Core competencies in sports-specific training courses

Adaptable cognition of the rules of special sports, controllable physical expression without compensation, and sustainable sports decision-making ability applicable to all scenarios.

A while ago, when I was leading a youth tennis training camp, I met an interesting child. He was 14 years old. His forehand and slow motion shots were flawless. His hit rate for fixed-point multi-balls was 95%. From the beginning of the game, he would either go half a meter out of bounds or hit the net. The coaching staff was divided into two factions at the time. The old coach with a background in traditional training felt that the skills were not in place and that he could just add more than 1,000 ball trainings a day to sharpen his muscle memory. The young coach who did functional training directly objected, saying that the child did not know how to adjust the range of motion for balls with different rotations and different landing points. He did not even have the basic understanding that "the force frame of the tennis forehand should change at any time according to the position." No matter how many fixed points he practiced, it would be a "showcase" on the training ground.

Don't tell me, this situation is too common in the training of various sports. I had met a basketball forward of a provincial team before and practiced plank support with the physical coach for three months. The core static strength test increased by 20 points. However, he always wobbled when he turned and got stuck. When he asked, he found out that the physical coach used a general core training chart. He did not consider that the core of basketball is not "steady stability" at all, but "dynamic stability that can adjust the center of gravity at any time during running and jumping confrontations." To put it bluntly, this is a lack of adaptive cognition - many people have been practicing for several years, but they don't understand what kind of strength and action logic are needed for the event they are practicing. They stick to the general template and end up either useless or injured in the end.

Speaking of body control, a controversy that has been quarreling in the circle for almost ten years is: Should we train to the limit? Those who advocate "extreme breakthrough" believe that professional competition is about pushing the upper limit of the body, and minor injuries are normal. Those who advocate "controllable priority" believe that all movements must be within the range that the body can bear. If there is compensation (that is, using the wrong muscle group to borrow force), you must stop. I once met an amateur who ran a marathon. In order to break the 330 pace, his knee was already buckled in when he landed, but he still relied on willpower to carry it on. In the end, he suffered from patellar tendonitis for a whole year, and he didn't even dare to jog. In fact, controllable physical expression does not prevent you from overachieving at all. It means that you have to accurately know the proportion of your force in each step and the safety line of your joint angles. Just like driving a car, you can't just step on the accelerator. You have to know when to brake and how to steer without overturning. Otherwise, the faster you drive, the worse you will fall.

Interestingly, many people attribute sports decision-making ability to "goal intelligence" and "talent" and think it is innate. In fact, this is the core quality that should be honed in special training. I was chatting with a coach from a football youth training camp before, and he said that there is a big difference between the kids brought up by two types of coaches: one is the directive type, where even the running route and timing of the ball are stipulated for you during training. When the kid plays until he is 17 or 18 years old, he panics when the coach is not there, and kicks randomly whenever he encounters tactics that he has not practiced before. ； The other is the guidance type, which deliberately leaves holes in the defense during training and allows the child to choose whether to pass, rush or shoot. Even if he makes the wrong choice, he does not directly scold him, but first asks him what he was thinking at the time. The children brought out by the latter can still calmly judge whether to attack or retreat when their physical strength reaches the bottom in the last five minutes of the official game, without the coach shouting at the sidelines.

When it comes to this, there must be someone who wants to argue, so technical movements and physical training are not important? Of course they are important, but these are the carriers of core literacy, not the literacy itself - you can't say that you can memorize 10,000 words, just because you are good at Chinese language, right? I have been doing special training for almost 8 years. In the first two years, I was superstitious about "standard movements" and required all students to perform the same movements as in the teaching videos. It wasn't until a student with a congenitally limited range of motion of his left shoulder practiced acromion impingement by practicing high and long balls according to standard movements that I realized that there is no absolute standard. Movements that can adapt to one's own body and can be used in real sports scenes are considered good movements.

In fact, to put it bluntly, the core quality of special training is to make the trainer really "understand" the sport and "know" how to use the logic of the sport to control the body, instead of just doing the prescribed actions shown to the coach in the training ground. After all, whether you are a professional athlete aiming for a championship, or an ordinary person practicing just to play ball with friends on weekends without getting hurt, you will eventually have to return to a real situation where there is no coach to remind you, and there is no fixed ball. What you practice is usable, does not hurt anyone, and can help you enjoy sports comfortably. This is more important than anything else.