THE SPECIFICITY TRAP.

The role of a strength and conditioning coach is often misunderstood, I thought I’d share my opinion on what it means to be an S&C coach:

‘Our job as S&C’s is to make you a better athlete. It is to increase your athleticism, make you faster, stronger and more robust’.

Quite often the line between us and skills coaches gets blurred. For example it is not my job to make you better at taking corners or shooting 3 pointers, you (hopefully) have skills coaches for that. What I can do is improve the movement patterns involved in your chosen sport to make performing the specific actions during a match easier, faster or more powerfully. I touched on this in my last blog article where I talked about how olympic lifting helps increase power and speed, a certain exercise or movement can have direct transfer to an action performed in a sport. For instance, if you look at the general movement pattern of a basketball shot: 

There is a slight dip in the lower body, followed by extension at the ankles, knees and hips as you jump upwards, the arms then extend over head and the ball is thrown from the very top of the jump. Now, that is an awful lot of muscles involved in what is quite a basic movement (a movement most people can do regardless of skill or experience). So we can look at what muscle groups and movements are involved and prescribe exercises for them right? That is how we improve our basketball shot, surely?!

Hold up…it’s not that easy! By doing that we run the risk of falling into what is known as the ‘specificity trap’. This is where confusion arises from a lack of distinguishing between skills (technique, coordination) and capacities (strength, aerobic capacity). This can lead to, on one hand, a skills coach trying to force new technical improvements when the athlete simply doesn’t have the capacity to achieve that change. Or, on the other hand, it could be an S&C coach being pressured to implement ‘sport specific’ drills that at face value replicate the movement patterns seen in the sport. 

So, going back to the basketball shot example, as an S&C coach, I am not going to be getting a basketball out, and I also won’t be getting a medicine ball out either with the idea that a heavier ball, then makes the basketball feel light as a feather when I throw it in comparison. What I will do is focus more on what happens with the legs. Now unless it is a free throw attempt, almost all the shots taken on the basketball court will be jump shots. Armed with this knowledge I can then begin to think about trying to improve my athletes jump ability. If I can improve my athletes vertical jump, it is going to have numerous benefits to their game. Now that may seem obvious, but you would be surprised how many coaches would go straight in with ‘medicine ball throws or thrusters’ in an attempt to replicate the sport rather than choosing an exercise where significant overload of the physical capacity can be achieved…such as a barbell jump squat. 

Another classic example of the ‘specificity trap’ that I have personally seen in the gym on more than one occasion is the weighted cable rotation to mimic a golf swing. A golf swing, is hugely dependant on power and even more so on timing. You can’t swing one of the cable machines in a gym around at full throttle, it’s not safe to you or others around you and it will very quickly wreck the equipment. And for that, you will not be popular, because everyone loves the cables! So swinging around with a weighted cable in your hand instead of a golf club in an attempt to improve your general swing will not give you the results your looking for. Ironically, an exercise that would be far more suitable here is one I mentioned in my previous point…a medicine ball throw. Grab a medicine ball, stand about an arms distance away from a wall, in a good athletic stance. Hold the ball out in front of your chest, rotate the ball to your side using your torso and your hips and fire that ball into the wall by driving your hips and your torso towards your target. Use your entire body to throw that ball, not just your arms.

Be careful what exercises you select when training for your sport, sure many will benefit, but many will have little to no effect whatsoever and some could even be detrimental to your performance. If in doubt ask a professional in the industry for some guidance.