Conditioning Programs for Improved Performance and Injury Reduction
From Chapter 12: Performance Enhancement Programs
FUNCTIONAL TRAINING FOR SPORTS, by Michael Boyle
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Authors note:  I spent a full day taking one of the training classes at Mike Boyle's facility about 3 years ago. I was impressed with a lot of things about the program, most importantly the high staff to student ratio.  Boyle has left his Boston area facility to work on things out West but he has a great staff at all his locations.
Check out the review from that visit.

 Functional sport conditioning is constantly developing and changing. Coaches and trainers have made huge advances in their understanding of the physiology of sports and in designing programs that stress the appropriate energy systems. Although many  programs now use work-to-rest ratios that are much more appropriate for team sports, few programs address changes of direction as a vital component of sport conditioning. The areas of conditioning that now need to be developed are muscular specificity and movement specificity.

All the programs detailed in this chapter address changes of direction as a key component of conditioning. The ability to tolerate the muscular forces generated by accelerating and decelerating and the ability to adapt to the additional metabolic stress caused by acceleration and deceleration are the real keys to conditioning. Deficiencies in these components are often why athletes describe themselves as not being in “game shape.” Most athletes have trained by running, or worse, riding a set distance in a set amount of time with no thought to the additional stresses provided by having to speed up and slow down. Athletes frequently are injured in training camp settings in spite of following a prescribed conditioning program to the letter. This is usually due to following a conditioning program that ignores the vital components of the conditioning process:
 
 1. Acceleration
 2. Deceleration
 3. Change of direction

Editors Note: Boyle makes a very good point about training for the specific demands of your sport.  This type of training can be very intense so I always advise either hiring a trainer for a few sessions to show you how to do these drills safely, or taking part in a small group training class that is more economical.  The books are great, but applying them safely is not always easy.

 Programs that force athletes to increase speed, decrease speed, and change direction drastically reduce the incidence of early-season groin and hamstring injuries and better prepare the athletes for the demands of an actual game or event.

Conditioning programs must be sport specific in terms of these characteristics:

Time. In chapter 2 we discussed analyzing the needs of a sport. Conditioning programs should not be designed to allow the athlete to pass an arbitrary conditioning test but to prepare the athlete to participate in the sport itself.

Movement. Conditioning programs should incorporate changes of direction. Injuries most often occur in acceleration and deceleration. Often athletes are injured not because they are out of shape but because they are poorly prepared. One minute of straight-ahead running on a track and one minute of stop-and-start shuttle running are drastically different, both muscularly and metabolically.

Motor pattern. Conditioning must incorporate the pattern of a sprint. That is, the stride pattern must be similar to sprinting. To condition the hip flexors and hamstrings (the muscles most often injured in preseason), the athlete must aggressively extend and recover the hip. Consider that a six-minute mile is run at the speed of an eight-second 40-yard dash. No wonder many athletes who think they are prepared often injure themselves.

Movement emphasis. The workouts are arranged so that on lateral movement days, conditioning has a lateral movement emphasis. This means that two days per week, conditioning is done on the slide board, regardless of the sport.

 FUNCTIONAL TRAINING FOR SPORTS
Michael Boyle
Paperback • 208 Pages
ISBN 0-7360-4681-X
$19.95 ($29.95 Cdn)

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 Edited by Ray Lauenstein. Posted April 2004