So I find myself at an impasse with my role as a coach.
Having read through strength is specific and range. I find myself wondering is there really anything we can do to improve sports performance through strength and conditioning? Yes I understand that strength and conditioning aids in overall health outcomes but is there anything we can do specifically to improve performance in sport beyond that?
I think the correct, nuanced answer is “maybe, but it depends…”
It’s my understanding that the first sport specific benefit resistance training provides, is more resilience against injury. The best, evidence based example I’m aware of is Nordic Hamstring Curls reducing hamstring injury rates significantly.
Beyond that, to build on @Millzners comment, it probably depends a lot on what sport the athlete competes in.
Edit: Also, I still need to get around to reading that book!
I think that strength can be viewed as a physical characteristic as well as a skill. Yes, LBBS is the most reliable exercise for getting better at LBBS, but HBBS will work too, getting stronger quads makes your quads stronger in any context.
I think that just doing LBBS to get better at basketball is a very inefficient training strategy and that just doing basketball specific training to get better at basketball may work pretty well, but when you develop strong quads from LBBS and do basketball specific training as well, you have the most efficient strategy for being good at basketball.
Basically I think that the nonspecific strength and conditioning is valuable for increasing sports performance because it increases the capacity to improve via sport specific training.
I would now like to take a moment to draw some false equivalencies: people who are good at sports tend to be strong and conditioned. People who take anabolic steroids tend to get better at sports (which is a very nonspecific form of strength and conditioning).
It’s been a little while so I apologize for vagueness; There is a podcast called the Pacey Performance Podcast, I heard an interview with a gentleman named Bryan Mann, who I believe is a college s&c coach and researcher, stated something along the lines of; raising strength, particularly in less trained individuals, showed on field improvement for their college athletes to a point of diminishing returns after some level of strength improvements. Interesting stuff I think is worth a listen. I believe he also has some published research around using bar velocity to auto regulate load selection in training.
Edit: here’s the podcast, I think the one I referenced was an earlier episode.
Yah, reviewing Jordan’s forum posts on the subject, in addition to discussing resilience against injury, he mentions that untrained individuals see performance improvements on the field from strength training.
I had assumed OP is dealing with relatively trained individuals.
This is a broad category to discuss.
TLDR in my opinion: Yes.
The most obvious benefits of strength training beyond the scope of decreasing injury risk in athletes would be sports which require physical strength, such as wrestling, mma (fact: if you have a larger bicep and a stronger grip, guess how much more effective your bare naked choke will get) javelin throw, handball, american football etc.
Beyond that, I’d still argue that most (if not 99.9%) of athletes might benefit from strength training in one way of another, but again this is specific to the context of that sport and its requirements.
Are we talking exclusively about heavy loads through the three powerlifting moves or are we taking about resistance training in a broader sense, i.e. velocity lifts, unilateral work, resistance conditioning through kettlebell training etc.?
If it’s the lattter, then I’d argue yes.
It is an effective and efficient way to address individual issues regarding performance.
Your assumption is correct and maybe I should have started with that. I am a strength and conditioning coach for a university basketball team. I personally feel as though the only thing I can do at this point for the athletes is potentially decrease injury rates.
So I’m neither an athlete nor a basketball fan, but it is my understanding that there are 2 competing curves of efficacy when it comes to a basketball players lean body mass on the court.
On the one hand, for some positions, bigger means more presence inside, and thus, better able to dominate an opponent in a physical game.
OTOH, the bigger the dude, the more stress put on the body (especially the joints and such) with all those athletic moves… I read an article once that theorized that one reason why Kobe was able to have such a long career is that he cut quite a bit of weight when he hit 30, and that it was a deliberate decision.
The take away being, I don’t think you should completely throw away the concept of positively affecting their performance on the court, especially on an individual case by case basis. I’d also say though that the more elite the athlete, the more the S&C’s first and primary goal should be DON’T INJURE THE ATHLETE, and the secondary goal should be, to improve resilience on the court and in life. Only after those 2 boxes are taken care of comes improve their performance through strength gains and hypertrophy.
