The 5 Most Dangerous Words In The Profession

“Is your program sport-specific?” seems like a straightforward question, but there’s a trap lurking beneath the surface. Here’s how to avoid taking the fall.

“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble.
It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”
— Mark Twain

I’ve got good news and bad news. For starters here’s the bad news: the subject of this article is specificity, perhaps the most mundane and unexciting concept in all of training. Why bother going there when we could tackle so many other interesting, urgent issues? Specificity is worth revisiting precisely because it’s such a foundational concept that it tends to slip under our radar. Of all the time-honored training principles, none seem to get bastardized and misinterpreted the way specificity does. Maybe that shouldn’t be surprising. Who wants to think about stuff like analyzing task demands when there’s planning and coaching to do?

Now for the good news: Specificity really isn’t boring at all, especially when you consider its place in the planning process. Think of it as the essential first step in preparing any strategy: zeroing in on the target. You can be an expert at the next two steps — understanding the situation and selecting tactics — but if you don’t get an accurate fix on your performance target, odds are you’ll miss it despite your best efforts.

So hopefully I’ve got your attention and you’ll read on. I’ll try to keep it interesting and present a worthwhile take-away message. If I can accomplish that, with luck you won’t be caught off guard the next time you hear the five most dangerous words in the profession.

The Simulation Epidemic

There’s no doubt about it, the sports training scene has come down with a bad case of simulation over the last decade or so. In my opinion, it has become the pandemic of our profession. Some practitioners are missing the target worse than ever, emphasizing “sport specific” training tasks that are based on outward appearances more so than actual demands. It’s a classic example of unintended consequences: Start with a basic principle (specificity), give lots of people easy access to lots of information — some of which is sound, but some of which is nonsense — and even with good intentions, the signal-to-noise ratio gets fubar fast.

To be clear: every sport has some specific demands. However, most sports share some generic demands as well. For the majority of athletes — at least those involved in terrestrial activities — there is a skill set that matters more than passing, shooting, throwing, kicking, dribbling, stickhandling and so on. I’m talking about the common movement skills of running and jumping.

Here comes the painful part of this exercise. Think about what the demands of running and jumping really mean for training, in terms of injury prevention as well as performance. In ground-based sports from A to Z, whether the players are female or male, think about how these general demands should influence your training priorities. Consider the implications not only for advanced athletes, but also for novices and intermediates. Then — brace yourself — compare this with the “specialized” programs many coaches and parents want you to provide.

Therein lies the problem.

Of course there are sports that don’t involve running or jumping — cycling, rowing and swimming are obvious examples — but you get the idea. We need to select training tactics with respect to both specificity (the target) and developmental considerations (the situation). At any point in the program, no matter how compelling the need for basic training might be, the trick is to balance needs with wants. People won’t do a program that they don’t accept, and it’s remarkably tough to get some folks to buy into the ideas of running-centered or developmentally-appropriate training.

In my experience, this challenge presents itself on a few fronts:

• It’s getting harder to convince many people of the need for generic training or the pitfalls of getting too specific, especially early in an athlete’s development. Make no mistake, progressing toward specific performance targets is the name of the game, with progression being the central concept. The key is to approach training as a long-term curriculum that begins with a broad base — the prerequisites — and gradually zeros in on the target. As is the case with any developmental curriculum, however, fast-track or early-specialization programs usually backfire. Unfortunately, that’s exactly what many coaches and parents want.

• It’s hard to convince many people of the need for remedial training, especially later in an athlete’s development. Running and jumping mechanics are rarely taught in schools, probably because they’re not included in our national standards for physical education (NASPE 2004). Yet they comprise the essential language of movement that athletes need to be fluent in, making them the most “generic” and important skill set of all. As acquired skills, these should be part of the syllabus during children’s critical developmental periods; but the assumption seems to be that they’re innate skills and don’t need to be taught. This is a big blind spot with big implications (e.g. it’s one thing to accept that a high school student-athlete isn’t ready for a college program, but it’s another thing altogether to accept going back to elementary school for corrective work).

• Many people have difficulty distinguishing specificity from simulation because of the nature of specificity itself. It is neither one-dimensional nor a stand-alone principle. As will be discussed below, it has at least three dimensions; and is one of seven principles that must be considered collectively.
  

With all these stumbling blocks, we’ve got some work to do if we’re going to set things straight. Fortunately, there’s a simple way to make sure you never miss the target again, and to help guide people out of the simulation trap.

