Content requirements for specific sports skills

The core content requirements of special sports skills are essentially centered around the participation goal of a single project to form a five-in-one ability set of "technical implementation, physical support, thinking and decision-making, mental stability, and risk prevention and control." There is no unified scale that is divorced from the actual project, and all requirements must be anchored in the formulation of participation scenarios for specific projects.

Take the most familiar examples of running and badminton. Just because you can run 5 kilometers does not mean that you meet the specific skill requirements for a marathon. Just because you can catch a high ball from the opposite side does not mean that you can play amateur badminton. Two years ago, I accompanied a runner friend to prepare for his first marathon. He usually ran a 10-kilometer in 42 minutes and a half-marathon in 135 or less. I guess his endurance foundation is strong enough, right? As a result, his legs were so cramped that he couldn't stand up just after 32 kilometers of the first marathon. After he retired from the race, he consulted a rehabilitation practitioner for evaluation and found out that he usually only practiced running to accumulate volume, and had never practiced hip stabilizer muscles and core strength for long distances. In the second half of the marathon, his core collapsed, and the deformed running posture directly stretched the calf muscles to the limit. Isn't this a lack of specific physical fitness content? The core of your usual fitness training is static stability, but the marathon requires the dynamic core ability to keep the torso straight after running for 3 hours continuously. It is completely different.

Speaking of this, we have to raise a question that has been quarreling in the sports circle for many years: Should we first master the technical details of special skills, or should we first practice scene response? If you ask the Spanish football youth training coach, he will definitely say that before the age of 12, the foot shape for stopping and passing the ball must be perfected. Only after the basic skills are finalized will there be room for improvement. ； But if you ask a youth training coach in Northern Europe, he will most likely think that there is no need for children to practice so hard. They will first be thrown into small fields and play for two years. In confrontation, developing awareness of the ball is more important than movement standards. What’s interesting is that there are many top players on both sides. In fact, there is no right or wrong at all. It just depends on what your goal is - if you are pursuing a professional route, the error tolerance rate of technical movements is extremely low, and there is definitely nothing wrong with setting it up early. ； If you just want to exercise by playing football after get off work, even if you stop the ball three meters away, you can have fun. There is no need to impose professional standards.

Oh, by the way, many people tend to equate special skills with "action + strength". In fact, the proportion of mental requirements is often much higher than everyone thinks. There is a little girl who plays rock climbing next to me. She usually practices very standard movements in the gym. She can do 15 pull-ups. The line of climbing V3 has been stuck for three months. Every time she reaches the last difficult point, her hand slips. Later, after talking to the coach, I found out that as soon as she climbed to a position more than 8 meters above the ground, she subconsciously panicked and focused all her attention on "will she fall?" and did not care about where her feet were. You see, the special mental requirement of rock climbing is that even if you put your fingers on a rock point that is only the size of a fingernail and your whole body is suspended in mid-air, you can still calmly analyze the order of exertion in the next step. This is completely different from the mentality of practicing pull-ups on the flat ground in the gym. If you cannot practice this part well, no matter how good your technique is, it will be useless.

Let’s talk about a piece of trivia that many people haven’t noticed. There are two hidden requirements in special skills, which are most easily overlooked by most amateurs: one is understanding of rules, and the other is injury prevention and control. I met an opponent in an amateur boxing match before. His straight hooks were extremely accurate and powerful. However, he was penalized for hugging too many times in the first round. Later, he got too hasty and deformed his movements and lost. After chatting with him, I found out that he had been practicing boxing for half a year and had never seriously read the rules of amateur matches. He thought that as long as he could hit someone, that would be enough. Not to mention injury prevention and control. There are several tennis players around me who can pull the ball up to 120 kilometers per hour with their forehand strokes, and their movements are more standard than the coaches. As a result, they got tennis elbow after playing for less than half a year and couldn't touch the racket for three months. This is because they never relax their forearms after practice, and they don't adjust the training volume according to their own joint endurance. This part of the ability is missing, and the higher the skill level, the more likely to be injured.

I have been practicing boxing for three years, and my deepest feeling is that the requirements for special skills are never the one, two or three items written in the lesson plan, but many of them are details produced by real swords and guns. For example, if you play a three-round amateur match, can you retain enough energy in the first round? Can you predict in advance if your opponent likes to throw a left hook? Can you even use the countdown time in the rules to adjust your breathing? The coach won't tell you these things one by one, but when it comes to the field, you can't win without any of them.

In the final analysis, there has never been a unified standard answer to the requirements for specific sports skills. Whether you want to sweat twice a week, play in amateur competitions to get rankings, or pursue a professional route, the corresponding requirements are very different. There is no need to impose the standards of a professional team on ordinary enthusiasts, and don’t think that you have reached the threshold of the project after just playing a few games. It is enough to find your goals and supplement your abilities accordingly.