I’m incredibly fortunate to get to train high-level athletes every day. I can’t help but be insanely proud every time I watch a client play on TV or in person.
It’s easy to get excited about pro athletes, but let’s not forget that non-athletes make up the majority of most fitness professionals’ client roster. And where working out can help an athlete get a little better at their sport, working out can make much more dramatic improvements in a non-athlete’s quality of life.
In my opinion, helping someone completely transform their life by losing 30 pounds is just as cool – if not cooler – than helping a baseball player throw 1 mile per hour harder or a football player sprint .01 second faster. CSP co-founder/business director Pete Dupuis wrote a fantastic article about this very topic last year.
With all that said, if you don’t play a sport (i.e. 99 percent of the human population), you may want to NOT train like an athlete. In fact, you’re probably doing yourself (or your clients) a huge disservice if you train like an athlete. Here’s why:
1. ATHLETES DON’T EVEN NEED TO WORK OUT
A year ago on the eve of the Patriots vs. Broncos, I wrote an article about why athletes don’t even need to work out. And as it sit here and write this waiting for the Pats to kick off in Denver again, that article is worth revisiting for this single reason:
For athletes, skill practice is WAY more important than working out.
In fact, athletes don’t have to exercise at all. A few examples:
Baseball: Ken Griffey Jr. admittedly didn’t lift weights (he hit 630 home runs, the sixth-most ever).
Basketball: Kevin Durant couldn’t bench press 185 pounds at the NBA combine (he’s a six-time all-star and led the league in scoring three years in a row).
Golf: John Daly won two PGA major championships without being the model of “athleticism.”
If you want to lose fat, gain muscle or get stronger, working out is the number one thing that will get you there. There’s very little skill involved compared to an athlete who must perfect his or her sport-specific sills. Why would both groups do the same workout?
2. ATHLETES HAVE WAY MORE COMPETING DEMANDS
Playing off the first point, athletes have to recover from lots of physically demanding stuff, like practice, games, speed and agility training, etc. For that reason, their strength and conditioning workouts can’t be too hard or they won’t recover for the important stuff.
If you sit at a desk all day, you’ve got nothing to worry about except your next workout. Should you really use an athlete’s ultra-conservative workout to trim inches off your waist? Or avoid a certain exercise (that could very well help you get to your goal) just because it’s not “functional” or “athletic”?
Don’t want to do power cleans? Then don’t, they won’t help you burn fat anyway. Want to do curls, chest flyes and calf raises? Go for it, if you don’t mind being jacked and less functional.
For example, it would take a general fitness client approximately 200 years to build an appreciable amount of upper body mass using one of the programs I’d write for a baseball player at Cressey Sports Performance. Our baseball guys have extremely specific needs in terms of shoulder and elbow function. The last thing on their mind is building a big bench press or growing massive guns. If a general fitness client came in with those goals, I’d be stealing his money if I treated him like a baseball player.
3. LIMITED OFF-SEASON
Depending on the sport, athletes typically have a small window of time during the off-season to train hard in the weight room. And after a grueling 162-game baseball season or brutal 20-week football season, you can bet these athletes aren’t hopping right back under the bar after their season finale, giving them even less time to train.
If you don’t play a sport, there’s absolutely no rush to get to your goal. This gives you tons of freedom to plan your training and execute your plan. If something doesn’t work, no sweat. Regroup, start over and try again. Athletes have to train and maintain multiple athletic qualities at once (i.e. strength, power, speed, endurance, etc.), whereas you can focus on whatever you want for as long as you want without worrying about your first-step quickness or vertical jump going down the tubes.
If you play a sport, you must doing everything in your power to stay injury-free. If you don’t play a sport, it’s not the end of the world if you get injured. If you get hurt, you don’t miss games or lose your salary, which means you can take more risks in your training. You should still train smart and take precautions to avoid injuries, but there’s no need to baby yourself.
4. SPEED/POWER VS. FAT LOSS
In sports, speed kills. As the old saying goes, the faster athlete usually wins. Athletes must train in a very specific way to maximize speed and power. It turns out that in order to get fast and stay fast, athletes must avoid the type of training that’s most effective for fat loss.
Most team sports are what’s called alactic, meaning that there’s very little lactate production in the body while playing. Your body produces extra lactate when you exercise really hard for longer than 10 seconds or so, and it’s associated with the nasty burning feeling you get in your muscles. Research shows that high-lactate training is really bad for speed and power, but it’s REALLY good for fat loss.
Was this circuit really dumb for baseball players? Yup, lesson learned. Do I still use stuff like this for my fat loss clients? Absolutely.
If you train like an athlete and avoid lactic training – things like sprints with incomplete recovery and other metabolic conditioning workouts – you’re saying “no” to the world’s most effective way to burn fat.
5. MOVEMENT QUALITY ABOVE ALL ELSE
Movement quality is important. It’s a good idea to stay mobile and limber, learn to squat and hinge properly, and avoid moving like the Tin Man.
If you’re an athlete, movement quality is your top defense against injury. If you’re not an athlete, sometimes movement quality might have to take a backseat if you want to reach your goals.
I’m not saying to skip your warm-up or lift with crappy form. I’m saying that if you want bench 400 pounds, you might have to sacrifice some shoulder mobility. I’m saying that if you want to lose a bunch of fat, it doesn’t matter if your sprint technique doesn’t look like an Olympic champion’s.
If an athlete never pushes himself or herself out of their comfort zone for the sake of pounds on the bar or calories burned, that’s OK. If YOU don’t, that’s not OK and you’ll never get where you want to go.
Keep the goal the goal. Sometimes this means accepting “good enough” technique when an athlete wouldn’t settle for less than perfect.
HANG ‘EM UP
Whether you’re a fitness enthusiast, personal trainer or retired athlete, I hope this post helped you think critically about your approach to training and why training like an athlete is probably NOT the answer for you or your clients. Olympic lifts and ladder drills might be fun, but are they actually getting you closer to your goal? If the honest answer is no, it’s time for change.
