Traditional Training SUCKS for Sport!
Why?
…because you’re training your body to move unnaturally, and unless your sport IS weightlifting, that won’t help you much in sports.
Our bodies aren’t meant to move in blocks like robots. We rarely use one muscle group at a time, we use ALL of our muscles at the same time.
Everything works as one. We’re a system, not a load of individual muscles lined up next to each other.
As such, we should train our body as a whole, not as a series of “muscle groups”.
Smaller, more isolated exercises are great for bodybuilding, rehab or bringing up a weak body part, but other than that, they may actually impair your movement!
You’ll be de-training your body in terms of getting everything to work together in a smooth manner.
My goal is always to get people to Move Better whilst improving health and performance.
If you play sport, be it golf, rugby, boxing, running or even darts, you need your body to move fluidly and efficiently.
If your training looks like your sport, you’re probably on the right track.
Now picture a chest press… Does that remind you of ANY sport?
I can’t think of one.
Start to think in terms of movements rather than “exercises”.
“Exercises” are useful for labelling something so you can repeat it and see your progress, but really, your progress should be measured by how well you perform in your sport, not by how much more weight you’re lifting on any particular exercise.
If increasing your bench press hasn’t transferred into better performance, it means that exercise perhaps isn’t as relevant to your sport as you may have thought.
Being strong on an “exercise” doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll be strong in movement.
If you do isolate muscle groups to train them, you then need to integrate that strength into a more natural movement pattern.
A combination of strongman training, gymnastic/bodyweight work, sled pushes and pulls, crawling, jumping, throwing, climbing and other more natural movements are the key to success when it comes to sports.
The better you can move and control your body, the better you’ll be at everything.
This is why it’s easy to teach a gymnast or a dancer something new – they have such good control over their bodies that they can just pick something up instantly.
Learn to Move Better and by default your sports performance will improve. It’s logical.
The ONLY caveat is that if you’ve been compensating for a lack of mobility and you suddenly regain that mobility, your technique may need to change slightly with it.
Golf is a prime example of this – when you can actually move properly, all the little compensations you’ve had to make will need to be trained out of you again, but that’s just a case of practicing once you’ve got your mobility back and while you’re still working on it.
If you play a sport and use the gym, it only seems logical that you make those workouts relevant to your sport. Why wouldn’t you?
If you don’t play a sport, it would still be beneficial to work on moving better rather than just going through the motions of the traditional “gym exercises”. You can still build strength and fitness, lose weight or build muscle, you just do it in a way that makes you move better, not worse!
As always, I’m here to help so if you have any questions, get in touch.
Mark
Instagram: @markbroadbentpt
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