Training to be more coordinated and athletic?

This is probably a question out of scope of your expertise, or something so dumb that it’s quick and easy to answer, but it’s stuck in my head and i don’t want to get some bs answers through google search. Please humor me.

I have never been an athletic person. Physical activities that require techniques and coordination (basketball, freestyle/butterfly strokes, skating, to name a few that i tried as a kid) don’t come natural to me. Are there some exercises that I can incorporate into my training in the gym, maybe on GPP days, to increase my general physical coordination? Or, knowing BBM, would I be right to guess that there is no such thing as general coordination, and you just have to pick an activity you want to do and get good at it? Is physical coordination or motor skill, like strength, specific?

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I probably wouldn’t change your barbell training for this purpose, but would definitely practice the desired skills more – and depending on the task, some of these skills (something like box jumps, for example) could certainly be the sort of thing that fits into a GPP day.

Speaking as a former swimmer, I wouldn’t do anything in the gym for the skills of swimming. The butterfly stroke isn’t easy for most people to pick up, and probably needs a lot of practice and may need some coaching.

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I would agree with Dr. Baraki, I wouldn’t change your barbell training. I think clarification on what you mean by “more athletic and coordinated” is needed as well. Skill acquisition is different dependent on what it is you want to do.

Personally I know guys who are in excellent shape but have athletic abilities in completely different areas. There may be some carry over between sports but a lot of that comes from specific practice. I’ve done kickboxing most of my life and see myself as pretty athletic. Im certain however that my athleticism in kickboxing might not mean much if your throw me in a pool with Dr. Baraki and told me to keep up. Pick something you want to get good at and run with it! It’s never to late to pick up new skills.

Something that stood out to me from Beardsley’s writings is the idea that increasing muscle size has the most general positive impact on all displays of strength (high to low-speed) and, therefore, athleticism. In many cases, a more muscular athlete = a better athlete so long as the person is practicing. The use of steroids in sports confirms this. But some sports have conditioning/other requirements that will govern the amount of muscular size that is beneficial. I’ve never seen a jacked soccer player nor am I aware of a widespread abuse of anabolic steroids in soccer.

So, if you want to be more athletic in general then get more muscular AND perform/practice the athletic events you want to be good at. Let your athletic event/sport determine the “ceiling” in which muscular size becomes less useful.

Thanks for your insight! You guys have confirmed my suspicion that physical coordination is also specific to the activity performed. It was hard for me to articulate what specific skills I wanted to develop or improve at the time of posting the question, except that it was probably going to be something along the line of “hand-eye coordination” if i tried my best to clarify.

After more pondering, I guess specifically it would be the skill that could allow me to learn a new physical activity, such as boxing and dancing, without being extremely clumsy or taking a more arduous effort than average. I also wanted to improve my freestyle swimming skill regarding the coordination between the body rotation and breathing. However, after reading your comments and thinking more about it myself, it seems that I’d be better off spending more time in the pool or finding a swimming coach, taking classes in boxing or dancing, instead of screwing around in the gym on GPP days. I’ll start with the box jumps for now though, so thanks for the suggestion, Austin!

Just going to say that I identify with the OP more than the rest of you guys. When dating my wife we tried salsa lessons for a date and discovered 1. I can clap to a beat
2. I can step to a beat
3. I can clap and step at the same time
4. I can not clap and step at the same time to a beat. So it makes sense that I enjoy physical activities that I consider effort dependent rather than cordination dependent. Picking up heavy stuff. Running. Biking.

OP: Like others said here, if you want to be more cordinated, you probably should chose something to be more cordinated at and pratice that skill. You are already in the gym getting strong, so maybe as an alternative to something physical, pick a crafting hobby. For instance, I collect shark teeth and make them into necklaces to give away to family and the kids of friends/co workers. Or blow some heads off in a FPS PVP video game.

You may not get general cordination out of these things, but the challenge of honing the specific skills can be rewarding, and you are already developing the physical trait of strength, which as a member of this community, I agree is the improvable general physical trait that best* translates to life improvement. To quote Rippetoe from a link I came across on BBM last week: “Strong people are harder to kill than weak people and more useful in general.”

*I started barbell work with a decent conditioning base, others might benefit from increasing the priority of conditioning to some degree…

One more thought: OP, if you are like me, the technical demands of the Squat make it the lift that is hardest to progress. I’ve found BBM’s programming of tempo/paused/pin variants to be the best prescription for developing the skill side of the Squat.

This was one of my main takeaways from “Strength is Specific.” Given this, how does hypertrophy training for an athlete differ from hypertrophy training for a bodybuilder or a strength sport athlete?