For sporting success make your weights programme specific to your chosen activity

These days, hardly any sports performers can afford to neglect weight training. At the Manchester Commonwealth Games last summer, even England’s crown green lawn bowlers had weight-trained to improve their performance. Get this training right and you could find your place on the medal rostrum; get it wrong and you could end up at the back of the field.

Weight training for endurance

It has long been accepted that weight training (and the right strength training programme) can improve performance for aerobic athletes. Take swimming: depending on the stroke, the arms and legs contribute different amounts of power to propel the swimmer through the water. Freestyle, for example, requires an upper body contribution of 70% and a lower body contribution of 30%. By strengthening the muscles that move the shoulder girdle, upper arm and forearm, hips and legs, it follows that, everything else being equal, performance will be improved.

But it’s crucial to select the right exercises, perform them at the right intensity and place them within a progressive and carefully structured weights programme. Olympic rowing coach Terry O’Neil believes that a weight training programme for his sport should mirror actual race requirements as closely as possible (a principle that should always be adhered to regardless of sport). This means that:

1. The exercises selected must be relevant to rowing;
2. They must be performed ultimately at a pace equivalent to the actual stroke;
3. They must create conditions that mirror the heart rate levels sustained during a 2K race and
4. Reflect the time it takes to complete the race distance.

In his most specific six-week weight training microcycle, O’Neill reduces the amount of weight the rowers attempt to between 15 and 30kg. This is so that they can complete 45 seconds of continuous rhythmic exercsie at a similar rate to the stroke in a race.

At the end of each station, the athlete moves on to the next exercise without stopping, providing a total of eight minutes of work, during which time the heart rate will rise to 85-95% of maximum (see facing page for exercises).

O’Neill gets the athletes to rest for two minutes at the end of each circuit and the aim is for them to complete three of these circuits workouts per week during the first three weeks, and four in weeks four, five and six of this microcycle. The specific exercises utilised are: high pulls, press behind neck, front curl, bent over rowing, lateral dips (side bends) to right and left, squat, bench press, clean and press, jack knife crunch, bench pull and hyper-extensions.

The sports-specific transference from this microcycle appears considerable. By targeting primarily type I muscle fibres and the cardiovascular system, an intense physiological response would be elicited – similar to that achieved during a high-intensity interval-style rowing workout.

This workout should also avoid the ‘physiological confusion’ that can arise from targeting two different physiological goals – eg strength and endurance – at the same time. (Note that it was designed for indoor rowing but was adapted from O’Neill’s vast knowledge of on-water rowing training.)

Weight training for speed/power: why bigger is not always best

Lifting progressively heavier weights will not in itself lead to improved power and speed, but many athletes and coaches still get caught up with this ‘heavier and bigger is best’ strategy. Too much bulk is just that: an additional load to transport around the track or into the air. If increased muscle size on its own brought the required results, then a body builder would be able to run as fast as 100m world record holder Tim Montgomery.

It’s how you develop the size and strength, and where you take it to after and during a gross strength development phase that counts. A larger (and stronger) muscle will exert greater force and ultimately more power, but simply pushing out near maximum rep lifts, rep after rep, without sport-specific channelling is a waste of time. So how should you weight train for explosive power?

Charles Van Commenee is UK Athletics’ multi-events and jumps coach and it was he who coached Denise Lewis to Sydney Gold. He believes that to develop power you initially need a good strength base, and advocates the use of exercises that train the whole body. Intensity is set at 90% of one rep maximum (1RM) and his athletes perform 5-15 sets, but only using 1-2 reps and interspersed by long recovery periods of 3-4 minutes.

After a couple of months training this way, the athletes move on to a power development phase, lifting at 70-85% of 1RM. The number of sets performed depends on the stage of the training year, but vary between three and six. At 70% of 1RM, five reps are performed, and at 85%, three. As before, a good recovery is crucial to unimpaired performance.

Van Commenee explains his training methodology in terms of a specific hormonal response. At a high percentage of 1RM, testosterone is released, boosting the speed development which his athletes need; at lower percentages and using multiple reps (8-10), growth hormone release tends to predominate, which is good for general muscle building but less advantageous for power athletes whose power-to-weight ratio is crucial.

Again, as with our rowing weight training plan, it is crucial to select exercises that have a real relevance to the sport in question, particularly during the power development phase. The direct transference of, for example, a power clean to a high jump take off is marginal – and much less direct than the physiological responses elicited by our rowing schedule. A power clean cannot be performed at the speed of a high jump take off, nor could the same amount of force be overcome and nor, of course, could it be performed on one leg after a curved approach to a bar. Weight training for speed (and endurance) obviously has certain limitations. It can only take an athlete so far, and more specialised exercises like plyometrics, sports-specific drills and the sport itself must be used to channel the strength gained through weight training directly into improved performance.

Weight training and open sports skills: strengthening the body Swimming, rowing and sprinting are predominately ‘closed skills’, requiring the same movement pattern to be repeated over and over again. However, soccer, rugby, tennis and other field or court sports require myriad ‘open sports skills’. And it is in these sports that the direct contribution of weight training to performance can appear less relevant.

A tennis player reacts to a serve, a goal-keeper to a shot – and weight training is unlikely to condition a directly transferable movement pattern. Why? Because speed of movement, balance, proprioception and, of course, specific sport skill are incredibly specific to the requirement of the movements.

So what is the role of weight training for these sports? The answer is twofold:

1. To strengthen the body and protect it from injury by strengthening tendons, ligaments and muscles (a further reason for endurance athletes to weight train);
2. To provide a base for better (stronger/less fatigued/faster) open skill performance.

Mike Antoniades, a specialist speed, power and weight training coach, who has worked with many top sportsmen and women using the Frappier Acceleration system (see PP169, August 2002), provides a further third reason why the open skills performer should not neglect weight training. He notes that soccerers can lose up to 35% of their strength during a season – and more if they are unlucky enough to sustain an injury. The open sports skill performer therefore needs a weight training programme that maintains specific strength across a season.

Sports-specific weight training exercises and their value

The table below includes highly specific weight training exercises. Some, like the first, even contain an element of open sports skill performance because the performer has to not just perform the move but also to balance and be spatially aware.

This is similar to the requirements of a striker having to take a shot at goal while off-balance. Note that these are advanced moves and should only be attempted by well-conditioned athletes who have a suitable level of prior-conditioning.

Six top weight training tips for enhancing sports performance

1. Do some ‘muscle re-education’ work after lifting. If you are a cyclist, for example, you could do three minutes on a spin cycle after weight training. You will have stressed the muscles through weight training and the sport-specific task that follows will help to re-coordinate the firing patterns of your muscles. A runner or games player could achieve the same by performing some light strides after a weights workout.
2. Devise a progressive weight training programme to accompany the demands of your sport, but never lose sight of the sport itself. Weight training is largely peripheral to performance unless it is adequately channelled into performance.
3. Select exercises, particularly during key training phases, that replicate the movement and have a similar speed element to the sport in question.
4. Take your level of maturity as well as your sport into account when devising your programme of weight training.
5. Don’t turn into a gym narcissist, marvelling at your great new physique: it could turn into a burdensome suit of armour for you to haul around.
6. The more experienced the performer the more the coach will have to work at exploring new avenues for enhancing sports performance. Revisiting a weights programme could be crucial: look closely at the transition to competitive season phases and check out whether previous strength gains really are improving sports performance.

John Shepherd