Now that your physical fitness analysis is complete you can use your results to build your strength and conditioning program.  Completion of the physical fitness analysis allows you to structure your training program to improve muscle deficiencies, maintain strengths, or enhance sport specific neuro-muscular activation.  Keep in mind, athletes will not improve with just weight lifting alone.  Athletes require sport specific resistance training, such as, explosive power, muscular endurance, maximal strength or some combination of all three in order to excel. 

When selecting exercises understanding the exercise type is important.  Exercise type is classified as either core exercises or assistance exercises.  Core exercises involve large muscles.  Core exercises are chosen first because they have a direct effect on improving sport performance.  Assistance exercises isolate smaller muscles and are considered less important to overall improvement of sport performance.  However, the regular use of assistance exercises is for injury prevention and rehabilitation.  Incorporating both core and assistance exercises into your program is extremely valuable in order to improve performance. 

Examples of Core exercises:  bench press (chest), squat (thighs), shoulder press (shoulders), dead lift (hip and thigh)

Examples of Assistance exercises:  abdominal crunch (abdomen), seat row (upper back), lateral shoulder raise (shoulders)

Muscle balance

Keeping muscle properly balanced is another vital component to injury prevention.  The larger muscle groups work together in pairs called agonist and antagonists and those muscle pairs need to be balanced in terms of strength and flexibility.  Agonist is the muscle responsible for contracting during movement.  The antagonist does the opposite, allowing the muscle to relax and stretch.    For example, we bend our knee by using the hamstring muscles.  It's pair is the quadriceps muscle.  The quadriceps muscle must be willing to stretch for the hamstrings to contract and bend the knee fully.

Agonist & Antagonist Pairs

Sport specific exercises:  SAID Principle next blog….