It’s this time of year at Endeavor where our hockey players are slowly coming back for the off-season training.  During the next 2 months or so, we’ll progressively welcome back our players, and by the time June rolls around we should be at full capacity and be extremely busy throughout the summer.

In the meantime, the current phase of the off-season is what we call “the early off-season” for the guys that are already back with us.  These guys have the advantage of having a long off-season and plenty of time to not only improve their performance, but undo the damage they’ve put on their body throughout the season.  And God knows how much damage a long hockey season can put on your body, especially on your hips.  That’s why our early off-season phase focuses a lot more on re-establishing balance than it is about improving performance.

Hockey is a rotational sport, just like baseball, football (for quarterbacks), lacrosse, tennis and golf.  One thing to understand is that the rotational movements occur almost exclusively in one direction.  Over the course of a season, this accounts for many rotations when making passes and taking shots during all the practices and games the athlete takes part in.  Rotations in the opposite direction are almost non-existent, and if you want to ensure better symmetry and balance throughout the body, there is definitely a need for rotational work on the non-dominant side.

The core exercises in a training program can be a good tool to help re-establish better balance.  Even though our exercises are not purely rotational in nature (actually they are just the opposite; anti-rotation), the movement pattern and the muscles recruited are the same; they just happen to work in an isometric fashion.

That being said, instead of working both sides equally, we’ll double or triple the volume on the non-dominant side for all the anti-rotation core exercises we’re using.  Just about any anti-rotation exercise can be used, but 2 of my favorites are the Belly Press and the Chop, both in the 1/2 kneeling position.

I really like the 1/2 kneeling position, especially in the early off-season because you get some lengthening of the hip flexors and some hip stability in the end range of motion.  We’ll usually do 3 sets on the non-shooting side, and only one on the shooting side.

The concept can also be expanded with the rotational power work, with medicine ball throws and the like.  Adding more sets on the non-dominant side will help re-establish some sort of balance around the hips, the shoulders and the core.

The early off-season is a good time to work on major imbalances and the damage done during the season before getting into heavy strength and power work throughout the summer, so it’s important to take advantage of it.

Enter your info below to receive my 3 FREE reports on sports performance training! Speed training, soft-tissue work and much more!!

Sports training and strength and conditioning are becoming more and more popular with the younger crowds.  Working in a private sports training facility, I’ve witnessed this trend firsthand.  We’ll have requests for kids as young as 8 and 9 year old to start training with us to make them better athletes.  I’m not sure what is the cause of that trend to push kids to start a structured training program younger and younger.  It might be a result of the early specialization that is plaguing too many sports nowadays; it might be a result of pushy parents that are trying to re-live their sports career through their innocent children, and think they can make them become a professional athlete by forcing them to do what they never had the will and the dedication to do themselves.

Remind me when FUN started not being the main reason for kids to play sports?  Yea, it’s spelled F-U-N.

As part of a company that is still developing and trying be as profitable as possible, it’s not easy to turn potential clients down because at that age you think they’d have better options than taking part in a structured training program.  They’re still clients you’re turning down, and money you’re not making.  And when you turn them down, the first thing they’ll do is sign up with your competitor a couple blocks down the road, who you actually know does a shitty job training young athletes.  So what do you do?  It’s a problem….how do they call that again….ethical problem?

So invariably we end up training kids younger than we would ideally want, but at least I have the conscience of knowing that we do something that’s actually going to benefit them.  But what’s best for them?  What do kids need training-wise when they’re under 13?

Even though we know from research that safe and supervised weight training is not dangerous for them, putting them on a structured lifting-only program might not be optimal.  Again, remember that kids at that age need to have fun.  Is putting them through endless sprint, agility and ladder drills until you’ve beaten them to the ground a better option?  I don’t think so.

