Athletes Don't Need Special Training

At least not until they're already strong

Athletes, just like regular people, need to get strong first, and can worry about any and all other details later. The reason why isn’t complicated, but lots of overly complicated explanations are conjured up to deny this simple fact.

Sammy Sosa and late 90s baseball

I could probably drop this meme right here and my intelligent readers could figure out the rest:

Circa 1990 vs 2005

For those who don’t know baseball, Sammy Sosa was an above-average but unexceptional home run hitter in the early to mid 1990s, who suddenly exploded with 66 home runs in 1998, revitalizing baseball in his chase with Mark McGwire to break the then-37 year old single season home run record of 61, set by Roger Maris in 1961.

While players have exploded for exceptional single seasons before, Sosa went on to what I believe is still, 25 years later, the most prolific 4 year power stretch in baseball history with successive seasons of 66, 63, 50, and 64 home runs to go along with an annual average of 149 RBIs during that period.

Working as a peanut and hot dog vendor at Wrigley Field during those years, I had a first row seat to this show, and it was electric. All 40,000 fans would stop whatever they were doing, every time Sammy came to bat. It wasn’t even worth trying to sell anything, so I’d just stop and watch. An amazing time.

What does this have to do with sports-specific training, and why it’s overrated and often unnecessary? The meme hilarious encapsulates the secret sauce that Sosa used to go from above average to all time great power hitter. And, let’s just say, it doesn’t seem to be “sport-specific.”

Sosa has continuously denied he ever took steroids, but a 2009 New York Times article named him as one of more than 100 Major League Baseball players who tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs during spring training in 2003.

To people intimately familiar with physical culture, this was the most unsurprising revelation in history. The signs were there, and the revelation of a positive test was a mere formality. Not enough to make a formal allegation or win in court, of course, but that’s not the point.

PretendsToBeShocked.gif

Sport-specific training

What does all this have to do with special, sport-specific training for athletes, and why it’s overrated and often unnecessary? It’s pretty simple, and none of the overly complicated, convoluted arguments really cut through the BS as well as this: Performance-enhancing drugs make you stronger.

They don’t make your technique better, they don’t improve your eyesight, they don’t work on ‘sport specific’ movements, positions, or ranges of motion. They primarily make you more muscular and stronger. While there is some preliminary evidence they can improve coordination a bit through neuromuscular effects, that’s not certain as far as I know, and we generally didn’t see the batting averages of the players implicated improve by the leaps and bounds, the way that we saw their power numbers improve. To the extent that batting averages did improve, it can likely be mostly explained by balls being hit harder - aka strength - and thus either leaving the park instead of being caught on the warning track, or being hit too hard to get to for a catch. But largely it was the power numbers that rocketed up.

If the central premise of sport-specific training was true, this shouldn’t have been the case. PEDs don’t improve anything in a sport specific manner. They don’t mimic field or court positions for any sport, they don’t train the body through specific ranges of motion that the sport requires. They make you broadly and generally stronger. And this leads to the results we see on the field, without any sport specific training or focus.

Practical Application

What this means in practice is that, unless an athlete is already strong, then getting stronger should be the priority in the gym. Sports practice should take care of all those sport-specific positions and skills, which ARE important. But that’s not why you go to the gym; that’s why you practice, repeat, and practice some more on the field and court.

In the gym, you train to get stronger, and that’s it - at least until you’re already strong. The best way to get stronger is through full range of motion, repeatable, progressively loaded, full body barbell lifts like the squat, press, bench press, deadlift, and power clean. Along with some selective accessories like chin-ups or lat pulldowns, barbell or dumbbell rows, maybe a couple others.

Until you’ve reaped the substantial, and relatively fast, increases in strength that you’ll make with such a program, all the agility ladder drills, sport specific position stuff, unstable surface this and cable-mimicking-the-thing-on-the-field that, are just not as useful (if they’re useful at all, beyond perhaps a warmup or to alleviate boredom).

The great thing is, you can do all this without worrying about the side effects, substance bans, or penalties associated with PED use. Just use barbells to get stronger using a program like the one linked above. It works for everyone, every time it’s done correctly, and works even better for athletes, who are genetically primed to respond even better to physical training.

Until you’ve reached that point in your basic strength development, both the PEDs and the sport specific training are unnecessary. Get stronger first, using progressively loaded, full ROM basic barbell lifts and a small handful of accessories. Because after all, it wasn’t single arm, cable-baseball-bat-handle high to low ax chop rotations that did this for Sammy Sosa

or this

or this

and it wasn’t some baseball specific, staggered stance partial ROM deadlift, mimicking his batting stance, that got him from a 35 home runs a year to 66. It was, obviously, the muscles, and the strength that they improved.

If you could build that strength just by training effectively, why wouldn’t you?