Specificity³: Triangulating On The Target

Most people would probably agree that specificity is where it’s at, even if they don’t agree on how it’s defined. “Specific adaptation to imposed demands” (SAID) is widely acknowledged as a fundamental premise of training. Here in the West, traditional definitions of specificity usually address issues like muscle/joint involvement, range of motion and movement velocity. Beyond these, however, there really aren’t any standard criteria — which leaves the door open for plenty of opinion and (mis)interpretation. As we’ll see, there are some pillars we can lean on to help us come up with a working definition.

One of the central premises of the “functional training” school of thought is that movement involves the entire body. As a general rule, it’s not a question of which muscle groups we use; the issue is what they’re being tasked with, how they’re interacting, and how the operating system coordinates them. Paradoxically, muscles that might not appear to be main movers can in fact be major contributors because of the way forces are transmitted through the system. So we can’t rely just on outward appearances when analyzing a target task’s demands. We need objective criteria.

Specificity exists in several dimensions, giving us a useful framework for categorizing those criteria:

• Mechanical
• Energetic
• Coordinative

Think of these as three different perspectives you’re using to try to get a fix on a 3-D target. It’s important not to rely on just one or two perspectives because certain things may not be visible from each vantage point. In effect, we want to do what a good outdoorsman or navigator does when searching for an elusive object: triangulate on it.

Each perspective offers a useful paradigm we can build on. Let’s take them one at a time:

Mechanics. This is where we’ll look through the biomechanist’s lens at the forces, or kinetics, involved in the target activity. This is a perspective that we otherwise wouldn’t get by looking just at movement patterns, or kinematics.

Forces are vector quantities, which means they have direction and magnitude. They’re expressed in terms of acceleration, velocity, and rate or time of application. Furthermore, they’re applied via various muscle actions including concentric, eccentric and isometric — as well as reactive-elastic actions involving a combination of these, called the stretch-shortening cycle. Depending on the mode of locomotion, forces are transmitted and summated through the kinetic chain in technique-specific ways. The dynamic correspondence paradigm addresses all of these factors (Verkhoshansky 1977, 2006). According to this concept, training tasks should be specific to the target activity in terms of:

• Rate and time of peak force production (impulse) and the velocities at which it is applied
• Dynamics of effort (power)
• Amplitude and direction of movement
• Accentuated region of force application
• Regime of muscular work

It’s hard to find a better working definition of mechanical specificity than this — especially when evaluating propulsive ground-reaction forces. Dynamic correspondence seems like cutting-edge stuff, but was first introduced decades ago. This idea originated in the former Soviet Union, perhaps explaining why it’s still sinking in here in the West.

A comment about velocity specificity is in order. Because of the cause-and-effect relationship between force and velocity, it’s rather meaningless to consider either variable independently. When analyzing (or training for) a task, keep in mind that the forces producing the action are causative factors; whereas the resulting accelerations and velocities are outcomes. Athletes must be able to skillfully apply forces across the velocity spectrum even when they’re already moving fast. Achievable movement speed is also load-dependent — a major factor when ballistically launching oneself as a projectile, particularly when doing so from single support (as when running). In this sense, velocity specificity is really the final movement velocity targeted when accelerating a mass. The take-home message: regardless of movement speed, performance boils down to the forces an athlete generates.

Energetics. This lens seems to intimidate some people because they think they need to be an exercise physiologist to use it. The good news: We don’t need to concern ourselves with all that unfathomable stuff about energy systems; we just need to create an exercise:relief profile of the sport to use as a model in training. For this, we’ll put on our coaching hats and grab a clipboard, stopwatch and some game footage.

Few sports involve a single, brief effort. Most consist of ongoing activity with intense, intermittent bursts — or a series of plays with periodic rest intervals. Athletes need the metabolic power to execute their assignments at the required effort level, as well as the capacity (and recoverability) to do so repetitively. A simple, pragmatic way to achieve metabolic specificity in training is to model a conditioning program on the activity/inactivity patterns of competition.

That’s the idea behind the tactical metabolic training paradigm (Plisk & Gambetta 1997, Plisk 2008). It involves a simple 5-step procedure we can use to model the “special endurance” demands of a sport and then prepare athletes for them. “Tactical” in this context doesn’t refer to military or law enforcement. It has to do with the playing tactics used to achieve strategic goals in competition, and the energetics involved in doing so. If we identify the exercise:relief intervals and effort distribution of the target activity, and then train specifically for those, the energy system contributions will take care of themselves.