What they can benefit from is to learn how to move the right way through as many different movement patterns as possible; sprints, jumps, squats, push ups, lunges, DB chest press, etc.  They also NEED to have fun.  Drop the heavy structure, teach them new skills, incorporate games, organize small competitions between kids, etc.  By the way, if you’re dealing with young boys, using small competition formats is a sure way to incorporate the fun in training.

Again, kids don’t need to be pushed like they’re pro athletes, being forced to play in every off-season league, and going to every camp imaginable.  The first thing you’ll know is that they’ll burn out before they graduate from high school, and they won’t want anything to do with whatever sport they’ve been pushed into.

Think about the mindset you were in when you were 11 or 12 years old; chances are that engaging in a strength and conditioning program was the last thing on your mind, and you’d much rather have wanted to go play outside with your friends.  Because, you know…..that’s what kid are supposed to do.

Don’t forget to sign up for my FREE newsletter to get all the insights on strength and conditioning and also receive you 3 FREE reports on sports performance training!

I’m currently working on a project at work where I need make a detailed plan of our training system at Endeavor, which I could explain to someone who has no idea what we’re doing.  Getting started on that project, I struggled just putting something down on paper, simply because I didn’t know where to start.  I was trying to think: “What do you cover first? How do you make someone understand all the subtleties of how you build a training program? Why we do the things we do? etc.”  After brainstorming for a little while and exchanging some ideas with Kevin Neeld, I was up to something.

But what are the steps to detailing a complete training systems?

To me the first step is to highlight the philosophies behind the system.  This is what’s going to guide you in building  programs and knowing what components to include in your training programs.  Your philosophy doesn’t have to be extremely detailed and it doesn’t have be 5 pages long.  It’s really just knowing what your goals are and what the underlying concepts of your systems are.  To me, these are 3 ideas behind a good philosophy:

• The priorities of a good training program are, and always should be:

• The Joint-by-Joint approach to training

• The Anatomy Trains concept; everything works together in the body and isolation doesn’t exist

Those 3 concepts help shape a mindset of what you’re trying to accomplish and what the general directions of your training programs is.  Once  a background philosophy is established, you can put the building blocks of a training program in place and develop the tools to use for each component:

• Self-myofascial release (foam rollers, lacrosse balls, the stick, etc)
• Dynamic warm up (mobility exercises, activation drills, corrective work, etc)
• Speed training
• Power training (plyometrics, Olympic lifts, med ball throws)
• Strength training
• Core work
• Conditioning
• Injury prevention strategies
• Flexibility

Once this is established, the next thing to do is to incorporate all of these things in a structured training program, or what you may call the art of program design.  Managing volumes, loads, recovery periods and the like is a task that’s not easy.  This is something that is totally dependent on your athletes, their sports, training background, phase of the season, recovery capacities, genetics, and much more.  Although the basics of program design can be taught, only will you become better at that with experience and by listening to your athletes.

And last but not least, is the coaching itself.  This is an area that might seem pretty simple, but you really need to understand the fundamentals of functional movements in order to coach even the most basic exercises the right way.  Athletes need to learn to move the right way before anything else; it doesn’t matter how good your program looks on paper if your athletes move like crap.  Because in the end it comes back to the first 2 goals of the whole program: do no harm, and decrease the risks of preventable injuries.  Such concepts as the neutral spine, the packed shoulder blades and the packed neck are just some the concepts of coaching that need to be understood in order to make your athletes move better.

There are many things to go over when detailing a whole training system.  Sure there are probably things I haven’t mentioned that might be important, but in the end I feel like those are the basics to understand to build a good, efficient training system.  This is how we do things at Endeavor.

Interestingly this is all stuff that Kevin Neeld goes over into his book Ultimate Hockey Training.  He goes into great detail about every aspect of a complete training system that has been proven effective for years.  And please don’t be fooled by the title; this book could’ve simply been called Ulitmate Training System because it goes far beyond the concept of training for hockey.  No matter what sports you’re coaching, it is an invaluable resource to have.

