What is a special sport?

Specialized sports are directional training or participation behaviors that revolve around a specific sports event and match its exclusive movement patterns, energy metabolism characteristics, and ability requirements. They are clearly different from the general basic fitness we usually do such as running and weightlifting.

The concept may be a bit abstract, but let’s take an example from around you to understand: People who usually play half-court basketball practice push-ups and squatting at home to practice basic strength. However, if you specifically spend time to repeatedly practice the stability of layups under confrontation and the rhythm connection of catching and shooting jump shots from outside the three-point line, you are doing basketball-specific sports. The boundaries are clearer when placed in a professional team. For example, in the daily training of a sprint team, in addition to general strength and endurance training, most of the time is spent on starting reaction speed, matching of arm swing and cadence during running, and angle calibration of back pedal force. These contents are only needed by athletes training 100 meters and 200 meters. It is completely useless to practice with weightlifting or volleyball players.

There are actually different opinions in the circle about the timing of intervention in special sports. Many organizations that provide children's sports training always emphasize that "special sports should start from childhood", believing that early exposure will form muscle memory early, and it will be easier to achieve results.； However, most of us coaches who have been in youth training for seven or eight years are more cautious. Children’s basic sports abilities are not fully developed before they are 12 years old. If they are directly locked into a single sport and are not exposed to other running and jumping activities, it is easy to cause compensatory injuries. In the past two years, I had an 11-year-old badminton player who seldom participated in other sports except for ball training. Later, a physical examination revealed that he had mild scoliosis and long and short legs, which were caused by long-term unilateral exertion and overall muscle imbalance.

In fact, to give an inappropriate analogy, basic sports are like the public courses in Chinese, Mathematics, and English that you learned in school. No matter what major you study in the future, you must have a solid foundation. Specialized sports are professional courses taken in college, and all contents are designed to meet the needs of specific fields. For us ordinary enthusiasts, there is no need to think too much about special sports. If you like to run marathons, practicing long-distance pace and core anti-lactic acid ability are much more useful than blindly rushing to deadlift and squat with heavy weights. This is already a special sport that meets your needs.