GARBAGE WORK EQUALS GARBAGE RESULTS

The debate continues on which school of thought is superior; avoiding overtraining at all costs versus outworking your opponent through volume and repetition. I believe both are valid as long as the timing is right. While this discussion, and I say that with a large smile, will undoubtly continue, eliminating garbage work will bring you closer to the ultimate goal of both camps: increasing performance and results.

In your training don’t do something just for the sake of doing it. I hear the term finisher used quite often and I have no clue what it means. It may sound hardcore but in reality it is hardcore stupidity. It screams garbage to me and doing something just to intentionally beat up your body does not make any sense to me whatsoever.

An easy way to track this is measuring performance as you go along in your training. Is the bar speed slowing rapidly from set to set? Stop or move on to something else that trains another movement pattern of the body. Is your bat speed slowing down as practice goes by? Alternate swings with other performance drills that do not tire the body such as projectile tracking or mentally imagining yourself making the perfect swing. Do your punches have less and less impact? Break your training down into segments and perform drills that do not exhaust the CNS during the “intermissions” allowing your body to recover and building endurance over time.

It is one thing to periodize phases of high volume training, but to so year round will lead to fatigue, decreased performance and ultimately injury. For example the most a baseball player should train in season with weights is twice using much lower volume in comparison to off-season training. I see way too many athletes training hard when they should be focusing on recovery, injury prevention and mental training. These athletes are training hard with the right intentions, just the wrong methods.

Sometimes in conditioning work you have to push yourself to new limits. While posture must always be monitored certain aspects are allowed to decline a bit, such as the amount of rope skips per minute. There is a fine line here. You should not be so tired that performance is extremely poor, but if you are losing ten skips per minute in order to increase endurance that is accepted.

Skill work such as throwing, punching, swinging, shooting, etc., should never be done just to do it. Practice perfect technique on each and every repetition and avoid breakdown like the plague.

Next time you are training ask yourself what the purpose of that particular drill or exercise is serving and whether or not it is helping you reach your ultimate goal.