On Strength & Conditioning
Vires acquirit eundo. We gather strength as we go.
Sometimes the spark comes after the best part of youth and the strength to act has already been used up in sitting still - Nietzsche
Confidence, discipline, strength, humor and wisdom. These are traits one should possess to ensure success in life. Strength, excellence, inequality… Self reliance and self love are the root of human strength and greatness. Now, from the philosophical to the pragmatic. How does one transmute the traits just mentioned to actual physical and mental strength? Through physical training. This essay will focus on the merits of strength and conditioning and how everyone, not just, athletes can benefit from its rigor and administration.
Strength and Conditioning (S&C) is the selection and development of dynamic /static exercises used to improve physical performance. Whilst it originally benefited athletes it is now widely used in both the sporting world and more generally.
S&C is used to develop every area of the body and improve the way a person moves, with the intention of enhancing sporting or physical performance.
Research demonstrates that correct and appropriate training can improve physical performance. It also shows that incorrect and inappropriate training can be very detrimental to the way the body moves and performs, whether that’s in daily life eg walking the dog, or at hobby or sport.
Strength and Conditioning training involves a wide range of exercises developed to build a variety of skills with a focus on mind, mobility, stability, strength, endurance, power, speed, agility and performance.
S&C combines strength training, aerobic conditioning, speed and agility training, as well as sport-specific training.
S&C aims to improve strength and endurance, reduce the incidence and severity of sport injuries, and to improve technique and overall performance.
S&C is beneficial for people of different ages and abilities.
Principles
The principles of training have to be applied to any training program for it to be a successful one. Briefly, these principles are:
Specificity: Specificity states that the body adapts to exercise according to the manner in which it is exercised. This applies to the muscles, joints and movements that are trained. In addition, it applies to energy systems and even to velocities of movement. This means that training programs have to be intentionally designed to help the athlete accomplish his or her goals.
Overload: The overload principle states that once the body adapts to exercise, we have to find ways to make the exercise more difficult in order to force the body to continue adapting. In other words, to become stronger, you have to lift heavier weights as your strength increases. If you continue to lift the same weights, your gains will plateau and then reverse.
Progression: The principle of progression views an athlete's career as a series of steps, each of which builds on the one that came before it. This means building a fitness base at the beginning of the year, learning exercise techniques and mastering fundamental movements before advanced ones, etc.
Benefits
Proper strength and conditioning allows an individual to strengthen supporting muscles, even out muscle imbalances, increase mobility, correct posture, stabilize joints, learn new movement patterns and enhance coordination and peripheral skills.
Specifically:
Increases muscle strength.
Increases muscle endurance.
Increases muscle fiber size.
Strengthened Mental Health.
Increases neural recruitment.
Improves connective tissue function.
Improves bone health.
Improves motor skill and confidence to engage further in physical activity.
Improves mobility and flexibility.
Nobody picks on a strong man - Charles Atlas
Prioritize
On the surface, strengthening and conditioning has become very complicated and confusing. 15 years ago the focus was on lifting weights, such as learning the techniques of the foundational movements like the clean, snatch, squat, and bench press. Nowadays, there is a myriad of tools, and the marketing that accompanies them makes one think that they are all essential. They are NOT.
To further complicate matters, people do not just lift weights. They commute to work, play with children, garden, and ride bicycles. Thus, training needs to be multi dimensional. This also means that an individual has a limited ability to recover from training.
Perspective
Strength and conditioning is only one tool to help improve an individuals performance. Remember, the focus is on how strong and agile one feels in daily life and not on their weight room numbers. There are a lot of people who perform very well in the weight room, but who feel terrible simply walking up and down the stairs.
Keeping things in perspective becomes imperative as individuals become higher level and start to approach their genetic limits. As individuals become stronger, it becomes more difficult to continue to increase their strength. As individuals approach their limits, it also increases the likelihood of an injury from training. This means that a one needs to determine realistically how much strength is needed, at which point they should carefully weigh whether adding five more pounds to lift is going to be worth the risks. An important aspect of training is that one needs to be able to do it frequently and for the long haul, pushing oneself to the point of injury curtails both.
Link
An individual will want to use such a large variety of training tools and approaches that it is tough to balance everything out. They may sprint, condition, jump, throw, train for mobility, use core training, work on their flexibility, lift weights, etc. The list is very long. Within each training tool, there are different things that can be focused. For example, in sprinting one can focus on acceleration, maximum velocity, speed endurance, resisted sprinting, assisted sprinting, etc.
This makes it very difficult to juggle a training program for an individual. Ideally, training should be put together so that all of the parts support and complement each other. If a person is not careful, though, then it could be put together in such a manner that the parts interfere with each other. This is what leads to injury.
One approach to this is to consider what kinds of qualities one wants to train and put the training together in a way that groups them together. The table below shows some examples of doing this.
Periodize
Periodization is one of those topics that people overcomplicate. It's about a long-term approach to program design, designed to make sure that the individual is at their physical best at the right times. While this is being done the training is also balanced so that the individual doesn't become overtrained or burned out. One of the challenges with periodization for individuals is that it involves every aspect training, not just lifting weights.
There are several steps to follow when designing a periodized program. These include:
Decide on the goals for each part of the calendar
Determine the training means and methods for each part of the calendar
Based on #2-#5, write the first four weeks
Write the next four weeks when halfway through the first four
Organize
When organizing the calendar, start with when the individual is competing. The time around this is one’s competition period of training. Usually, four to six weeks before the competition phase is a pre-competition period. The rest of the year is one’s offseason. Table three shows an example of this for a collegiate sprinter. Note that there are two competition periods.
Once the calendar is organized, organize each of these periods into two to four-week blocks of training. It helps to make things more manageable. Table four shows an example. The classic periodization literature calls these meso-cycles.
Goals
Once one has the big picture of the training program, it's time to decide on goals for each period. This is important, and a frequently overlooked, step. If this is done it will save a lot of time later on when it comes to writing the program. Table five shows an example of goals for each period.
Means and Methods
Once one knows where one’s training is going, then it's appropriate to start thinking about how to get there. This involves everything from thinking through the tools, to looking at programming variables in a very general sense. Table six shows an example of how to do this for the first offseason period.
Writing Workouts
Once all the above has been done, it's time to write the workouts while also keeping in mind every thing that has been covered.
Begin with the first four weeks, write this out in detail. Don't bother writing the rest of the program because real life is going to interfere with any plan that is longer than four weeks. If one has done all the steps that have been outlined, then one has enough information to be able to effectively write the other parts of this program.
When half-way through the first four weeks, then sit down and write the next four weeks. Remember, assess how one is reacting to the program. Then make adjustments as necessary.
Strength and conditioning can be a tool to help improve an individual's performance. It is also the kind of tool that is subject to misinformation and marketing which can make its effective use challenging. When using strength and conditioning, it's important to apply the principles of exercise, prioritize training, keep it in perspective, link it to the rest of the training program so that all the components support each other, and to organize the program deliberately.