Lifting Weights is not the Key to Improved Athletic Performance

As athletes and teams progress through levels of competition, coaches and athletic programs are searching for ways to improve the performance of their athletes. Over the past few decades, programs and schools have recognized the importance of qualified strength and conditioning professionals. Due to this, we have seen a rise of weight room and strength training accessibility for high school athletes.  This access has helped to improve the strength, power, and resiliency of many athletes.

However, as a strength and conditioning professional, I will be the first to tell you that the weight room should not be the end of this quest for improved athletic performance.

The goal of this article is not to discredit the work applied in the weight room. However, it is to shed light on the reality of human performance and development, as well as, acknowledge the lack of carryover that weight room training, alone, creates.

When athletes begin sports at any age, there is no movement requirements to achieve nor prerequisite assessment of movement abilities to achieve. Individuals are just placed on the competition surface and taught the rules of the sport. There is little to no attention being directed toward movement mechanics when sprinting, cutting, decelerating or in lateral movement patterns. You are simply labeled “fast” or “slow”, a “good mover” or “flat footed”, “quick” or “stuck in the mud”. In all actuality, these are things that can be improved based on the mechanics of your movement patterns and your ability/ strategy to create and apply force.

 The issue with rushing into the weight room too quickly is that we take these improper movement patterns and apply greater force to them. If you have an athlete who is running too vertically and make that athlete stronger, then you have created someone who becomes more vertically bouncy, but does not move forward any faster. If you have an athlete that takes a short stride in a shuffle or crossover run and emphasize the weight room for an entire offseason, you will again have someone who may be able to move their legs faster, but because they still have a less than optimal stride they will not be able to maintain speed with their peers.

When beginning any type of strength and conditioning program in the weight room you should, simultaneously, be working to improve the mechanics and movement patterns of the athletes. Begin by understanding their flexibility and mobility needs. If you are working with an athlete that struggles with tight hamstrings, then you are fighting a losing battle with any type of speed exercise that does not address the hamstring flexibility first. Again, the legs may move faster, but if you are still working with a shorter than optimal sprinting stride then it does not matter how fast the legs are moving.
Once you have identified the flexibility and mobility demands of the athlete and begun addressing them, then you should begin to assess their current movement capacities. This will include watching them sprint, shuffle/ slide, crossover run, backpedal, jump and cut. Based on each of these movements you will gain a better understanding of their deficiencies and areas of weakness to improve upon.

As you improve in these areas it does not need to be prior to or separate from strength training. Actually, it is quite the opposite. It is important to begin and establish proper strength behaviors while improving the movement patterns. When strength training is implemented in conjunction with the correction of movement patterns, you are able to improve the rigidity and consistency within these positions, as well as, help the athlete to create additional force from these proper positions.

This process also helps to improve buy-in throughout the process as you have the opportunity to discuss the carryover between the positions that you are establishing and the opportunity for strength training to enhance these movements.

Strength training is extremely important and can be the key to improved athletic performance. However, before jumping into strength training be sure you have a plan to help the athletes move more effectively and efficiently.