Wanna get 3 FREE sports performance reports? Just enter your info below!

Arguably one of the main goals of strength training is to improve the way the body moves and reinforce good movement patterns with weights.  It will make your body stronger in those positions and those movement patterns that are considered optimal in the way we move.  It will also ensure that when challenged by outside forces and velocities, our body will be able to maintain good alignment and react properly.  The squat and the deadlift, for example, are primitive movement patterns that your body needs to own.  We own them as babies, but because of modern life that makes us extremely sedentary and because we sit all the time, we lose these movement skills as we age.

How many adults do you know can squat this low with a spine as neutral as this?

So in a way, we need to re-learn these movement patterns, and ultimately become stronger in them.  But because how restricted our bodies are, there is a process to go through to be able to own these movements and get stronger.  It might mean working on soft-tissue restrictions, doing general and specific mobility work, doing static stretching, improving motor control, etc.  Once the restrictions are out of the way, you’ll want to become proficient in the basic movement patterns before getting stronger.  Most strength gains you’ll make in in the beginning are going to be mostly neural adaptations and improved motor control, anyway.

In order to get strong and efficient in the basic lifts, you need PRACTICE!  I just finished reading Never Let Go, by Dan John, and one thing he stresses is the repetitions.  If you want to get good at something, if you want to get strong, you need to put the reps in.

When designing programs, we probably don’t need as much variety as we think we do.  Sure we need to keep things interesting so we don’t get bored in the long run.  But the basics stay the same; squat, deadlift, 1-leg squat, bench press, chin ups and rows.  That’s it.  You don’t need to have a new main lift every month; if that’s what you do, how do you know if you’re getting stronger, or better?  You don’t have any basis of comparison.  If you want to become proficient in these movements to improve the way your body moves and get stronger, that’s what you need.  And you need to do them a lot.  If you do chin ups for 4 weeks, and then take them out of your training and don’t do them for another 3-4 months, how do you expect improvement?  Repetition really is the key to mastering a movement and getting stronger.  The more repetitions you do, the more efficient your nervous system will be at this specific movement, and the easier it’ll be to get stronger.

Not only do you want reps, but you want perfect reps.  Doing near-max effort reps every single time you deadlift is not going to be the answer because your body won’t be able to perfect the movement pattern; every single time you perform the movement, you’re just trying to lift the heaviest weight possible (aka, your body switches to compensation mode).  Don’t get me wrong, you do need to load the bar to get stronger, but you need to be smart about it.  You need to make sure that form is your first priority and you never sacrifice it for weight.

Practice.  Practice with perfect form.  Practice some more.  Make every rep count.  Do a lot of them.  Do your main movements more than once a week.

“If it’s important, do it every day.  If it’s not important, don’t do it at all.” – Dan Gable

For all the insights in strength and conditioning, make sure you sign up for my newsletter; it’s FREE and you get instant access to my 3 sports performance training reports!

I’m just finishing up Joel Jamieson‘s book Ultimate MMA Conditioning, and as I’ve mentioned in a previous post, it’s definitely an eye opener for me.  There are many things about conditioning that I thought I understood well, and now I’m just starting to rethink everything.  And to be honest, it goes far beyond just the conditioning part of training.  I’m starting to rethink some of the strength stuff as well.

Ever since I read the Ultimate Off-Season Training Manual from Eric Cressey and after I interned at Robert Morris University a few years ago, I was seeing max strength as the answer to pretty much everything; if athletes just got stronger, everything else would just fall into place.  I still think that max strength is a very important part of an athlete’s training program, and has profound effects on speed, power and agility.  But I’m starting to realize that it’s not all…

With that focus on max strength, the emphasis is mostly on improving the efficiency of the nervous system, increasing the activation of the fast-twitch muscle fibers and recruiting more motor units.  All of these effects are very important for any athlete if they want to improve their performance.  And this is mostly how we usually see strength training; it’s all about the nervous system, the muscle fibers and everything in between.

