Conditioning as an Athlete

 

Conditioning as an Athlete

Being physically fit when being an athlete at any level, but especially at a high one is detrimental to the athlete’s success. Physical conditioning plays a key role in allowing athletes to enhance their performance, become durable, and more importantly the total well-being of the athlete. There are various things that athletes can and do to help them become the best variation of themselves, physically. These activities can include strength training, working on flexibility, cardiovascular conditioning, and exercises to prevent injuries. My hope for this blog is to examine the benefits of physical conditioning more and depth and why it is detrimental to the athlete’s success, development, and injury prevention.

 

When athletes choose to be disciplined and partake in physical conditioning honestly, they have an opportunity to reap the benefits that they work for. What do I mean when I say, “partake in physical condition honestly”, well simply put they don’t cut corners when they do it. Nobody likes putting their bodies through physically, mentally, and emotionally draining circumstances. However, in order to be a high performing athlete, you can’t corners and expect to reap the benefits from your so called hard work. Depending on the sport that the athletes participate in will affect the type of training program that would be most beneficial to them and their individual needs. when wanting to enhance their performance athletes can focus on working on strength, speed, agility, and endurance. Below I will go into some more depth about these four variables and why they are important for athletes to focus and work on when they are training.

 

Strength training: Strength training is the foundation for athletes improving their performance. By participating is weightlifting, exercises for bodyweight, and plyometrics. All these activities can help the athlete to develop things such as power, strength, and endurance that is all specific for their sports and its demands. For example, when we think of sprinters, we know that they are a endurance and speed based sport, meaning they should focus on exercises that focus on explosiveness such as squatting and lunges. These exercises could help work with accelerating, whereas in sports such as basketball players use may focus on doing more upper body workouts to help with shooting and rebounding. In addition, strength training helps to prevent injuries because it helps to strengthen their muscles and various other types of anatomy such as joint stability.

 

Speed and agility: when athletes partake in physical conditioning one, they will want to work on is their speed and agility. These two things are essential when it comes to competing in sports at a high level, especially sports that deal with quick bursts of acceleration, changing of speeds, and need to move agile. They can accomplish enhancing these skills through things such as agility drills, sprinting in intervals, and doing plyometric exercises. Working on your speed and agility can also help to prevent injuries as well because it helps to train the body in properly moving and helps to reduce chances on injury for any types of falls, twists, or awkward movements.

 

Endurance training: Endurance training is another type of training that is essential for athletes, especially those who are competing at a higher level. Working on your endurance is essential when it deals with sports that are known for going long periods of time without breaks where you are physically exerting yourself. For example, distance running, swimming, soccer, rowing, biking, etc. The point on working on your endurance is to overall enhance your cardiovascular fitness because it works on improving your lung capacity, enhances blood flow to your muscles, and helps your muscles be able to use that oxygen and convert it to energy. Working on your endurance can provide many benefits to athletes such as helping overcome fatigue, help to improve your recovery, and help to sustain performance while participating in competitions that involve long spurts.

 

Wins and losses are a natural part of sports and are inevitable, sadly injuries can also fall into this category as well. Sports, especially those that involve contact, put you at risk to get hurt. But we as athletes know this from the moment we agree to participate. However, we have learned that there are ways that you could prevent injuries from occurring rather being throughout to the wolves and having to fend for yourself. Athletes can help to prevent injuries by strengthening tendons, ligaments, muscles, bones to help lower the chances of strains, tears, tweaks, sprains that can come from a sport. Also doing things that incorporate improving flexibility and mobility exercises during training to help improve their range of motion. Furthermore, it can also be prevented by having prevention programs that neuromuscular exercises. Below, I am going to go into more detail about preventative measures that athletes can partake in.

 

Strengthening the musculoskeletal: Areas to focus on when wanting to help areas of the body when wanting to prevent injuries and risk would be to strengthen your muscles, ligaments, bones, and tendons. Athletes can increase their strength and help to decrease the chances of strains, tears, sprains, and fractures. For example, if an athlete chose to focus on strengthening areas that their quads, hamstrings, and glutes can help athletes stabilize their joints and build their muscles around their knees and prevent injuries that are common in sports such as ACL tears or patellar tendinitis.