Coordination. This is where we’ll look through the motor behaviorist’s lens at the movement skills involved in the target activity. Here we can lean on the classic motor learning paradigm of practice specificity, which states that the demands of a training task should correspond to the target activity with respect to sensorimotor, processing and contextual effects (the origin of this principle is hard to trace; refer to Magill 2006, Schmidt & Lee 2005, and Schmidt & Wrisberg 2007). Our goal should be to maximize the acquisition, retention and transfer of motor skills. In other words, it’s not necessarily about mimicking the target activity’s movement patterns or kinematics — it’s about tasking the system with functional problems.

In this sense, training is like upgrading a computer system. We’ll get optimal results by improving both the hardware and software in a coordinated way, since they must work together. What’s unique about athletes is that their hardware is upgraded by their software, and this whole remodeling process is shaped by task demands. As a practical matter, the question then becomes: What are we tasking their software to do? The essence of functionality is to challenge the system with skill-based problems. This means criteria must take precedence over appearances. So, to put it bluntly, don’t get cute. Keep things pretty low-tech for the most part and prompt your athletes (rather than some gadget) to do the problem solving.

This touches on the related issue of balance or stability training. These methods have become so popular that a cottage industry has grown around them, but we need to keep things in perspective. Balance is part of a suite of “coordinative abilities” that have been recognized throughout the international community for decades (Drabik 1996; Harre 1982). Think of these as the basic elements of technical skills we use to perform motor tasks:

• Adaptive ability — modification of action sequence upon observing or anticipating novel/changing conditions and situations
• Balance — static and dynamic equilibrium
• Combinatory ability — coordination of body movements into a given action
• Differentiation — accurate, economical adjustment of body movements and mechanics
• Orientation — spatial and temporal control of body movements
• Reactiveness — quick, well-directed response to stimuli
• Rhythm — observation and implementation of dynamic motion pattern, timing and variation

Regardless of how useful balance training may be, keep in mind that the more instability you introduce into a task, the lower the athlete’s force output tends to be. Even if a balance exercise prompts a lot of muscle activation, much of this tends to involve protective co-contraction (e.g. to keep from losing balance) rather than power production. So it’s important to be clear about the goal of such tasks and to be especially careful about including them in strength training.

To sum up, there’s no denying the importance of SAID. Just remember that it refers to Specificity³:

• Take a look through the mechanics lens even if you’re sure the activity you’re training for is an “endurance sport”. Regardless of whether the energy systems are at steady state or maxed out, there’s a good chance that some explosive forces are being generated where the rubber meets the road.

• Take a look through the energetics lens even if you’re sure the activity you’re training for is a “power sport”. You might be surprised at the special endurance demands of competition or practice. Likewise, even long-duration sports usually involve intermittent stop-and-go activity, not just a continuous submaximal effort.

• Always, always, always look at the target activity through the coordination lens. Regardless of where athletes are on the power-endurance continuum, chances are you won’t see them sitting on guided-resistance machines or counting reps while playing the game. Of course there are exceptions, but for the most part life tends to be a free-weight sport.

The intersection of these three prongs of specificity is where we’ll find the “special preparation” tasks that closely correspond to a target activity. The more we steer an exercise toward one prong at the expense of the others, the lower the correspondence tends to be — in other words, the more of a “general preparation” task it becomes. That’s not a value judgment. It’s a useful rule of thumb when prioritizing and selecting training activities.

This brings us to the short list of movements that seem to be staples in many training programs, including Olympic-style lifts, squats and plyometrics. Each of these satisfies most or all of the criteria mentioned above. Collectively, they work well together because they can potentiate one another’s effects. Still, some people react negatively when asked to do them — as if the fact that they’re commonly used in sports like football makes them inappropriate for other activities. When you think about it, however, football shares the same basic demands as other ground-based activities; and the main purpose of these movements is to improve athleticism and prevent injury, not to bodybuild. So when you encounter resistance, it helps to remind people that such generic exercises are the right medicine for a wide range of athletes as long as appropriate doses, or loads, are prescribed.

Fundamentals

Having clarified what specificity actually is, as well as what it isn’t, let’s put things in context. Specificity is one of at least seven training principles that have stood the test of time (Dick 2007; Harre 1982; Matveyev 1977; Stone, Stone & Sands 2007; Zatsiorsky & Kraemer 2006). This isn’t just a checklist of no-brainers. Fundamentally sound training involves making some important decisions and resolving some challenging trade-offs:

• Accommodation: The biological response to constant stimuli decreases with repeated application. Novel/beneficial stressors yield adaptation; whereas monotonous/detrimental stressors yield stagnation or decay.

• Continuity: The body’s homeostatic mechanisms up-regulate corresponding systems in response to training; and down-regulate them in response to detraining.