What we, myself included, too often fail to consider is the energy systems part of the equation.  And I’m not talking about how we condition our athletes.  I’m talking about the implication of the energy systems in strength training.  There is indeed a big neural and muscle fiber effect that comes from strength training, but there is also a energy system effect.  Even if it’s not conditioning in it’s traditional form, your body still need to produce the energy necessary to lift the weights.  When we lift weights and train for max strength, the anaerobic alactic system is going to be the one that is used primarily, which also means that we don’t have to worry too much about oxygen utilization, the number of mitochondrias in the muscle and that kind of stuff…..but that’s for one set of one exercise.

What happens when we run out of stored ATP after one set in the anaerobic alactic system?  Your body needs to recover and regenerate that source of energy while you rest.  And how does that happen?  Because you’re resting and the demands on your body are fairly low until you start your following set, this recovery process will happen through the aerobic system.  Now can you see where I’m going with this?

This is just one example to show you that your energy systems, and especially your aerobic system are involved in strength training even if you don’t think about it.  Not because we’re using weights means no energy system work is happening.  There is not a clear line between strength work and conditioning.  There is some overlap, just like there is some overlap between each energy system when you condition AND when you strength train.

Think about the implication this can have on your max strength and ensuing effect it’s gonna have in the practice of your sport.  Training for max strength is going to improve the efficiency of your nervous system and increase the percentage of fast twitch muscle fibers activation.  But if you don’t realize the importance of the aerobic system in the recovery process after short bouts of intense activity (a.k.a the use of the anaerobic alactic system), chances are you’ll be performing your first shift (or your first play, your first punch, first set, etc) at a very high intensity and you’ll have an edge over your opponents…..and then it’s gonna go downhill from there until the end of your game, match, etc. because your body will not have been trained to recover quickly.  If your body can’t recover as fast as possible every time, your performance will only get worse and worse as your game goes on.  Nobody wants that!

This is why understanding the importance and the implication of ALL the energy systems is crucial for your performance or the one of your athletes.  And that includes being aware of the implications of the energy systems on strength training and how to maximize the performance and recovery of each one of them.

Don’t forget to sign up for my FREE newsletter!  You’ll receive 3 bonuses on performance training for sports immediatly upon signing up!

Single-leg exercises like reverse lunges, rear foot elevated split squats and 1-leg squats can have great value in a training program as it improves your strength, your stability and your balance on 1 leg, which is the way most sports are played.  Whether it is when you run, when you change direction, when you skate (if your sport is played on the ice) or when you decelerate, all of these actions take place on one leg at a time.

For these reasons, single leg exercises might be more “functional” than 2-legs exercises like squats.  Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely love squats, but they might not transfer as much as single leg exercises when it comes to developing strength, speed and power in a sport context.  You just need to know which one to use and when.

Athletes still need to be able to squat as it is one of the most primitive patterns that the nervous system should control and master at a very young age.  You could be surprised to see how many athletes have a hard time squatting properly.  It can be because of mobility restrictions, stability or motor control problems, or other reasons, but it’s still a movement that an athlete (and any person as a matter of fact) should own.

If this isn’t textbook form….unfortunately I might lose this skill as he ages

That being said there is a strong neural relationship between single-leg strength and its carryover to sport’s performance.  And these can be used as a main lower body lifts just like a squat or a deadlift.  On top of being very beneficial in the transfer to sport’s performance, single-leg lifts can be great to reduce spinal loading (because you’re usually using less weight than double leg exercises) and to establish symmetry between both sides.  Also everything changes from double leg to single stance; more stabilizer muscles are engaged, core muscle activation is increased and the foot’s proprioception is challenged to a much greater extent.

Even if spinal loading is not as great as with regular squats, you can still get a tremendous effect out of single-leg training and gain a lot of strength.  If you’re not convinced, just check out this video of one of our hockey player at Endeavor doing Reverse Lunges with 255 pounds for 6 reps!

