Fundamentals: Training "For" or "With" a Sport
Advice on participating in sport practice/casual play and HOW to improve your abilities in a sport or use a sport to improve general qualities
Sport Play, in General
Training and/or working out can bear a degree of pointlessness if you never exercise the abilities it provides you. By nurturing your body and pushing it to be able to produce, absorb, and connect greater force outputs, you increase your ability to perform the action you have trained it to in an isolated context. At some point however, we all want and likely should exercise those capabilities in live context. This helps connect all the gears and moving parts that you have been training to work on into a finalized web of synergy as well as provide you an extremely healthy mental outlet to be engaged in play versus struggle.
Very often, the exercise, training, and health benefits of “play“ are effortless by comparison to your outside training because it is done largely for the enjoyment of it. As it’s been said this is also very good for your bodily health – however it is extremely healthy for your mind and spirit as well to connect with an activity, hobby, especially when performed with friends or family.
For these reasons and more I consider it a fundamental piece of my hybrid athlete training philosophy to engage in at least one if not a variety of physical activities beyond your targeted workout sessions.
Training and Exercise
Many of you will be training for a spectrum of goals already, one of them often being the ability to perform better in a particular activity that is usually enhanced by increased strength, speed, stamina, coordination, and skill/technical ability. For the most part, a decent portion of your strength and conditioning training will likely be partly designed with at least one of these activities in mind. There is at least one important distinction however in how this might play out – it is if you are training for said particular activity versus with/using a particular activity.
Training “For” vs “With”
Training for a particular activity by enhancing your ability to produce the outputs necessary and coordinating your efforts to produce better outcomes while performing needs no further explanation. Your training, or at least a part of it, is geared toward increasing those necessary outputs within the activity’s criteria.
However, in “hybrid athlete” fashion, your training does not need to be geared towards a singular goal and it can also be wise and beneficial to instead “use“ a sporting activity rather than be committed to it in order to reap various benefits that it may provide to you. This will differ greatly depending on the activity – be it golf, basketball, hiking, rock climbing, martial arts, soccer, dance, swimming etc.
Here we will describe some considerations and viewpoints based on these two slightly different goals/uses.
Benefits of Using a Sport for Fitness and Athletics
To speak first on casually using a sport for general fitness or as a hobbyist, let’s discuss some of the benefits to incorporating some actual live activity into your lifestyle and routine.
Improved athleticism and skills
This one is very obvious. If you engage in an activity regularly you will almost certainly improve your baseline skills and coordination during play. This is overall a good thing as it can give you some raw, intangible qualities when it comes to reflexes, movement comfortability, and an actual outlet with which you can learn to control and exhibit your physical potential that you are probably developing with resistance training and other methods we talk about here.
Some traits, like natural coordination, can be greatly enhanced by simply engaging in some live activity regularly that demands it. This is also very helpful in terms of aging. We have written prior about a “use it or lose it” paradigm towards the process of aging and many who lose the capacities of their youth often lost them because they “grew old“ in their lifestyle and behavior first and their body and mind followed suit. Regular live sporting activities can prevent these neural pathways from degrading.
General fitness + Sport Specific Conditioning
If you find basic cardio boring, it can be an effective means of supplementing aerobic or anaerobic cardio work with live sport activity provided it challenges these qualities. It may be more difficult to measure total amount of time spent at a certain heart rate, which we have spoken about prior. However, if you can get a general feel for how demanding a sporting activity is you may be able to fairly judge if you’re getting enough healthy cardio in and this might make it more enjoyable. The only downside is the measurement problem and the potential that you may even overshoot your efforts depending on the nature of the activity and potential people you are playing with. Keep this in mind but it is not worth overthinking. (Adjust if you feel it is compromising recovery too much)
Replacing one of your cardio sessions a week with a casual moderate effort sport play is totally acceptable and even encouraged.
Community Bonding and Mental Health
Many activities have different competitive natures on a spectrum between none at all and entirely competitive. However, with the right people this is a very strong way to bond and engage with peers and develop a healthy relationship with others as well as yourself.
Learning-to and maintaining a bit of friendly competition or meaningful shared activities with friends, family, coworkers etc (or strangers - make new friends) is good for the mind and a sense of connection that we all need. It provides more engaging life experiences and helps provide a mental support network of qualities that are better for your overall well-being. Having friends and family time is excellent for your mental health and reduction or management of stress which is also paramount for your foundational health and even recovery from the rest of your training.
Even if the activities you choose are not physically very demanding at all they can enhance your results from the rest of your training by improving your state of mind and thus stress/fatigue buildup.
Action Intangibles
Many elements of performance and getting the results you want rely on some qualities that are more mental and psychological rather than physical. The ability to make decisions, remain calm, deal with struggle or loss. As well as the ability to remain focused while winning & solve problems are arguably more important than anything else. (In terms of performance) Regular, actual engagement with moderate activities help you navigate your experiences with them and learn to develop these qualities passively.
If one thing separates the concept of training for a sport versus with a sport it is the concept of PASSIVE training versus ACTIVE training.
The idea behind this is that you are “passively” USING an activity to garner a certain outside element - like playing basketball FOR cardiovascular & general coordination benefits - versus “actively” training for the performance of the activity itself. (i.e. wanting to become a much better basketball player)
Drilling For Skill Development
Training for specific positive outcomes in an activity is a much more active form of sport training versus passive (which we just covered) active training is a little more intensive and requires a little bit more deliberate focus. What we will cover here is a very brief rundown of general concepts you should consider and apply if your goal is to specifically improve your abilities in a particular sport/activity that requires particular skills.
(We will cover this in depth on a more advanced level in its own essay soon, but I will provide to you the basic concepts here)
Skill training works very similarly to strength and power training. You identify the necessary qualities, i.e. skills and movements, that are required and practice them with some level of isolation & focus in order to improve them so that the “live” playing sessions are more of a series of efficiently orchestrated movements rather than ineffective flinches.
If you want to begin developing some level of skill with workouts outside of your strength training, I advise a basic process like this: