The birth of sports-specific training

The official birth of sports-specific training as an independent discipline is recognized as the completion of the systematic combing of the theoretical system of special training in the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe and Western sports academic circles in the 1960s. The essence is that the commercialization of competitive sports and the professionalization of events have iterated to a certain stage, and front-line practice has forced the upgrading of theory.

To be honest, if you look through the training logs before the middle of the last century, you will know that there was no concept of "specialty" at all at that time. When I was an intern with the provincial sprint team two years ago, the old coach who had been on the team for more than 40 years was still talking about the teachings of his master: "At that time, no one knew about fast-twitch muscle fibers or slow-twitch muscle fibers. Whether you were training for 100 meters or a marathon, you had to carry the barbell for three months before entering the door. Only when you have enough strength can you talk about your results. You can catch a lot of good ones who have failed in practice." ”Earlier, the training boundaries between amateurs and professional athletes were blurred. Everyone relied on experience. How the coach taught them all depended on how they practiced as athletes. Performance improvement basically relied on talent and luck.

As for when this subject will truly come to fruition, the academic community has been arguing for almost half a century and has yet to come to a completely unified conclusion. Scholars of the Soviet and Eastern schools generally regard Matveyev’s first batch of special training syllabuses in 1956 when he combined period training theory with the training rules of individual events such as weightlifting and gymnastics for the first time, as the starting point of the discipline—after all, this was the first time someone refined the matter of “different events have different training logics” from scattered experience into a replicable system. However, most Western academic circles do not accept this statement. They believe that true special training can only be learned after the physiological research on muscle fiber classification and special energy supply systems was carried out in the 1960s. The special training manual for 12 Olympic sports released by the US Olympic Committee and the NCAA in 1960 was the first set of special theoretical frameworks with biological support. In the end, the Soviet system was just a summary of experience and not "scientific" enough.

Both sides have their own reasons, but no one can deny the "bomb" that special training dropped on the entire competitive sports circle at the 1968 Mexico Olympics. Before that Olympics, altitude training was only a general "endurance training aid." However, Kenya's middle and long-distance running coaches split arrangements for athletes in different events half a year in advance: the altitude training for 800-meter athletes is mainly interval running, 1500-meter athletes mix long-distance training and speed training, and athletes above 5000 meters focus on low-intensity aerobic volume. Even the adjustment period after descending from the plateau and the details of pre-match warm-up movements are specially adjusted according to the event. In the last Olympics, the Kenyan team won 3 golds, 2 silvers and 1 bronze. In the middle and long-distance running events, they directly surpassed the European and American athletes who had previously monopolized it. After the game, coaches all over the world went crazy looking for the training plan of the Kenyan team. No one thought that the "universal training method" could conquer the world anymore.

Interestingly, the earliest studies on specialized training were not actually done on humans at all. In order to win the Derby at the end of the 19th century, British horse trainers specifically collaborated with physiologists to measure the heart rate and blood lactate changes of horses in different races, and tailor-made training plans. The logic of splitting training content according to the energy supply characteristics of the event was later directly transferred to the training of human track and field events, which is half a century earlier than the dedicated human research.

In fact, to put it bluntly, is there any “suddenly born” discipline? I looked through the team's old training log from the 1960s, and the yellowed pages were filled with the coach's scattered records: "Today I lost 3 sets of heavy strength and added 2 sets of 30-meter starts. Xiao Li's 100 meters was 0.2 seconds faster." "Xiao Wang's hurdle stride is always 10 centimeters different. He changed the special strength training to weight-bearing hurdle walking, and it improved this week." These trial and error records, scattered among various project teams and without even signatures, were gathered together and sorted out by scholars into a systematic framework, which gave rise to the current science of sports-specific training. To this day, this discipline is still expanding. New Olympic sports such as surfing and rock climbing are supplementing their own special training systems. Even the special training logic of e-sports is leaning on this discipline. You are right to say that it was born in the 1960s, but you are right to say that it has not been completely "finished" yet.