Essential characteristics of special sports

The essential characteristic of special sports has never been "a simple superposition of general physical fitness", but "an exclusive coupling of inseparable action patterns and energy supply systems formed around the specific winning and losing rules of the event - any training that is divorced from the specific goal is essentially an ineffective consumption." ”

Many people may think this is too absolute. I ran into this trap two years ago when I met a friend who was an amateur runner. He has been practicing half-marathon for a year and a half, with a best time of 1 hour and 27 minutes. He thinks that his cardiopulmonary and leg strength are much stronger than ordinary people. Last year, he wanted to try the 100-meter event in the Municipal Games.

You see, they are both running with legs, but the nature of the two events is vastly different. Aerobic metabolism accounts for more than 90% of the energy supply system of the half marathon. The action pattern is a periodic repetition of low stride length and high stride frequency. The nerves recruit mainly slow-twitch muscle fibers. ； Phosphagen energy supply accounts for more than 95% of the entire 100-meter run. The action mode is an explosive and synchronous extension of the three joints of the hip, knee, and ankle. The nerves recruit fast-twitch muscle fibers. Even the hip angle change during pedaling is more than 15 degrees greater than that of jogging. It looks like "running", but in fact it is two completely incompatible systems.

Speaking of which, we have to mention the controversy that has been quarreling in the training circle for almost two decades: Should general physical fitness be given priority, or should specific training be given priority? Both factions have solid cases to back them up. Most of those who believe in “general physical fitness first” are youth training coaches and researchers in the field of fitness. Their logic is very practical: when teenagers first come into contact with sports, they do not even have basic coordination and joint stability up to standard, and they struggle with specialized movements. Compensatory injuries are easy to occur. Many children suffer from waist injuries and knee injuries in their teens. Most of them are caused by rushing to compete in special sports without establishing a solid foundation in basic physical fitness. For example, when the provincial table tennis team recruits young players under the age of 12, they are basically not allowed to touch multiple balls for training in the first half of the year. They practice rope ladders, cross steps, and core stability every day to build a solid general foundation before moving on to specialized content.

But the coaches of the first-line adult team who are "specialized first" don't accept this. Last time I chatted with Director Li of the provincial long jump team, he said that the team no longer pays attention to the squat and deadlift weight of the athletes. There used to be a young player who could squat 180 kilograms, but his long jump score was stuck at 7.6 meters. Later, he cut his strength training in half and replaced it with a single-leg half squat jump with a 30-meter run-up. The weight is only one-third of the squat. After three months of training, his score directly increased to 7.85 meters. “No matter how heavy you squat, the force pattern is straight up and down. The last step of the long jump is to push forward and upward at a 45-degree angle. The force cannot be transferred to the movement at all, and all your practice is in vain. ”

In fact, the views of the two schools are not contradictory at all, but the stages of application are different. To put it bluntly, the coupling of special sports is like boiling a pot of Cantonese-style sugar water, and the general physical fitness is the raw materials such as rock sugar, white fungus, and snow pear. If your raw materials are good enough, the lower limit of the sugar water will not be low, but if you pile the raw materials in the pot and do not stew them in proportion and do not control the heat, you will never get that clean and moist taste. Special training is the ratio and heat, it is the process of kneading the scattered physical fitness into a whole that meets the project requirements - you can't say that if I buy good rock sugar, I don't need to learn how to stew sugar water, right?

I once met an older brother who had been training in the gym for three years. He could bench press 140 kilograms and squat 200 kilograms. He felt that he was strong enough and wanted to try an amateur boxing match. However, in the first round, he was beaten by a young man who had been practicing for more than a year. After coming down, he said, "I couldn't find the point of force when I threw my fist. My feet were still floating, and I couldn't use my strength." This is a typical example of treating "universal strength" as a specialized ability. The punching power of boxing is not derived from the chest muscles and triceps alone. It starts from the foot pedal, the core rotation, shoulder delivery, and punching. It also needs to be coordinated with the movement of the pace and the judgment of distance. This whole coupled system is the specialized ability of boxing. It doesn't matter which muscle you train alone.

To be honest, many people’s misunderstanding about special sports nowadays is that they always want to find universal shortcuts. They think that if I practice core, explosive power, and endurance, I can understand all sports. But if you really dig into it, you will find that the essence of each project is a unique "precision instrument." If there is a difference in the timing of force generation and a 1% difference in energy supply ratio, the results will be completely different. There is no one-size-fits-all training method. It is just a matter of focusing on the essential characteristics of the project and focusing on the details.