Training for Other Sports, Part 2—Metabolism

Sprint coaches and distance coaches in track and field do a great job training the anaerobic and aerobic metabolisms. But in a sport like American football, where each play lasts only seconds, the metabolism fueling that effort is a mixture of the creatine phosphate system and the anaerobic metabolism. In these cases, it's best to think of the athlete as a battery, with the goal of metabolic training being to build a better battery. And for sports where the action is a bit longer, say tennis and basketball, then the goal is to work in both the realm of the creatine phosphate system and the anaerobic system, spending the majority of practice time building the athletes’ anaerobic capacity and improving their buffering capacity. The good news is this is fairly simple: you simply need drills that, from a temporal standpoint, replicate what will happen in the game. If a rally in tennis takes 20 seconds, then the players rest 15 seconds between points and then replicate that same pattern in training. The flip side is you don't want to send your wide receivers or your star tennis players out on a 30-minute run. While they will benefit slightly from an aerobic stimulus from time to time, it’s better to give them a circuit of exercises where they run for about the same time they run in competition, and then do general strength exercises as their rest.  Killer workout, but specific to their sport.

Jay