Even Coach Jorts  from  CoachJortsTraining.com can’t squat as much double leg! (barely 225! Pfff, those jorts don’t even make you stronger)

In all seriousness, my friend Kevin Neeld just released his Ultimate Hockey Training book last week and he goes into great details on the benefits of single-leg lifts.  Make sure you get a copy; he’s still selling it at the introductory price (less than 35$!!)

Kids are starting to strength train younger and younger these days.  Is it a bad thing?  Not necessarily.  Then, is it a good thing?  I’m not sure either.  Here’s the thing: despite many old beliefs that have been proven wrong through research, IT IS safe for kids to strength train as young as 6 years old.  The fact that it affects growth is a myth, that is if training is done in a safe way and in a supervised environment.

Although it is technically “safe” to do it, does it mean all kids should start lifting weights at 6 years old?  I don’t think so.  What it comes down to when considering if your kids should start to train or not, is really their mental maturity.  Strength training requires a great level of focus and seriousness.  If your kid can’t focus focus for 30 seconds straight, how do expect him to be able to perform an exercise the right when he is required to think about keeping his weight on his heels, sitting back, keeping his chest up and keeping his eyes straight ahead, all at the same time?

Strength training at a young age is not so much about getting the kids stronger, as it is to teach them correct movement patterns and to move the right way.  Gains in strength will be minimal before puberty anyway.  The goal is to have them master those movement patterns, so they can minimize injuries and get stronger at a much faster rate when they’ll hit their puberty.  If your kid is weak and slow at 9 years old, chances are he’s going to be weak and slow for a coupe of years.  But with proper training that reinforces quality movement, they have a chance of becoming much better athletes when they start to grow.

Might not be as easy as it looks  for a kid to master this movement?

Does that mean every kid should start lifting before 10?  God no!  Like I said, it all depends if the kid is mature enough to enter a weight room, be serious, be focused for an hour and understands that it’s a process that is going to make him better in the long run.  And if your kid is not mature enough for it, guess what?  IT’S NO BIG DEAL!!  Kids are kids and they should have fun!  Kids should play different sports and games and acquire as many new athletic abilities as possible through that.

I am a strength coach and I’m training kids as young as 12 years old.  I can’t send them home if they want to be there, because if it’s not me training them, it’s going to be someone else.  And with the quality of training offered in most sports training places, I’d much rather see them at Endeavor, learning to move well and becoming better athletes than being run through cone drills, and agility ladders until total exhaustion by some dude who doesn’t know what he’s doing.  And if they’re not going to train and they don’t want to, it’s fine; let kids be kids, and let’s let them play!

I came across a study yesterday (thanks to my colleague Kevin Neeld) on ice hockey and the relationship of physiological components with actual on-ice performance.  Before discussing the results of the study, what I found especially interesting with this specific study is that they were interested in the actual on-ice performance during games.  Most studies measuring physiological attributes (such as strength, speed, VO2 max, body fat, etc) usually relate these aspects to on-ice performance, but not very often to actual in-game performance; results will most of the time be compared to on-ice skating speed, endurance and the like.

In this study by Peyer et Al., the physiological measures were compared to in-game performance in the form of plus/minus scores.  The characteristics measured were:

• Age
• Height
• Weight
• Body mass
• Body fat %
• VO2 Max
• Repeated off-ice speed test (in the form of 12 x 110 meters sprints)
• Strength tests (in the form of push ups, chin ups, leg press and bench press)
• On-ice speed tests (dot-to-dot, short lightning, and lap sprint)
• Plus/minus on the ice during games

A significant correlation was found between the repeated off-ice sprint test, 3 strength tests (chin ups, leg press and bench press) and the plus/minus scores.  The players who performed the best on the repeated sprint test and the 3 strength tests had a better plus/minus score.  What is equally interesting to me is that body fat percentage and Vo2 max, which are two highly rated and utilized tests in the hockey community, had no relevance whatsoever with actual in-game performance.

