What are the special sports?

Judging from the general consensus of mass sports and professional training, special sports cover all sports categories, including six core directions: track and field, ball games, fighting, water, ice and snow, and extreme sports. Each direction is subdivided into hundreds of specific events.

When I was a training partner for the city's track and field team, I had a very intuitive perception of "special events." The children in the team who practiced the 100-meter sprint often failed to run the 800-meter test as ordinary middle school students. This was not because of poor physical fitness, but because the ability models of the two special events were completely different. Sprint running was about explosive power and cadence, while middle- and long-distance running was about aerobic capacity and rhythm control. Even the focus of daily strength training was completely different.

In the context of mass sports, the definition of specialties is much looser. Many people regard sports that they have been involved in for a long time and have fixed training logic as their specialties. I have a friend who spends weekends in the gym and has played badminton for 7 years. He even signed up for a small class with a retired coach of a professional team just to practice netball. He often said that his speciality is mixed doubles, and he can react faster than many semi-professional players when playing games.

There is actually still some controversy over the boundaries of specialized sports in the industry, especially after emerging sports such as Frisbee and flag football have become popular in the past two years. One school of thought believes that such sports do not yet have unified global official competition rules, nor have they formed a systematic training and level certification standards, and are not yet mature special sports.； The other group believes that the definition of a special event does not need to be too rigid. As long as there is a fixed group of participants and clear competition rules, even if it is an emerging special event, after all, table tennis, which is now extremely popular, did not have such a complete training framework when it first became popular in Europe.

Recently, I watched the broadcast of the World Athletics Championships. The category of track and field alone has been divided into 47 independent special events. Even relatively niche-sounding events such as 35-kilometer walking and women's hammer throw have dedicated teams for systematic training all year round. Not to mention special events with a broad mass base such as basketball volleyball and table tennis. There are hundreds of thousands of registered young athletes in the country alone.

In fact, for ordinary enthusiasts, there is no need to worry about whether what you are practicing is an orthodox speciality. Find a project that interests you and concentrate on practicing. The feeling of relief every time you touch the threshold of a technical breakthrough is much more interesting than trying to figure out the definition.