I maintain that no athlete is diminished by becoming stronger.

I maintain that no athlete is diminished by becoming faster.

What does that leave?

Specificity.

And I maintain that playing your sport is the most specific training you can do. You can emphasize elements of your sport: make the playing area smaller or larger; make the players on the field fewer or greater; reduce the contrast of the implement and the court; speed the game up or slow it down; maximize or minimize leverage against the implement.

Doing any of the things above improves your training on a specific element…yet it remains specific.

I almost come to question what my role is as a coach! Get stronger, run faster, and play your sport.

What Does An S&C Coach Do Anyway?

Then I realized the magic of what I do. It’s the magic that is missing in Tony’s summary.

How do you put it all together?

Dan John, that other coach I quote all the time, laid this out in the book Easy Strength, which he co-wrote with Pavel.80% sport practice.
10% strength training.
10% everything else.

• 80% sport practice
• 10% strength training
• 10% everything else

I will make the argument that “10% strength training” is actually “10% coordination training”, a la Frans Bosch and with regard to the impact of speed development on general strength.

Thus, the question “how do you put it all together?” morphs slightly: “How much time do you have to train each week?”

A Problem Unique to Amateur Athletes

And, in answering that question, I actually see where I can add value for my athletes. In team sports or weather-dependent sports (looking at you, rowing and skiing) especially, the amount of time someone has available to train may be way out of proportion to the amount of time they are able to spend in the sport.

Much of my expertise in sports performance was built serving ultimate players. It’s a 7-a-side game on a large field with an implement that is heavily influenced by conditions played by teams of amateurs. Team practices might be three times per week in the most competitive programs. Even if every practice were 3 hours long (which I’ve observed as rare), that amounts to 9 available training hours.

Let every practice be unbelievably efficient, meaning most time is spent on productive game-like activities, and you total 6.5 to 7.5 hours per week playing the sport.

My wife is a triathlete. She fits 10 training hours per week into our working, parenting, traveling, socializing lives without making an effort. She’s gotten as high as 15, still not counting recovery activities.

So if I assume most athletes who are dedicated can fit 12 training hours into a week…yet only 7 of those hours are playing the sport (a mere 58%), what should an athlete do with the remaining 42% of available time?

5 hours a week of serious strength and speed training could wreck you. If it were all you did, no other sport in the mix, it could still wreck you. So the magic that I can provide is selecting, organizing, and adapting the tasks that “should” fit into 3 hours so that they can fill the 5 hours you have AND support getting better at your sport.

I can arrange the training schedule and dose so that you get better month after month but rarely, if ever, feel sore.

I can distribute the training activities so that you do enough reps to improve your skills yet don’t repeat the same sessions every week.

And I can teach you how to advance the skills, which sometimes is more valuable than increasing the weight or increasing the reps or decreasing the rest.

So What’s An Athlete To Do?

When we get right down to it, between Tony and Dan, you have everything you need to succeed as a self-directed, if not self-coached, athlete:

Devote 20% of your time to building your capacity by being general in strength and extreme in speed.

Devote 80% of your time to building your skill by being specific in your sport.

And, a nod to Greg Everett of Catalyst Athletics, build your daily routines like an athlete. That is, live the rest of your life in a way that helps you recover and be prepared to train the next day.

Those three points really do cover everything.

But if it feels like a burden to plan, execute, audit, and adjust your own training day after day, find a coach. Outsource everything but the execution.

Free your mind to look for more opportunities to play your sport. Because no matter how strong or fast or flexible you become, someone who gets 10 hours of skill practice every week is going to outplay you on the field – and that goes double if you do the wrong things in the wrong amounts because you didn’t know better.

Get stronger and get faster and work on your sport.

There’s a coach out there for you for all three elements, if you’re open to the help.