General vs. Specific

“I really like that you guys do baseball lifts here.”

In the time that I have worked at PRP I have heard this phrase a few times from our athletes. Each time I hear it makes my wheels turn thinking what do baseball lifts really look like?

When I dig into what our athletes mean when they say baseball lifts, they often say at school we only do football lifts. As many of you know our athletes are referring to the back squat, power clean, and bench press. I find it interesting that our athletes have made the decision to classify these lifts outside the realm of their sport, though there may be better movements if executed technically well these movements can provide strong transfer to all sporting environments. 

That’s why they have lasted the test of time, but gains in load in these movements is probably not because of technical execution. But the fact 15-18 years old are the ultimate hot bed of increases in performance because of their physiological biomarkers. Which makes you ask the question: as a coach am I really helping?

Defining Specificity

A fight strength and conditioning coaches battle in all industries is the understanding of specificity in the weightroom. Many coaches are yelling from the rafters saying I do functional or sport specific training. I think personally we do the industry and injustice by not asking these coaches to define what that means to them. It’s one thing to say it and it’s another to be able to supply the principle behind these words. 

Sport specific training or special training was first made popular by former Soviet Union research that found itself in books like Supertraining and Transfer of Training. Dr. Verkhoshansky and Dr. Siff who wrote about means of special strength in Supertraining as means of training or movements that provided the greatest transfer from weight room to sport.

Dr. Bondarchuk then came along to write Transfer of Training, where he provided a multitude of correlation tables between different athletes in track and field that ranged from  the elite to the average. He looked at the correlation between different exercises that include  sprints, throws and olympic lifts in an effort to see which exercise has the greatest transfer. This allowed him to create his own system that eventually built his performance pyramid, and categorizing different exercises into different buckets. His work was tremendously influential and informative to many, but with all this information came paralysis by analysis by those who do not fully understand his work and systems. Which is admittedly most of us in the industry. 

Specificity is a varying definition depending on what sport we are talking about. Dr. Bondarchuck was fortunate enough to work with track and field athletes, and it is easy to find specific movements or exercises that mimic the main components of the sport. If you look into Transfer of Training, you will see that the movements that were most specific to the event had the highest correlations with the best athletes. For example, I am talking about a specific distance of a sprint and its correlation with a high achiever who participates in a sprint event. We’re not talking about how specific a split squat is to sprint performance. In fact, in Transfer of Training when the power clean, back squat, or snatch were included in the tables they often had the lowest correlation amongst the best athletes. 

Specificity for Baseball

When it comes to the weightroom it is hard to identify lifts that have specificity in relation to baseball. The beauty in this for strength and conditioning coaches is the involvement of companies like Driveline who have created a wide variety of tools that can be used that are highly specific for baseball. Why are these specific? Because they allow the athlete to do the exact same movements that are required in the sport. In baseball, athletes are either hitting, throwing, or occasionally sprinting. I never want to see an athlete doing dumbbell or kettlebell throws in the weight room because there's a high likelihood that we will be dealing with an injury pretty soon.

This is why in my opinion the job of the weight room is to create generalists in a world of specialists. Athletes need exposure to a wide variety of athletic traits that their sport does not give them. This exposure allows them to become robust, and deal with a multitude of chaotic situations that arise in their sport. Athletes should never be fragile, but rather antifragile. Antifragile individuals succeed when the fragile individuals bend to the demands of their sport. 

General Physical Preparedness

This is a keyword or tagline that is universally known and leveraged by some to increase traction. Ultimately, GPP is what is needed to create a well rounded training program/ system that ensures athletes leave the program better than when they started. General comes from the multitude of qualities that are needed to compete at a high level in sport. This includes strength (all sub categories), speed, change of direction, agility, jumping, endurance, and many other qualities. It is also the ability to blend all of these categories together to display athleticism within the constraints of the sport. 

How do we structure this in the weightroom? Through a well thought program we can create training programs that strategically expose athletes to these stressors to make sure optimal and accelerated adaptations take place. Accelerated adaptation is a key component of our programming at PRP because unfortunately we don’t always get long periods of time with athletes. Therefore we need to derive results and gains quickly. 

At PRP, we use a high variety of exercise selection for our athletes because we want them to be prepared. We don’t categorize lifts as baseball lifts, we choose exercises that we believe deliver our athletes the biggest bang for their buck. We also consider and have conversations with our athletes to learn about what movements they are doing at school so we make sure they are not doing the same thing every day twice a day. This process is an ongoing conversation, and we often individualize lifts for athletes when  the time is appropriate. 

Creating effective training programs for the majority of athletes does not come down to how specific the program is, but rather does the program target the general qualities needed in order to succeed in sport. Now there does come a time and place when specificity is important in the weightroom, but this highly depends on the sport and training age of the athlete. When it comes to young athletes focusing on general physical preparation gives them a range of abilities that eventually one day can become highly specific, but without a robust foundation the pyramid of peak performance can only be built so high.