Currents is the weekly show from Black Creek Coaching. I'm Hugh, a health coach and archery instructor. I work with busy adults who want to stay strong enough for the life they actually live: the yard, the stairs, pickleball, keeping up with their kids.
Every week I take one idea and try to give you useful information and action steps in ten minutes or less.
Most of what we need to know about staying healthy has been settled for a long
time. The hard part is doing it in the confines of your real life, with a job and obligations, and that's what this show is about.
Each episode also runs as an article at blackcreekcoaching.com.
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Improve your performance with solid, principled training instead of gimmicks.
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Hello and welcome to Currents from Black Creek Coaching. This is a podcast for people who want to stay capable for the life they actually want to live. I'm Hugh, and this week's episode is about training for the game that you play. So imagine a golfer who wants more distance, or somebody who plays pickleball whose knees are aching. Both of those people have sport-specific problems, and one of them might have a general life problem as well with those aching knees. So people tend to be undertrained in a lot of dimensions of fitness, and the fastest wins for most of us are going to come from basic boring strength and conditioning that's designed for general physical preparedness, which you'll see abbreviated as GPP, as opposed to some kind of sport-specific protocol. It's really easy to go online and find flashy-looking sport-specific training plans. They look more exciting and engaging, and they seem like they're going to be better because they're specific to whatever the sport that you're interested in is. So they tend to sell well, but a lot of times they're overkill and they are potentially counterproductive for a lot of us. If you're getting paid or you hope to get paid to play a game, then it makes sense to pay a premium for your training. But if you're the kind of person who's playing a game and there's an open beer waiting for you on the sideline while you're playing, you probably don't need to hire the NFL's top strength and conditioning coach. So let's talk about GPP or general physical preparedness. This consists of developing strength, speed, endurance, and mobility. This is what college and pro athletes work on in their offseason. And for a lot of this, a lot of us, this can be really simple, like basic weight training, steady-state cardio, some high-intensity cardio or sprint work, and some kind of mobility work, maybe once a week. From there, you can move into the more athletic forms of exercise, which are like single-leg squat variations, explosive cleans, sprint starts, lateral hopovers, medicine ball throws, ladder drills, dot drills. The type of training that's way more advanced than most adults ever mess with. If you do that, it'll take you really far. So GPP, general physical preparedness, is like increasing your potential to play a game or a sport. Like it's really good training, but it's not always going to transfer directly into whatever your given activity is on its own. So once you have a good foundation of general physical preparedness, then you can work on our next acronym, which is SPP or specific physical preparedness. You see how that works? We've got general and we've got specific. And specific physical preparedness is just a fancy term for getting good at the sport you play. The simplest and usually the most enjoyable way to do that is just to play whatever the game is. So, like if you want to get better at pickleball, just go play pickleball. But this is also where specific drills can come into play. So, like layups in basketball, serves in tennis or pickleball, something like an archery practicing shooting from different distances. So let me be clear about what SPP or specific physical preparedness is not. It's not doing crazy stuff like trying to swing a golf club with a resistance band attached to it or practicing uh agility movements with a weighted vest on. It's easy to imagine that doing uh some kind of movement with a heavy weight attached to it will make you stronger and more powerful when you do it for real. But in actuality, what that does is it trains your body to move slowly. And in addition, if you do something like have a weighted golf club or some really weird, unstable setup to do something with, you're probably increasing the risk of you know joint and musculoskeletal injuries. So setting up these weird mimics of your athletic movements with gym equipment typically results in what is called negative transfer. It's a practice that makes you worse, not better, at whatever you're trying to do. And again, you'll see stuff like this online pretty frequently because it sells well and it gets views. But again, it's counterproductive most of the time. And I'll be clear, you can find videos of best in class, best in the world athletes doing some of this stuff. And the reason that they can get away with doing it, or that their, I should say that their coach can get away with having them do it, is because they are already so good that even if they get some of that negative transfer, they're still the best in the world. Um, so what you want here to summarize is a combination of the underlying qualities like strength, power, and agility that you train in the gym, and specific skills that you practice like graceful free throws, really hammering long drives in golf, or lightning fast backhand with a racket that you can train on the field or on the court. So, how do you prioritize your training? If you participate in like any kind of sport or activity, let's just pick some that start with B, the basketball, bowling, backpacking, biathlon, BMX, bocce ball, basket weaving, sure, why not? What matters is how you feel while you're doing the thing and how you feel the day after you do the thing. It's not how much you lift in the gym. Like you do not need a huge deadlift to play basketball or to play tennis. And there's a point at which your strength training can actually interfere with your sport just by costing you the time that you could be spending like playing or practicing. Now, of course, there's an obvious exception here, which is if your sport is some kind of a strength sport, like Olympic weightlifting, powerlifting, strongman, crossfit, then obviously making the weights and reps go up like is your practice. So now it's also absolutely fine if you spend so much time in the gym getting huge and jacked, that you aren't as good at pickleball as your show-off neighbors if you enjoy being in the gym that much. So the point is just to make an informed choice with clear expectations about where you spend your time and energy. So this week, what I want you to do is name your game or games, if you have more than one, and the specific parts of them where you start to fade or where something hurts. That is going to be your high value training target. And if you aren't sure how to address those gaps in your sport, and I'm gonna be clear here, life absolutely counts as a sport, then let's talk. That's a great reason to reach out to me. I'm Hugh at BlackCreekCoaching.com. Uh, if you found this useful at all, uh I would love it if you shared it with somebody that you think would also find it useful. And uh I'll be honest, next week's topic is a little up in the air, so I'm not gonna tease it. You'll just find out when the episode drops. Uh, but until then, be well.
