Day 8 | Daily Dose of learning
This project is inspired by the ‘100-day project’, a challenge consisting of committing to doing an activity everyday for 100 days.
I have decided to write about one thing I learn everyday for the next 30 days. This can be a skill, a deep concept to elaborate on, or a mere life lesson that made me become aware of something I consider relevant.
The decision is based on the belief that “we are what we repeatedly do”, as Valentin Perez put it.
Specificity in sport programming
Specificity is one of the foundational principles for programming training sessions and training cycles in sport.
“If you want to get good at something, your training should be focused on that something and should look at least somewhat like the sport/ability itself or its components. You don’t just do distance swimming if you want to be strong.”
This principle tells us that in order to reach an objective in sport (e.g. becoming stronger than you are right now), we need to focus on training to become stronger (e.g. using weight training, calisthenics). This applies to every sport, although specificity does not mean that we only practice sport-specific skills related to the discipline we compete in.
As a matter of fact, often times there is cross-sectionality in sport training. For instance, american football athletes work out a lot in the gym, not because that makes them become better at sport-specific skills, but because developing strength and muscle mass are very relevant attributes in order to be more complete players.
Specificity also implies that trying to achieve different objectives at the same time is not optimal, because the energy is dispersed among more than one discipline, which means that recovery is lower and, consequently, effort is lower in a given sport/ability. Which means that we can be mediocre at more than one ability, but very good only at one, generally speaking. So, focusing on becoming strong and increasing endurance at the same time is possible, but definitely not optimal.