Specific work is the most important training component for athletes, but a program without the correct general elements will be doomed to eventually fail.
In order to reach one’s highest level of performance, you must be functioning well, as a unit. As coaching great Dan John has said, “The body is one piece”.
With this in mind, the brain will only send signals to the muscles to contract as powerfully as it is safe for the body. If particular muscles surrounding the spine and pelvis aren’t contracting as optimally as they need to, movements become unsafe, and power is down-regulated to the rest of the body.
As athletes get stronger, and more powerful, the forces that get transmitted through their spine and trunk also follow suit. In order to maintain steady gains, keeping the muscles of the trunk and spine in good working order becomes a year-round venture.
In the same vein, coordination is an underrated component of human movement. When athletes start hitting high levels of performance, that fine tuned coordination can really come and go. It is important to address the coordinative response of the body in regards to whatever skill one is trying to hone in on. Coordination and strength are actually more closely related than most people would think.
When I was at the 2015 June “Speed Activation Consortium”, speed expert Dan Fichter shared with us an anecdote on his experience with a famous powerlifter. Dan recommended that the lifter perform several minutes worth of slow-motion standing cross-crawls each day, in addition to his lifting workouts. What this lifter found, is that after a few weeks, his deadlift jumped by 30lbs! For a long-time lifter, this increase is no joke! Increase the connective, and “one-piece” nature of the body, and watch the CNS wire more power to your movements!
The bottom line is that general and coordination based training is important, and needs to be included alongside more traditional training means and methods. For this article, I have 5 important methods that every athlete should include in their own training program over the course of the year in some capacity. With general training, it is very important to remember not to take each means too far, but to have some basic mastery of it in the program. These 5 methods we’ll cover are as follows:
- Crawls, handstands, and ground-based locomotion
- Jumping rope and movement combinations
- Hanging from a bar
- Deep squat mobility work
- Arching and bridging
It is also important to keep the exact methods varied and creative over the course of the training year.
Let’s get started with the ground based essentials of human general training.
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Crawls, handstands, and ground based locomotion
Coordinating the movement of the arms and legs in various sequences and intensities is important to maintain proper trunk function.
I was introduced to the idea of crawling by reading the book “Original Strength” by Geoff Neupert and Tim Anderson. Many times, I look back to certain points of my athletic career, and realize something I was doing that was really helping me, without knowing it at the time. Crawl based movements has absolutely been one of them.
When I was in high school, I was on a calisthenics and breakdancing kick for a few months, trying to perform windmills, “turtles”, and various handstands. In the process, I found that my dynamic performance in sprinting and jumping was also improving, and my upper body had reached a level of development that wasn’t possible before from simply doing various bench press and general strength programing.
The human body can only accelerate limbs as much as it can control them from a torso standpoint. Doing work on the ground where your arms and legs are transferring force through the torso is a vital, general training movement that does have nice transfer to general sport skills. It has been said that all athletes should swim in an early age before they go on to specialize later, since this helps them to coordinate their arms and legs spatially through the platform of the torso. Crawling is certainly similar, and in many ways, more advanced for athletes who do any sport aside from swimming or water polo.
Ido Portal has some awesome ideas for helping everyday people, as well as athletes, to regain some of their innate strength through various locomotion means. Here is one of my favorite videos from him shown below:
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Jump Rope in conjunction with movement
From a coordination standpoint, jumping rope is one of the simplest, and quickest ways to improve one’s ability.
Jumping rope won’t take you to the pinnacle of your athletic prowess, the intensity is just a little too low, but when combined with other movement skills, the addition of a jump rope offers a great boost.
I had the pleasure of listening to Mike Gentry, one of the fathers of modern S&C, and long time strength coach at Virginia Tech. Coach Gentry makes plenty of use of the jump rope in combination with running and skipping drills to open up his workouts.
My friend, Andrew Darqui, has an amazing recovery day series of jump rope drills that can build coordination and give the nervous system a unique stimulus. See the video below for his take on a variety of drills that can be performed.
It is my opinion that the jump rope can be a great way to improve quick twitch warmup drills a notch, and also help with that “vibration based” recovery atmosphere to cool down from a high intensity workout, or as a stand alone recovery method. It’s role in the development of coordination is extremely valuable for all athletes.
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Hang from a bar
I don’t care what your sport is, it is a basic human ability to at least hang from a bar, tree branch, or vine. When we were children, it was so easy to swing around on the monkeybars, yet, go a decade without doing this, and it quickly becomes an incredibly difficult skill!
Without ever hanging from a bar, we tend to lose things like thoracic mobility, shoulder girdle strength, and grip strength, as well as the many benefits that come from the trunk coordinating our swinging and moving about as we hang.
One of my favorite general bar drills is the “skin the cat” drill
Every athlete should be comfortable moving around in various positions with both hands on the bar for at least 45 seconds. They should also be able to hang from a bar from one arm for at least a few seconds time. You don’t have to be quite as agile as the monkey in the video below, but you shouldn’t be writhing in pain when hanging from one arm for a measly second or two.
