My first “career gig,” well before becoming a Starting Strength Coach, was coaching competitive youth soccer. In the soccer world, I couldn’t help but marvel at how well parents could often identify the areas in which their children needed improvement (“Josh is really struggling to make accurate passes”), but at the same time so often completely miss the mark on identifying an appropriate solution to the problem (“Would you have any time to work with him one-on-one? Just get him tired, he needs to work off that energy!”). In hindsight, of course, I realize that it’s not just the parents that miss the mark – my fellow coaches and I also made plenty of mistakes, especially when it came to improving athletic performance.

This article is written with those mistakes in mind, for anyone looking for the best way to make athletic improvements to support on-field sports performance. Athletes, parents, and coaches all have something at stake here. We will address some critically important questions that you need to ask about your athlete, discover that there are really only a small handful of improvements worth pursuing, and conclude with what the best athletic performance programs look like – as well as what they don’t look like. I will be making frequent references to soccer in this article; replace soccer with whatever sport you desire, the ideas are the same. While age and ability may require specific nuance, the general methods and ideas to follow hold true whether you’re trying to get a full ride playing college basketball or if you’re a retiree trying to improve your golf or pickleball. The sport doesn’t matter, your age doesn’t matter. Only the principles matter.

Parents want their kids to excel. For improvement in their sport, they’ll spend time, money and energy to provide what they hope will be an edge over others. Unfortunately, the fitness industry is a minefield of snake oil and false promises, so this “edge” is rarely found. It’s not just the aspiring meatheads and bodybuilders that need to be wary – the world of sports performance has been compromised as well. The more one knows about the truths of athletic performance and improvement, the more frustrating this becomes. But for whatever reason, too few parents, athletes and coaches dare to ask the question: “Is this really the best way to do things?”

If this article has found its way to your screen, hopefully you’re one of the few willing to question the norm and demand the best. Consider academics: when a kid is struggling with algebra, an astute parent knows that the hierarchy of best tutors would be those specializing in algebra, then general math, and then far more worthless would be the tutor of an unrelated subject like history or home economics. But parents are funny. In athletics, most are willing to accept very modest returns – and sometimes none at all – for all of their (and their kids’) energy inputs. To get the most bang for your buck, you must evaluate a proposed solution’s worth for yourself. This involves more than just buying what you’re told, and it certainly means being able to see through the illusion of short-term feelings and emotions (not to mention flashy videos, professional athletes, expensive facilities, and good marketing). It means being critical. Generally, it means:

1) Determining what your child needs to improve.

2) Determining if any given program will deliver this specific result.

This process is not complicated and should be obvious. In line with the algebra example above, the scenario can be laid out as such:

1) Johnny is failing algebra and thus needs help with algebra.

2) Would an algebra tutor be able to help Johnny improve his algebra? Most likely, yes. Let’s get Johnny an algebra tutor.

In most cases, we do this intuitively. It’s how we make decisions every day, often unconsciously. The issue, for our purposes, is that most people simply do not bother to question the status quo in the arena of athletic performance. This is a shame, not only because the status quo always deserves questioning, but more specifically because in our world of physical performance, the norm is wholly ineffective. Yes, even those things that Tom Brady, Lebron James and Cristiano Ronaldo are doing and selling are ineffective. You are not these genetic phenoms, and your kids aren't either, so you cannot afford to make these decisions unconsciously.

Partially to blame is the lack of quantitative metrics that most people use to judge sports performance improvement. In the classroom, if Johnny’s grade improves from a D to an A over the course of a few months, the pretty safe conclusion can be made that the tutoring worked. On the playing field, “He looks like he’s playing better lately” is a very subjective observation, one that can often be attributed to any number of mental, emotional, and psychological reasons in addition to the physical ones. This will always be the case – and this is why so many patently ineffective athletic performance programs continue to exist: it’s hard to prove they aren’t working. Wouldn’t you rather have something that you know will work?

Training vs Practice

In order to properly evaluate athletic performance, it is critical that you understand the difference between training and practice. “Practice” for soccer includes improving every technical skill required for playing the game effectively – all the various ball skills as well as general spatial understanding and “how and why to move” in any given situation. Passing, dribbling, and shooting. This is the goal of soccer practice. An adequate tactical understanding of simple and complex strategy is an important part of excelling at high levels as well, though developing this tactical understanding is generally a different learning process than the improvement of the specific on-field skills.

