Conditioning is one of those factors that players and coaches seem to constantly misunderstand and get wrong. I still hear coaches tell their athletes to do cross country to get ready for a baseball or basketball season. This comes from a lack of knowledge of what exactly their sport requires from the body.
Cross country is a sport, wait it’s a sport. Sorry I meant a thing kids do after school, my bad. The sport if you don’t know just consists of running, which is great for other sports that involve running long distances with no explosive movements or eye hand coordination. So other sports cross country translates over to would be, biking, swimming, and more running.
The reason other sports like basketball are not on this list is because there is more to running in basketball. In basketball you have to be able to keep consistently moving and then be able to make an explosive movement, whether that be jumping or sprinting.
If you use baseball as an example, well that is simple, in baseball you stand, scratch your nuts, and then sprint as hard as you can in one direction and stop. You will then rest and repeat for 4 to 8 hours. As you can see cross country does not involve any of these things.
The point of these examples is two fold.
- To show you the different demands each sport requires from different energy systems.
- To show that not all sports are created equal, or just to shit on running 🙂
To optimize your conditioning you must understand what energy systems your sport uses. Once you know that you can make a conditioning program that will get you ready for your season.
In this weeks write up over at Stack I will show you the conditioning spectrum I use to get my athletes ready for their season.
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