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Deep squat mobility
All athletes should be able to comfortably get into, and move around in a very deep squat position. Believe it or not, I’m significantly less adamant that my athletes are strong in the deepest, or ass-too-grass squat positions than I used to be, but I do demand that they can get to those positions comfortably.
Humans used to spend a whole lot more time in the squat position, and reaped the benefits of better hip and ankle mobility, as well as some of the intrinsic foot strength required to move around in this position when needed.
I’ll again reference Ido Portal here, as the man has an incredible philosophy on movement. His squat mobility routine goes quite a ways beyond the “sit in a squat for 2 minutes” that some fitness professionals advocate (not that this is bad advice!). Perform this type of movement series for a few weeks, and I promise you that you’ll immediately feel better by leaps and bounds.
Taking this movement ideal a step further, you can even add some weight to the process. The video below is one of my favorite movements to use with athletes such as swimmers, or tennis players, but can be a great supplemental exercise for any athlete.
I like how this guy introduces himself like he is about to do a “Jackass” video (if you’re old and immature enough to remember the old school originals).
As long as we sit in chairs every day, we need some basic movement in the squatting position to maintain some general mobility. This goes a bit further than just hitting deep squats with a barbell on your shoulders, since athletes tend to compensate for immobility through various wiggles at the deep positions anyway.
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Arching and bridging
As long as I’ve been a track coach, I haven’t met a group of track athletes where at least a good portion of them were completely obsessed with crunch-based abdominal work. Why is this type of training so popular? I’m convinced that it’s a product of athlete’s confirmation bias that tons of “abs” are helpful, because:
- They want to have “ripped abs” as a means of greater attractiveness
- They see that some of the best performers in track and field tend to have… ripped abs.
Seeing that this is the case, why would athletes want to pop in that “Ab-Ripper X” DVD and have at it? Because it’s a case of the chicken and the egg, for the most part. You see, it’s important for athletes to have strong rectus abdominis (ab) muscles, as this group works reactively to support the pelvis during sprinting and jumping. This means that athletes with properly functioning core muscles will be able to sprint, jump, swim, and perform other explosive movements, and improve the strength and size of those muscles through mere repetition.
Granted, these athletes also tend to perform at least some supplemental core and trunk work, but that isn’t what got them the abs.
Moving on, because the abs aren’t really the point of general movement #5. Athletes spend too much time training in a position of flexion. They don’t spend much time in extension. This is a problem! We are already tight and kyphotic as a society as it is! Why make it worse by proliferating the problem in the gym?
We should be spending more time, comparatively speaking extending rather than flexing. When athletes get overtrained, the “tonic” muscles of the body tighten, pulling the body into the fetal position.
Don’t spend too much time going into the fetal position. A few abs here and there are fine, no problem, just make sure the lot of them are done with a neutral pelvis, such as “dead bug style” variations.
What you do need to do is make sure that you are spending time working on extension. In order to do this, you need to spend time arching and bridging. This is something you get to the “N’th” degree when performing gymnastics, and this is yet another reason why gymnastic style work has a great supplemental place in the arsenal of many athletes general training schemes.
The “bridge” is a standard movement. You can check it out in the video below.
You can even perform it only on your neck. No, it won’t kill you, and a little neck strength will do you some good.
I used to truly suck at these. When I did the P90X yoga back in the day, I nearly died holding the arch for 45 seconds, or whatever Tony Horton and his posse wanted me to. Actually, I never made it the full 45, I was usually stuck around 15-20 seconds. Years later, this is no problem, and arching and traversing in the arch is something that not only helps my posture, but even makes me feel more “open” in my body and mind after a few good rounds of it. I’ve had a kyphotic hump in my lower cervical/upper thoracic spine since I was young, and the bridge is one of my sharpest swords in the fight against it.
This type of arching movement is also similar in theory to the movement called “The Bow” which is popular in bioenergetics circles (I personally love it), as well as the use of a bioenergetic stool, which Elliot Hulse of Strengthcamp made popular.
I enjoy using a glute-ham machine with my kyphotic athletes for this end, making them deeply belly breathe during the process. Elliot has a great video detailing the use of this type of stool below. What I really love about Elliot’s videos is his integration of the mind and body. I think it’s easy to convey the importance of this type of work to athletes, and it’s usually well-received and beneficial, particularly when athletes get into the stool, and can barely breathe because of their tight airways from their daily posture and muscular tensions! They realize how helpful the drill can be to them, and what it is like to open up, and breathe fully.
Conclusion:
So there you have 5 important general training means that are an amazing supplement to specific training. They are great as part of the warmup, cooldown, or used on separate training days, but in any case, a lack of proper general training and function may just be what is standing in front of you and your next personal best.
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