, which begs the questions, how much conditioning is appropriate to one’s sport? How strong is strong enough? How transferable is one’s “artificial” training? If the answer to the latter is “not very,” meaning significant re-education is required, then sport-specific training is preferable because the brain and central nervous system must continually learn and refine specific motor skills. Achieving fitness at the expense of skill is a waste of time and resources so using “cross-training” as the primary means of improving sport performance is a dead end.
4 comments:
Really nice post. I like stuff that makes me think about my own training. Two points - one, I agree if a particular movement or exercise doesn't fit into YOUR training goals, then you shouldn't feel the need to spend your limited training time working on it. There are a TON of valuable exercises out there, but there aren't enough hours in the day to work on pole vaulting, shot putting, butterfly stroking and every other exercises that might make you fitter, but not necessarily BETTER at anything.
The other point, though, is that sometimes I'll work things that have no intrinsic training "value", just 'cause I want to. Double-unders, for example. Not sure how functional they are, and if I never did another one again, my training wouldn't suffer one bit... but I REALLY like doing them, so I spend some time every week to work on the skil. After all, isn't this supposed to be at least a little bit of fun?
So what are you considering eliminating due to a lack of transferability?
Great post indeed.
Isn't there also the issue that some of our training is untargeted (in the sense that it does not greatly improve our performance in whatever sport we are interested in) because 1) we can't exactly predict what is useful and 2) overall fitness is not necessarily/exclusively meant to serve particular purposes.
Great points Byers! In a world where I had infinite time and recovery capacity I would do everything. Unfortunately, I possess neither, and I've been feeling a bit under-recovered lately due to that. Two things I'm considering adjusting (the context being that I would like to improve Oly lifting and rock climbing):
1) Excessive strength work. I have a strange fear of losing strength on lifts like the deadlift, low-bar back squat and bench press. Part of this is cause it took some time to build these up. However, beyond a certain point, they don't transfer that well to Oly lifting (and depending on your philosophy, can alter motor patterns enough to fuck up your first pull). But I've been sneaking stuff like squat ladders into my warm-up and heavy deads and Zerchers after my cleans. I'm starting to burn out, and it's time to dial this stuff down so that my technique can improve.
2) Making the metcons more climbing specific. Oly lifting doesn't require much in the way of metabolic conditioning, and I believe Everett's stated goal of the PMenu metcons is to keep you from 'rolling out the door'. That's fine, I'm hoping to help my climbing by tailoring the metcons more specifically ( Mountain Athlete style).
Guillaume, predicting what is useful is hard, but it is even harder when you don't know what you are training for! But once that is clear, there are plenty of resources to turn to (Hörst, Twight, Shaul, etc; although sorting out the various ideas is a workout itself). And I definitely agree with you about general fitness, Rob Shaul has some good stuff to say about this.
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