 

Mobility and Flexibility: Adding in exercises and mobility drills into their workouts and training programs to help promote maintaining range of motion, helping to improve muscle elasticity, and working on their movements. Working on your flexibility can also help athletes lower their chance of straining, tears, and overusing injuries that are correlated to having tightness that causes your mobility to be restricted. Stretching can be highly beneficial for focusing on specific areas of muscles, again, such as your quads, hamstrings, hip flexors, calves, etc to help with any types of muscle tension. 

 

Neuromuscular training: when you have programs that work with specific on targeting and preventing injuries such as neuromuscular training can help work with the movements tied to common injuries that occur in sports. Improving things such as your control, balance, coordination, etc can help to lower the risk on injuries that occur in non-contact sports that are caused by imbalances and poor mechanics. For example, to help to improve stability, athletes can focus on incorporating things such as single-leg squats, lunges, or work with a balance board can help athlete improve their awareness, focus, and stability. Thus, helping to reduce their chances of having ankle sprains or injuries involving their knees. Similar to this, working and doing plyometrics that work on how to land properly, and decelerating techniques can help with things such lowering risk for injuries such as tearing your ACL or any low body type of injury that can occur from jumping or cutting.

 

 

Now that I have shared the logistics of why physical conditioning and why it can be beneficial to athletes. And you are probably wondering to yourself about how much what have I said is truthful and how if what I am saying is truthful how do I know this information. Well, as an athlete who has been playing basketball at various levels from the youth church group all the way up to being AND succeeding at being division one athlete. Although, I would like to credit that to my talent and skill that it helped me be the athlete that I am today. However, a lot of my success has come from the way I took care, trained, and helped my body thooughout my journey. If I am being honest before I went to college my work ethic and discipline with how I trained and took care of my body during the season and after the season was terrible. Before I went to college, I was the type of athlete that I would never prepare for the season until it was the season. In high school I played volleyball and basketball. When it was volleyball season I only focused on volleyball, and vice versa for when it came to basketball season. The problem of this I would always be way out of shape by for the season that I would play until a few weeks, sometimes in a month into the season. I would allow myself to come to the start of the season out of shape because during that time my logic was that it didn’t matter that I came out of shape because they were about to get me into shape. Spoiler alert, I was in for a rude awakening when I went off to college to play. Another thing that I was terrible at was how I took care of my body after I had suffered an injury. Still to this day I am not quite sure why I was this terrible, and it came down to pure stubbornness or pure laziness. Now if you’re lucky, some athletes will have tweaks here and again never the same thing but for some of us there is a certain part of our body that is our Achilles heel for that sport. For example, mine were my ankles. It was normal for me to experience at least one ankle sprain throughout a season. My trainers and parents would tell me about the exercises that I needed to do to help strengthen them. Would I do them? No. They would also tell me ways that I could help myself after I had just experienced the injury to help it heal faster. Would I do them? No. Again, I have no idea why I was like this and still have no answer for you. However, when I went to college that changed. My freshmen year experience was shell shocking to say the least. I think I can say confidently I never experienced anything close to that type of mental, physical, and emotion exhaustion that I did my freshmen season. I thought that I could do what I always did because it always worked for me, I had been success. Now the differences were that I was playing at a higher level, where there was more expected out of me. That year I also experienced a record high ankle sprain, two grade twos and grade one, that year. All three times I acted the same way that I did in high school, and then would be frustrated and threw a pity party when I would get hurt again. By sophomore year, something changed. I realized that I never wanted to experience a year like my freshmen year ever again. And the only way that I could change that is to change my behaviors and work ethic. My sophomore summer was also the same summer as the quarantine shutdown, so this meant that I had a summer where I was home the entire time. At first, it scared me because I was afraid that I was going to lack the discipline to accomplish my goals. These goals were to come back to school in the best shape that I have ever been in, both physically such as my strength and cardiovascular wise. My other goal was to work on strengthening my ankles, so I didn’t experience that type of injury or put myself at risk of missing the season. That summer I worked out a ton. I did strength training such as weightlifting, physically conditioning, and working on my flexibility and mobility. A lot of the things that I did were exercises that my trainer and strength coach had taught me during my previous season, but now I did it with more intent. I was more disciplined. By the time that school did start, I accomplished three goals. I came to school in the best shape of my life, I strengthen my ankle muscles and mobility, and I became disciplined. That season also became a breakout season for me. I went from a starter averaging around twenty minutes a game to a starter who didn’t come out of the game and won defensive player of the year and was runner up for player of the year.  I reaped what I had sewn, and hopefully for this blog have proven why conditioning is a vital part for an athletes success in reaching their peak performance.