'Train like an athlete, eat like a nutritionist, sleep like a baby, win like a champion.'
A lot of us will have heard or read that corny quote in some variation before. It is a little bit cringeworthy and realistically who has the time or ability to sleep like a baby, unless you are a baby?! But there are some truth's in the training like an athlete part. Regardless of the sport, top performing athletes have certain methods, practices and ways of approaching their diet and training that allows them to not only become incredibly skilled at what they do, but perform at a high level consistently. Whilst a lot of the time they train in a very SPECIFIC manner to prepare for their sport, there are certain fitness skill elements such as agility, power, speed, strength that feature.
We can take tips and inspiration from how top level athletes perform and implement parts into our own training. Incorporating different methods such as power, speed and agility training can be really beneficial to create a well rounded body that performs well, moves efficiently and looks 'fit'. Even if your training and goals don’t focus solely on sport specific movements, there are a tonne of transferrable skills that we can take away and put into lifting in the gym for example.
There are six skill-related fitness components-
-Agility
-Balance
-Coordination
-Speed
-Power
-Reaction time.
I like to use explosive dynamic exercises with my clients for both for warmup drills, to prepare the nervous system/ muscles for the rest of the session and also as finishers as a last max effort. Short distance banded sprints have been a recent favourite to increase the resistance and intensity of regular sprints. This increased resistance, forces the individual needs to produce a greater force to move through the same amount of space. It means the person sprinting, has to accelerate with more force to get away from a stationary position and maintain more effort to keep up that max sprint speed.
So what are the benefits of training in such a manner?
Ultimately, this depends on the area you decide to focus on. For example if you chose to add in some power and velocity training, you're going to be looking at
-More muscle fibres recruited to complete the task, meaning your body can recruit these fibres more readily in the future. Also means that when an exercise is completed without this added resistance/load, you will be able to perform it quicker.
-Increased neural activation.
-Overloading the muscles and strengthening the movement pattern.
-An ability to produce more force and accelerate through a movement at a faster rate.
These benefits can also be transferred into a gym environment. Again sticking with the power/explosiveness theme, the ability to produce more force and accelerate from a stationary position, becomes useful when it comes to accelerating out of a squat or pulling a barbell from the floor. I don’t know about you, but being able to get up quickly when a squat gets nitty gritty sounds VERY appealing.
As always though, these more complex training styles and adding resistance/intensity should be done with caution. Master the movement first and aim to maintain high intensity with good form, before you look to increase the reps/duration. Think short and sweet [just less sweet and more sweat!!] So whilst training like this may not have you running like Bolt, dunking like Jordan, swimming like Ross Edgely bending it like Beckham or lifting like Thor anytime soon, you may very well improve your physique, performance and overall 'well-roundedness' in the process.
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