Strength and Conditioning

Similar to personal training strength and conditioning coaches will prescribe exercise to increase their client’s fitness.

The main difference is that strength and conditioning coaches work primarily with specific sports, aiming to improve their client’s skills and athletic performance.

Conditioning

Every sport requires a specific focus and combination of underlying qualities to improve athletic performance. This usually means a systematic and periodised approach to strength, power, speed and agility training.

Ultimately increasing the athlete’s performance by manipulating resistance-training program variables such as volume, intensity, rest, frequency, and duration are considered essential elements for maximizing neuromuscular adaptations.

Pre-habilitation

By nature competition and conditioning programs can be fairly rigorous and demanding on the musculoskeletal system.

Our other goal is to maintain the athlete uninjured and competitive by reducing the possibility of injuries common to the specific sport.

This may be achieved by monitoring loads and a specific program designed to strengthen and condition body parts that are prone to increased loading during competition.

Specific Adaptations to Strength Training

There are many variable factors that underpin the strength training methods available to enhance force production and improve sporting performance.

The type of strength training method determines the specific adaptations that occur in the muscle tendon unit, and are transferable to sport. Strength adaptation may be expressed as: isometric strength, maximal dynamic strength and reactive strength.

Muscle Hypertrophy

The increase in muscle size, or cross sectional area (CSA) following resistance training is called Hypertrophy.

The increase in muscle mass achieved by bodybuilders is a good example of musculoskeletal adaptation and hypertrophic response to higher volumes resistance training.

Resistance training elicits a combination of neural and muscular adaptations, which increase the muscles ability to grow by incorporating more muscle proteins into each cell (accretion) contributing to hypertrophy.

The resultant increase in CSA and strength gains with resistance training, are favorably transferable to a force producing capacity in a sporting movement.

Power

Although power and strength are interdependent, they are not the same.

Strength is the ability of the muscles to generate force without concern for distance or speed.

Power is a product of force, and is defined as the rate of producing work at a speed, displacement or velocity, and is the essential quality for explosive movements, running fast and jumping high.

Power may be expressed by these three equations:

Power (W)= work (j)/ time(s)

Power (W) = force (n) x displacement (m) / time (s)

Power (W) = force (N) x velocity (m/s) / time (s)

It’s important for a novice athlete to develop a foundation of strength prior to any power training, as power is a bi-product product of force as can be seen in the above equations.