Although if you get more compliance from an athlete by following a protocol that gets them jacked, then as compliance is important, getting them jacked, (or whatever their personal goals may be, or that you can get them to buy in on) would also be another important goal.
There’s a reason those parlor guys aren’t hulking behemoths.
i can remember @145# right after my 4 years in the Army, easily combing my mother’s oaks to cut down branches that were damaged during a hurricane.
fast forward a few years and ~20# (not very lean #s) and having to do it again SUCKED!
My concern is always not to injure the athletes to add more clarity to the discussion I am an S&C at a D3 university so the realistic thing to say is these guys are playing for the sake/enjoyment of the sport. Not because they need to be picked up by the NBA, Im not saying it is impossible I am saying that it is just highly unlikely.
That being said, none of these guys are a concern of mine in getting to big. Well all except one, our center who has…some excessive eating habits so he is big but not the way we want him to be. In my mind the best performance enhancement I could/can provide is not hurting them myself with poor load management.
I do always end up arguing with the other S&C coach because I program squats occasionally that are below parallel not with the intent of making them lift the maximum amount of weight etc…etc… but with the intent of exposing them to ranges of motion that are more than the standard “basketball players only need to quarter squat” mindset that i’ve noticed a lot of Basketball S&C coached have.
aside, RIP KOBE
I’ve asked Jordan before about reduced range of motion squats before and we came to an agreement that there would be better utility in using squat jumps for increases in explosiveness/vertical. This goes along with my thinking of exposing various ranges of motion to the athletes. I do regularly program NHC because of the discussions by both BBM and the articles associated. The guys hate them but i’ve gotten enough buy in that they do it anyways.
I guess we have two separate experiences with the military lol. I think me adding some size has actually helped my climbing, I went from a pretty adept climber in high school @175 to a bit more…I guess technical climber @205
Im not an outlier or genetically gifted by any means but I think the fact that growing up on a farm, I never played traditional sports for more than a year and did sports like competition cheer-leading, a bit of gymnastics, martial arts, and rock climbing for longer duration than I played football, basketball and soccer provided me with a mobile enough baseline physical capacity to where I have not really noticed a difference in any of the aforementioned sports since I have gained weight and focused more heavily on lifting.
Random slight change in topic but Its a good way to see that different people respond to weight gain differently.
Apparently I am the only one that doesn’t understand. If you get stronger by weight training, won’t you be better in virtually any sport?
The difficulty is in determining “what is stronger”? Sure I can go in and bench press “lot” but how does that translate to sport? having a strong bench does not mean I will be better at sport. Neither does any other lift that we do in the gym, one caveat is in untrained populations. I would say there is some benefit in taking a previously untrained person and having them undergo a S&C program while playing sport. At a certain point though, there is little (IMO) that I can do to improve an athlete’s skill in a sport, especially at the collegiate level.
Further the argument could be had that if it were as simple as
strength training + sport = better
that simply is not the case unfortunately.
@Bak2ThaBasix Said part of the problem is defining strength. Chris Beardsley goes into detail about the various aspects of strength that can be trained. Here is a small, anecdotal piece of what that means. (it’s dumbed down by my being several months removed from reading an article by Beardsley that had aspects that were slightly over my head.)
If you were to train for a 1RM, some of the adaptations involve converting certain muscle fibers towards versions that are better at producing force for the duration of a 1RM attempt. Additionally, when these fibers are being converted and are growing bigger, the muscle develops extra, non contractile connections between the fibers that allow them to more efficiently transfer this force to the tendon>bone>load.
The thing is, these selected muscle fiber sub type conversions, while hell on wheels for grinding out a 1RM, are less efficient at explosive displays of strength like a jump or sprint. The same is true about all these extra connections between the muscle fibers, which can impede how fast the muscle can contract.
So training to be an elite powerlifter can be counter productive towards improving your 40 time, vertical jump, and the aspects of sport those NFL combine tested items are supposed to be indicative towards an athlete being good at.
This just goes into just 2 tiny aspects of what adaptations are selected for in strength training. Beardsley’s Strength is Specific has 329 pages dedicated to the topic.