Sports Specific training..Necessary or not?

It is often asked by athletes, both amatuer and professional alike, if specific sports exercises are required, relevant or necessary to a sport or sporting movement, in order to improve the abilities of the athlete above that of the intermediate level. In order to answer that, one must look at the foundation or base level of the athletes preparedness. Below is a post from Pavel Tsatsouline in response to a Brad Nelson post about whether there is any need For Sports Specific training:

"In the Russian sports training methodology strength preparation is divided into general and special: GSP and SSP. A foundation of GSP is a must before one takes on specialized training. If you cannot squat two times your bodyweight or pull a lot, doing knee raises with a kettlebell hanging on your foot, a Russian sprinter SSP drill, will not make you faster; it will make you hurt. Skipping the hard and boring general strength training and going straight to the fun SPP is akin to going to college from grade school. It dooms you to failure. Once you reach a respectable level of general strength and earn the right to practice sport-specific strength training you have a decision to make. Either find a highly competent coach to prescribe you the right drills. Or forget about them altogether and stick with your general strength training. Unfortunately, SSP is not for amateurs. Poorly chosen exercises could do worse than fail to improve your special strength; they might mess up your skills. Basketball players who were given heavy basketballs had to learn that lesson the hard way. So stick with PTP (Power to the people)/ETK (Enter the kettlebell)/NW (Naked Warrior) or some other GSP approach and keep it simple."

So you must have a high base level of strength in order to move to SSP. Ubfortunately that is where the majority of intermediate and even some supposedly advanced athletes fall down. They are no-where near "double bodyweight squats" as Pavel mentions above. Get the strength down pat, Deadlift and get it heavy, Squat, do pullups and when you can do 15 strict ones add weight, learn the pistol and one arm pushup, Press a heavy kettlebell until you can do 5 reps per arm with a 32kg, use the high tension techniques and get STRONG.

As master RKC Brett Jones told me recently in a response to a post: "A wide foundation leads to a higher peak"

Go Train

Scott