Good Predictor of Hockey Performance?

If you’ve been using a no-nonsense approach to training hockey players (prioritizing strength, using an interval-based system for conditioning, etc) you’re probably not very surprised by the results of this study.  It’s interesting to me that the research world is actually coming up with concrete results that support and back some of the stuff we’ve been trying to spread in the strength and conditioning world.

It is obvious that there is a need for more research to be done on physiological components and their relation to in-game performance, as this study (like any study out there) has its flaws.  The first one is the fact that the study has been done on only one college hockey team (NCAA D-1), so only 24 players were part of the study.  In an ideal world we would want a bigger sample of players to contribute to the results.  Also, the in-game measure that was used was the plus/minus score of each player.  Although the plus/minus score gives a good idea about a player’s offensive and defensive abilities and reflects on-ice performance decently, there are other factors that affect this score.  For example, the goalie’s performance can positively or negatively affect the outcome of one player’s plus/minus; if the goalie is really good and allows very few goals during games, even when he faces a lot of shots, it can positively affect a player’s plus/minus score.  And the opposite is also true if the goalie is terrible and allows many goals, the plus/minus score will be affected negatively.

In conclusion, this study gives us a good lead on what might be more appropriate tests that actually co-relate to in-game performance and what physiological attributes might be more relevant for hockey players to focus on.

References

Peyer KL, Pivarnik JM, Eisenmann JC, Vorkapich M. (2011). Physiological characteristics of national collegiate athletic association division I ice hockey players and their relation to game performance.  Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, 25(5):1183-92.

Lunges are a staple exercise in every single-leg training program.  Most of the time it is the first exercise we teach our athletes and clients.  It’s a basic exercise, it’s efficient and it’s functional.  But one question stands: reverse lunge or forward lunge?  Here’s a in-depth comparison of both that should give some answers.

Reverse Lunges

The reverse lunge is usually a better option for beginners.  You don’t have to decelerate your body weight as much with your front leg as you do with a forward lunge.  Instead you’re stepping back and keeping your weight on your front leg the whole time.

Your body is not traveling forward, so no deceleration, which is part of the eccentric portion of the movement (and the hardest part of the movement to control).  Because of that, the  eccentric portion (when you go down) is easier with a reverse lunge.  On the way up, you’ll need to get a big push with your front leg to push yourself straight up (think of it as being axial loading, referring to the load vectors principle).

You’ll also get a significant push off from your back foot to help propel you forward and come back up in the starting position.
Because of the axial loading (straight down) on the front leg and the big push off from the back foot, you can load a reverse lunge a lot more than you can load any other type of lunges, whether it is with dumbbells, with a front squat grip with a barbell or with a back squat grip.  It is not uncommon to see beginners go up in weights very quickly with reverse lunges once they’ve mastered the movement.  I’ve seen many kids (younger than 16) get up to 70 pounds dumbbells and with 155 pounds on the bar for reverse lunges within 3 months of training.

To recap:

• The reverse lunge is easier to learn;
• It has more of an axial loading vector;
• You can load them up more than other types of lunges.

Forward Lunges

The forward lunge is definitely more difficult to perform, and to master as well, than a reverse lunge.  By taking a step forward, you are propelling your body forward, and therefore need to decelerate this forward momentum of your body weight with your front leg from the instant the foot touches the ground and all the way down to the bottom of the movement.

That portion of the movement alone makes a forward lunge a lot more challenging than a reverse lunge.  The concentric part (the push off to return to the starting position) is also more challenging.  The loading is more postero-anterior (again, referring to the load vectors theory), which means you need to push yourself up and back to return to the starting position.