“Training” for soccer includes making the physiological adaptations that are necessary to be able to demonstrate the practical skills in an improved performance – being able to excel physically in every way that soccer demands. Training refers to a physiological asset that can be improved, while “exercise” would be physical activity that does not or can not measurably be improved for very long. Most things are exercise. For something to be considered “training,” it must be improvable over a long period of time. Training gets you better at using your body within your environment, and thus allows you to further improve your technical skills, both with and without the ball.

The key here is understanding that training and practice must be done separately to yield the best short- and long-term performance results. Always remember: to get better at anything, you must spend your time working on things that you can improve, while learning to avoid wasting time on things that cannot be changed very much, no matter how hard you work at it.

In considering the arguments that are to follow, you must accept that not all “athletic performance” programs are created equal. But what’s worse is that the vast majority of them aren’t worth your time or money, either. No, I’m not exaggerating. There is an immensely sharp drop-off in outcome-based quality from good programs to the rest. And unfortunately, unless you’re already well acquainted with the almost magical powers of proper strength training, the programs that you currently admire, trust and are impressed by are likely the ones at the bottom of the steep drop off. It is your job as a parent, athlete, or coach to make the most of your time, effort and money. You wouldn’t keep paying the tutor that hasn’t helped your grades to improve, would you? In order to adequately determine whether or not a program will give you what you are looking for, you must address the two aforementioned questions.

What Does the Athlete Need?

Just working hard and getting tired does not make a better athlete. I wish it did. Like any project, the process must be tailored to have the desired goal in mind. What are you trying to improve? The ten aspects of fitness article details what we can improve from a physiological standpoint. It discusses the importance of and the interplay between each main category of fitness. Spoiler alert: improving strength is vital, and positively affects every other aspect of fitness like nothing else can. Instead of discussing each of the ten aspects individually, you’ll find that they all fall somewhere under the three general categories below, either neatly or loosely. These three categories can be useful to form a broad-strokes picture of how we can improve athletic performance specifically for a given sport. With that said, the following three categories are not just what should be improved, but what actually can be improved. But no, each category does not weigh equally in training importance:

a) Sport-specific conditioning

b) Sport-specific skill

c) Strength

Sport-Specific Conditioning

We can summarize the goal of sport-specific conditioning as getting physically, physiologically and metabolically prepared to compete for the entirety of the competition, with the cardiovascular frequency, intensity, and duration required for success over the course of the season. More simply, being able to compete for the entire soccer game and also the entire soccer season. Most of the adaptations that need to occur for one to be “soccer fit” are metabolic rather than structural, the intricate details of which are not particularly important for this conversation. What is important to know is that metabolic adaptations generally occur within already existing tissues, whereas structural adaptations concern the growth of new tissues (predominantly muscle, but also bone, connective tissue, skin, brain, and everything else that is loaded by the activity). In essence, it’s easier for your body to work with tissue that already exists than it is to create new tissue, so the adaptations happen much more quickly.

For the vast majority of sports and athletes, a lot of extra conditioning training is the most highly overrated – and over-emphasized – aspect of success. If you already agree with this, skip this section. If not, I’ll illustrate with a quick story.

When I played college soccer, the standard fitness test was the two-mile run for time. Under 12 minutes was the standard pass/fail benchmark. Before my freshman year, I took it very seriously and trained it for “a while,” let’s say the last six weeks of the summer. I managed the test in 11:41 (yes, I still remember this). I felt like I was in good shape and ready to play. This was by far the most cardiovascularly fit I had been up to this point in my life.

A few days later, we had our first pre-season game. I was blown away at how winded I was. Luckily (or better, naturally), within a couple more games, I was ready to last the full 90 minute game for the rest of the season.

Fast forward to my second through fourth years. My summers were centered more on playing soccer. I took the last two weeks before reporting to training camp to test the two-mile nearly every day, and while it was a horrible way to spend time, I managed well enough to make sub-12 minutes each time we tested. But more importantly, in these latter three years, I showed up to pre-season much more “soccer fit.” I was ready to play a full game from just about the first pre-season game, even if I wasn’t quite as fit for the 2-mile run.