• Individuality: The same stimuli induce unique responses in each athlete due to genetic differences, developmental/training status and environmental factors.

• Progression: Long-term preparation should be planned such that tasks become progressively more challenging with respect to critical/sensitive developmental periods. Optimal learning and training effects are achieved by advancing from general to special movements and extensive to intensive workloads.

• Specificity³: Adaptation becomes increasingly specific to imposed demands as the athlete’s level of preparation improves. Training tasks should correspond to the mechanical, energetic and coordinative demands of the sport.

• Synergy: Focus should be directed toward integrated movement qualities and systemic training effects. The challenge is to plan and implement various stimuli in order to exploit cumulative and interactive responses, and minimize fatigue/compatibility problems.

• Variability²: Adaptive responses to strenuous loading are manifested during subsequent unloading periods. Summated/sequenced training effects are realized through planned distribution or variation in training means (content) and methods (workload) on a cyclic or “periodic” basis.

The problem with these principles is that they often fly under people’s radar because they seem mundane. Consequently, some of them are misunderstood while others aren’t commonly recognized, at least on this side of the pond. In many resources published in the West, specificity and progressive overload are two that seem to be universally accepted, but after that it’s a crapshoot (by contrast, in the international community — especially the former Eastern Bloc — a full list of principles dominates entire chapters in most of the classic books on sports training). The result is predictable: Principles tend to get lost in the noise and many people are unclear on the concepts. It’s no wonder unsound or nonsensical training practices are still so common in some settings.

The first time you skim through the list of principles, it will probably occur to you that each one is just common sense. But go through them one more time and consider them collectively. Notice how some seem to conflict with each other even though they make sense individually. Two obvious examples are specificity and variation. The trade-off between these principles is one of the most important paradoxes of all because it drives the central decisions we have to make.

According to the SAID concept, training needs to be specific to a performance target or we’re just getting exercise. At the same time, we know that the system will accommodate (read: stagnate) if the training stimulus is too narrow. In effect, then, we need a bandwidth of variation around the target — and the earlier an athlete is in their development, the broader this bandwidth needs to be.

To borrow a pitching analogy: first, we need to be sure that we’ve identified the strike zone, and for that matter that we’re in the right ballpark. Next, we need to know the situation. In baseball, this starts with knowing the count; in training, it means knowing an athlete’s developmental status. Then we can select our pitches. Sometimes we’ll want to aim it right down the pipe; other times we’ll want to deliberately miss the strike zone a bit, to keep the other player on its toes.

Task analysis (specificity) is the unexciting, tedious part of planning. Selecting tactics (variation) is where the fun stuff is, and where we tend to focus our attention much of the time. But we can get into big trouble if we don’t first zero in on the correct target or recognize the situation — two distinct problems when overloaded with information. This is precisely when principles are most valuable, but also easiest to overlook. They make a great baloney detector and noise filter, enabling us to find superior information — i.e. the signal — and hopefully use it in a superior manner. Above all, remember that principles are natural laws that won’t cease and desist no matter how distracted or preoccupied we may be.

Good Old Needs Analysis: New & Improved!

Certain aspects of the triangulation concept should sound familiar. It’s really just a revised approach to needs analysis, the first step in exercise prescription (Kraemer 1983). Originally, this step involved a two-pronged (mechanical and energetic) analysis of a sport’s demands. We’re simply adding a third prong (coordination) and updating the criteria used in each.

There are corollaries to needs analysis in other professions. Occupational and Physical Therapists design “return to work” programs that have high fidelity to patients’ job demands. Therapists commonly use work domain analysis (Brannick, Levine & Morgeson 2007) as well as task analysis (Watson & Wilson 2003) procedures to model the performance demands and constraints of certain activities. The central idea is to evaluate the interaction between people, environments and activities; and then plan and implement intervention programs that improve how these factors fit together.

Athletic activities tend to be at the high end of the continuum in terms of both performance and stress. Our ultimate goal should still be to improve athletes’ fitness to their target activity and environment. Our intervention programs should be designed, first and foremost, as developmentally-appropriate curricula where the emphasis progresses from general to special preparation over the long term.

Is Your Program Sport-Generic?

When you consider the common skill set or “language of movement” that many sports share, their specialized demands start to look a bit subtler in the scheme of things. In order to maximize athletes’ performance and minimize injury risks, we do need to identify truly sport specific issues. But it’s important to start with sport generic demands.