Your body actually has to travel back to its original position, and therefore you need a big push off with your front leg.  Your push off also needs to be quick and powerful if you want to generate enough force to propel your whole body back.  Because of that increased need for a quick and powerful action you won’t be able to load a forward lunge as much as a reverse lunge (think of it this way: the heavier the load gets, the harder it is to move it fast.  The opposite also being true; the lighter the load, the easier it is to generate force quickly).  Another factor that’s going to limit the amount of weight you can use with a forward lunge is the fact that you don’t get much help from your back leg, because you’re actually pushing back.  A very important thing to note is that because you can’t load a forward lunge as much as a reverse lunge, doesn’t mean it’s an inferior exercise.  The deceleration (or increased eccentric) part of the movement makes it a great exercise to improve decelerative abilities for athletes.  Deceleration is a HUGE part of any sport, and crucial in quick transitions and efficient change of directions (athletes need to decelerate fast, and accelerate fast in order to have optimal quickness and agility).

To recap:

• The forward lunge is a more challenging exercise than the reverse lunge to perform;
• You can’t load it as much;
• It has more of a postero-anterior loading vector;
• It has a big deceleration component to it;
• It’s really effective for athletes to train deceleration.

In conclusion, there is not one exercise better than the other one; just a more appropriate choice depending on who it is for and what you’re trying to accomplish with it.  I hope this clarified any confusion that you might have had with this exercise.

Don’t forget that I opened up only a couple of spots for my online program design services!  If you’re interested, visit my Services page to read all the details, make sure you e-mail me as fast as possible; spots are limited!

While you’re at it, don’t forget to sign up for my FREE newsletter and make sure you don’t miss out on athletic development secrets!!

We hear it all the time that athletes should train in a “sport-specific” way.  They should perform exercises that are similar to the movements they perform in the practice of their sport, and training programs for different sports should be totally different.  I flat out disagree.

We always see athletes performing these fancy exercises in the gym that reproduce the same movement patterns that they perform in playing situations.

Do you SERIOUSLY think this is gonna improve your slap shot just because it looks like it?

This kind of practice is FAR from optimal for a couple of different reasons: first, when you load a movement pattern, you affect the efficiency of it (for example, if you perform an exercise similar to a slap shot with a load, you’ll actually affect your original slap shot pattern, and you’ll be less efficient at performing it on the ice).  Second, the more you stress the same structures the exact same way over and over, it will lead to overuse injuries a lot faster.  But I digress.

Let’s take a step back for a minute, and consider what every athlete needs.  I think it’s fair to say that what any athlete is looking for is speed, power, strength, endurance (relative to their sport, obviously) and a better level of conditioning (again, relative to their sport).

The hang clean will develop power for ANY sport!

Basically, all athletes are looking for the same thing.  So why would their training be that different?  You’re going to tell me that conditioning demands are different for a football player than they are for a hockey player.  And you’re right.  Conditioning demands are different, and the energy systems used are different.  And the same thing goes for injury prevention; the overuse and non-contact injuries that happen in different sports are different, so therefore require special injury prevention strategies adapted to the demands of their specific sport.  There are also variations that are gonna take place if you play a rotational sport (think hockey, baseball, tennis) in the way you train power.  But the biggest differences pretty much stop there.

Rotational sports require more rotation-based power exercises like med ball throws

Strength training will never be “specific” to a sport.  Like I mentioned above, performing exercises similar to sport movements in the weight room is far from optimal, and even detrimental to athlete’s performance.  Speed, power, strength, endurance and conditioning are all developed through the same modalities (or pretty much) no matter what sport you play, because what you are developing when you’re training is not your sport-related skills, but rather your athletic qualities (muscular and cardiovascular), and those are not specific to one single sport, but common to most sports.

Like I’ve mentioned earlier, there are going to be some minor tweaks in the way you write performance programs for different sports, especially when it comes to conditioning and injury prevention, but the big lines and the structure of the programs might be a lot more similar than you think.

Don’t forget to sign up for my newsletter!  It takes only a couple of seconds, it’s FREE and you’ll instantly receive 3 bonuses on sports training!