In other words, I spent four extra weeks training for the 2-mile test in that first year only to be less-ready to play soccer, while only shaving roughly 15 seconds off my timed run anyhow. Additionally, even after being completely unable to play a full game of soccer upon arrival in that first year, I was game-fit within a week or two of playing. There are two important lessons here that you should not ignore:

1. Conditioning is specific.

2. Conditioning is quick-earned and short-lived.

Conditioning for sports must engage the same energy pathways as do the sports themselves, and via the same (or very similar) means. In other words, conditioning to play your sport must look a fair amount like your sport. Note the “sport-specific” in the section title. You build the capacity to swim by swimming, not running. You build the capacity to run by running, not biking. It’s why training for a triathlon includes substantial work in each of the three different legs of the event. Likewise, being in marathon shape (or two-mile shape) has next-to-no translation for being conditioned for a competitive soccer game or season.

“Peak” Condition

Further, and more to the point, being in shape for a soccer season happens very quickly, and very specifically, thanks to its metabolic nature. The goal is to build up the ability to play multiple full soccer games each week, as is the norm for the season. How do you do this? By gradually increasing the amount of time and intensity with which you play soccer. That’s as complicated as it needs to be. When you’ve been playing competitive soccer for fifteen years, this happens in a short matter of weeks (not months). Remember, after that first exhausting pre-season game, I was in full-game shape within a matter of a couple weeks, simply because we began playing more intense soccer for longer periods of time. Closely-specific exercises like sprint intervals that mimic the actual cadence, flow, speed, duration and rest period of a real game can help, but ultimately, you get in shape for soccer by playing soccer. Same with basketball, volleyball, rugby, swimming, and everything else.

What’s more, though, is this: athletes and coaches must be selective about how long they can expect to be in peak “game fitness” for any given period of time. Being able to play competitive soccer games for 80-90 minutes two to four times per week – the norm in high school and college – is very demanding. It’s also nearly impossible to do for more than a few months at a time at a high level.

That’s not to say a three-month season requires a three-month break, but some break is needed. None of this, by the way, is “theory” or “conjecture,” but observation of the phenomenology. Increasingly high injury rates show us this. The body can only stand so much beating down before it starts to break down. (As an important side note, this is a great way to make accurate assessments and to predict future success: observe things that tend to happen, and then formulate intelligent explanations for these phenomena based on first principles like gravity, physics, anatomy, etc. Asserting some theoretical hypothesis for “what should be” and reverse-engineering an explanation as to why it should work like we say it should, like many fitness organizations and “gurus” do, does not work very well. The problem is that “what should be” rarely ever actually is.)

After the season, being “out of game shape” is a perfectly acceptable, healthy and necessary thing to do for long-term success. Running (which is at the core of most land-based sports) is catabolic. It breaks down tissue. When tissue breaks down, it becomes susceptible to injury. Add to the running the dynamic, powerful, contact nature of the sport wherein there are already plenty of chances for injury, and the risks compound. Moreover, with each passing week of “in-season'' competitive play, athletes accumulate fatigue and lose the ability to recover. Just look at how tired and worn out high school and college players are by the end of the season. They’re ready for a break. There’s a reason it’s viewed as remarkable – not common in the slightest – when a professional athlete has an injury-free career (or even just a season).

There’s also a reason why professional and collegiate programs spend multiple millions of dollars every year on the injury-prevention and longevity of their investments (the players). There will always be those athletes who can stay “in shape” all year long and never get hurt. They are the exception to the rule, and they should count their lucky stars. But that’s not the majority of us. Equally importantly, if those “always in shape” kids had taken some time off of running and spent it lifting weights in their off-seasons, they’d be both well conditioned and much stronger when it came time to compete. Outside of managing seasonal and yearly conditioning demands, strength is a big part of the answer to avoiding the injury cycle and improving performance. More on this in Parts II and III of this article series.

Despite the received wisdom, there is categorically, undeniably, absolutely no need for conditioning work in the off-season. None whatsoever. That’s not to say that conditioning itself doesn’t have a place, but the truth is that it’s had a much bigger place than it deserves for many years. Save it for a short pre-season. Play your sport, and start playing it closer and closer to competition-level intensity and duration as the season approaches. Running an 8-week, summer-long conditioning program for your upcoming fall soccer season is an incredibly effective way to become burned out, tired, weak, injury-prone, and a less efficient performer. Instead, place focus on the next two aspects of performance training in the off-season in Part II of this article series.

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