The language of movement analogy isn’t just a buzzword. Both speech and movement are acquired skills that involve the brain’s motor centers. In each case, achieving fluency requires sequenced development that begins with general prerequisites and then progresses toward more specialized or advanced content. The keys are to apply educationally-based training strategies and to take the term “student-athlete” literally. It’s a badge of honor if you can accurately describe your macro-, meso- and microcycles in terms of curriculum, syllabus and lesson plans, respectively.

The challenge in practice is to convey this to someone who has fallen into the simulation trap (but isn’t aware they’re in it) or doesn’t see the connection between training and education (but wants their kid doing an elite athlete’s program). It can also be a tough sell with coaches or parents who react negatively when their athletes do an exercise that’s commonly used in other sports. Hopefully these ideas, and some of the resources cited below, will help improve their signal-to-noise ratio.

In closing, some of our basic assumptions — the things like specificity that we “know for sure” — may be where we’re most likely to miss something or let a half-truth slip through our defenses. Once an idea finds its way into our belief systems, we tend to rationalize it and bring in the reinforcements. It’s normal to acquire biases, defend beliefs, disregard or distort new information that doesn’t conform, and generally develop a bad case of confidence. The more expertise we acquire in one area, the more it tends to bolster our sense of competence in others. That’s often a good thing, but sometimes it can backfire.

It takes real willpower and humility to think critically, to challenge your own beliefs, and to strive for objectivity and rationality — especially when you’re being peppered with information from every angle. The payoff is worth it. So step back and reconsider an elementary idea like specificity. Triangulate, if only to make sure you didn’t miss something on the first pass. Your game plan will really hit its mark when all sides of the target are clearly visible.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Mike Barnes, Luke Bradford, Loren Chiu, Walt Cline, Hank Drought, John Kordich, William Kraemer, Loren Landow, Roger Marandino, Mike Napierala, Tim Piper, Kurt Schmidt, David Spierer, John Taylor, Jay Twell, Dan Wathen and John White.

Resources

1. Brannick M.T., Levine E.L. & Morgeson F.P. Job & Work Analysis (2nd Edition). Los Angeles CA: Sage, 2007.
2. Dick F.W. Sports Training Principles (5th Edition). London: A&C Black, 2007.
3. Drabik J. Children & Sports Training. Island Pond VT: Stadion Publishing, 1996.
4. Fleck S.J. & Kraemer W.J. Designing Resistance Training Programs (3rd Edition). Champaign IL: Human Kinetics, 2003.
5. Harre D. (Editor) Principles of Sports Training. Berlin: Sportverlag, 1982.
6. Kraemer W.J. Exercise prescription in resistance training: a needs analysis. NSCA Journal 5(1): 64-65, 1983.
7. Magill R.A. Motor Learning & Control (8th Edition). New York NY: McGraw-Hill, 2006.
8. Matveyev L. Fundamentals of Sports Training. Moscow: Fizkultura i Sport, 1977 [Moscow: Progress; translated by A.P. Zdornykh, 1981].
9. National Association for Sport & Physical Education. Moving Into the Future (2nd Edition). New York NY: McGraw-Hill, 2004.
10. Plisk S.S. Speed, agility, and speed-endurance development. In: T.R. Baechle & R.W. Earle (Editors), Essentials of Strength Training & Conditioning (3rd Edition). Champaign IL: Human Kinetics, 2008; pp. 457-485.
11. Plisk S.S. Training principles and program design. Strategies 18(4): 16-21, 2005.
12. Plisk S.S., Gambetta V. Tactical metabolic training. Strength & Conditioning 19(2): 44-53, 1997.
13. Schmidt R.A. & Lee T.D. Motor Control & Learning (4th Edition). Champaign IL: Human Kinetics, 2005.
14. Schmidt R.A. & Wrisberg C.A. Motor Learning & Performance (4th Edition). Champaign IL: Human Kinetics, 2007.
15. Stone M.H., Stone M.E. & Sands W.A. Principles & Practice of Resistance Training. Champaign IL: Human Kinetics, 2007.
16. Verkhoshansky Y.V. Fundamentals of Special Strength-Training in Sport. Moscow: Fizkultura i Spovt, 1977 [Livonia MI: Sportivny, 1986; translated by A. Charniga Jr].
17. Verkhoshansky Y.V. Special Strength Training. Muskegon MI: Ultimate Athlete Concepts, 2006.
18. Watson D.E. & Wilson S.A. Task Analysis (2nd Edition). Bethesda MD: American Occupational Therapy Association, 2003.
19. Zatsiorsky V.M. & Kraemer W.J. Science & Practice of Strength Training (2nd Edition). Champaign IL: Human Kinetics, 2006.

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