Please note: I recently found some old articles from my old physicalengineering blog. I wrote many of these articles in 2015-16. I am not sure if I would agree with the contents in their entirety; however I am posting the articles to help keep track of my previous perspectives on certain topics. I hope you find them interesting, thought provoking, or if nothing else slightly comical.
Understanding specificity and transfer of training to competition is, for most, the holy grail of sports performance. The collaboration between sport coaches and sport science & sport medicine staff should ultimately derive some pragmatic training interventions which positively impact competition performance.
Listening to a podcast by David Joyce a few months ago, he mentioned the Chinese philosophy of competition simulation every Friday. By simulating competition, or indeed making training harder, for example physically harder, psychologically harder, technically-tactically harder than competition, it means competition appear “normal” – ultimately we should have athletes with some reserve capacity above what is required from competition.
I’ve created a simple checklist for technical coaches, which can help them assess the specificity, and potentially “transfer” of their session design. It’s important to note that just because a session might not be high on the specificity checklist doesn’t mean its not a good session, or that the skills gained are not transferable to competition – however during competition periods the closer we can replicate, and overload, competition then more normal the competition will appear. For example, an athlete may be performing a 5minute training contest and the coach rotates in a new, fresh opponent to fight every 60seconds – which is not specific to a competition. However, it would overload the intensity of the contest thus making a normal contest with the same opponent for 5minutes physically easier. Both a hammer and a saw are good tools, and like “Specific training”, which is also a tool, it’s how you use them that is important.
Using the checklist is easy: Go through each component and score 1-3 depending on some criteria you have set, which is evidence-based to be specific for your sport. For example if the session intensity had Lactate reading of >10mmol/L, we know this is the contest zone so we would put a “3” in the box next to highly specific, leaving the somewhat specific box and general box empty. However if the session was a low intensity technical session, a “1” would be scored in the general box and the highly specific and somewhat specific boxes kept blank. Add up the total score at the end and you’ll see how close your session simulated competition.
The template can be downloaded below and is easily modified for other sports alongside what it takes to win in that particular sport.
Session Specificity Judo Transfer
Hopefully this gets you thinking about your training session design and give you some ideas of some of the variables that can be manipulated to achieve the desired improvements in your athletes.
Cheers
Allan
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