Yes, Judo, your understanding is clear. Train for strength, condition outside sports practice if it is actually and truly necessary, and practice your sport. That is all.
Training for Sports... Competition vs. Practice Demands
Coach Ripp,
To be a succesful athlete, one has to spend a great deal of time practicing and improving sport's specific skills. Nevertheless, practicing your sport only gets you so far, as everyone else is doing the same. To get and advantage over your rivals, you have to look outside your sport to improve your performance. That's why genetically gifted athletes, or those who are physically stronger, have and edge over their opponents.
Most sports, demand a lot of biomotor habilities, yet fail to develop these same abilities to their full potential. For instance, wrestling requires strength, but you will not get stronger only by wrestling, unless you're a beginner. It also requires aerobic power, and anaerobic capacity, both of which are adressed during practice itself, but not developed to their full potential.
And we cannot just focus on the competition demands of the Sport. It is true that a wrestling match might only last 6 minutes, but, the training process lasts the whole week, months, years... And we must develop abilities that will ensure the athlete can endure the demands of the sport, day in, and day out.
Do you think that it is useful to spend time working on traits that the sport itself already adresses, or if, outside the mats/court/track, athletes would be better of training more general abilities?
For example, for Judo/Wrestling, I think that it's more useful to spend time getting stronger, than doing circuit training, even though circuit training might seem more ''specific''
On the other hand, a sport like wrestling demands high aerobic and lactic power. Would it make sense to adress these outside of practice, or the sport itself already conditions the athlete to competition demands?
I apologize for the extensive question
I hope you can share some thoughts on this topic, Coach.
TMPHBITEU
Yes, Judo, your understanding is clear. Train for strength, condition outside sports practice if it is actually and truly necessary, and practice your sport. That is all.
Member
That's another T-shirt.Originally Posted by Mark Rippetoe
Starting Strength Coach
It would be great if more people understood this. I get very frustrated hearing about kids I work with wasting their strength, talent, time, and energy doing silly things after spending hours and hours of my time getting them strong.
Rip is dead on the money. As usual.
Member
I'm still waiting for Rip's "Grow or Decay" shirt.
Member
I wrestled on the division 1 and continue to wrestle on the senior level. If you want to get better at wrestling you have to wrestle. However wrestling practices do not have to be that intense. In order to get in condition for an important wrestling tournament it only takes about 4 weeks.
It takes way more time to get stronger. I believe that it is important to work on your strength. You can do circuit work when you are already strong.
Just lift heavy, work on technique and wrestle live. That will be all you need until you are about a month or so out from an important tournament. Those should only be a few times a year tho.
Coach, what I've learned through the books has been very important in my development as an athlete, and as a future coach, but, I'm still an young fellow, and all the talk about energy systems, conditioning, aerobic capacity, lactic power, power endurance, etc. still creates some confusion in my mind.
And the coaches I have worked around with all preach about these things, even though they don't fully understand them, I think
Sometimes it's easy to get carried away, so, I just want to stick with what has been proven to work over the years
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