Specialized Exercises for Sport?

Many people will look at this exercise and freak out. Of course for the regular population this exercise is very dangerous and has no merit. But for a highly qualified athlete this exercise would be called a “Specialized Exercise”.

Specialized Exercise

Defined as:

These specialized exercises are usually done for the highly qualified athlete that doesn’t gain as much benefits from regular exercises like the rest of us. With that said, too many people are trying to create exercises that will have minimal translation or even execute exercises that will have minimal translation because of their lack of qualification.

Sites such as YouTube has given many athletes a platform to show off how they train, the problem is many of the popular videos are of highly skilled athletes. Yet blindly, young athletes believe because “X athlete trains this way I should too”. Clearly this far from the truth, there are too many variables such as training history, strength/Power of the athlete, DNA, sport skill development etc…

Without making this post into a program design book, the point is for a majority of athletes they will need the basic fundamentals with some tweaks for subjectivity and sport skills. Outside of that it’s hard work, recovery, and training smart!

Translation of “Creative” Specialized Exercises

I absolutely hate it when I see a unqualified Coach implementing specialized exercises for unqualified athletes or just as bad “creating” exercises that have minimal translation to sport and becomes wasted time and effort of the athlete. For example I watched an MMA athlete doing shoots to Zercher lunges, did this make sense? Would the athlete have better gained strength from doing Zercher split squat/lunges without the shoot? Or even just a general strength exercise? Most likely this athletes performance gains will be better developed from training without the shoot, he than could work on his sport skill such as shoots in practice.

That’s all for today. Train smart!

Team Fusion