Athleticism 101
As a professional in the Health and Fitness industry, we are faced with varieties of personal goals and desires on what a truly healthy body and physique is. Trust me, anyone that has worked with a handful of people and upwards will always have some interesting tales of some things that people might associate with "looking good" or a "goal." Coupled with this is the rarity that what this person wants is going to be what is actually the best thing for their body, like as much as I wish I could get people to lose 3-4% body fat from doing curls and dips, it just hasn't seemed to work for me yet, but this is something we see on a daily basis... misaligned goals with actual programs. At the end of the day, everything works... but will it give you what you want? That is up for you to decide.
One thing that I have pushed for is to get everyone that I train into the mind state that they will become an athlete. It just makes sense. As many of us have heard in many a different seminar or workshop, what people typically look the best and have what we consider to be highly-functioning and fit bodies? No, not that they can look something fierce in the newest fashion or on a runway, but can actually move with the capacity that humans are capable of, and with the highest intensity possible. These people are professional athletes, humans that train to perform and move extremely well, and as a side-effect (a rather desirable one at that) they look above and beyond the part. So how on earth can I relate someone who works 12-hour days with a wife and kids at home to someone who's life is dedicated to health, fitness, nutrition, and recovery? Because there are physical characteristics that any solid athlete will possess that we can pull out of any human being, it just takes time, commitment, and a well planned and progressed training program. Tie in some healthy lifestyle choices and we can really turn Joe Desk-Jockey into a better moving and performing human being, and much like the professional athletes side effects... that can actually look pretty damn good.
So what are these characteristics and how can I coach or acquire them? Well below I have taken the liberty to provide what I consider to be the 5 most basic bio-motor abilities that athletes practice on a daily basis, and you can place into your program as well... or find someone who will. Each comes equipped with one move that you can use to assess your efficiency in each area.
1. Proper blend of Mobility and Stability
The human anatomy is designed joint-by-joint to address one of these two foundational skill sets. Each joint has it's best function, and true athletes will have great mobility in the right joints (i.e. hip, shoulder) and great stability in the corresponding joints (i.e. knee, lumbar spine). Mobility is only "real" with stability where it matters. We see a lot of "fake flexibility" when individuals sacrifice the required stabilities in their body to reach a certain form, this can decrease muscle function.
Exercise: Deep Overhead Squat
Grab a light body bar or PVC pipe and place the bar lightly on top of your head so that your arms make a 90-degree angle. Completely extend your arms overhead and find perfect spinal alignment with your pelvis. Now drop into a deep squat, loading up your glutes and hamstrings as completely as possible and stand back up. Use this movement to assess and train your hip mobility, which we all need, and lumbar stability. This will allow for excellent transfer of force through your largest primary movers and eliminate the loss of any force into a weak and unstable trunk.
2. Balanced and Coordinated movement patterns
My favorite, yet most commonly under-utilized, athletic biomotor skill. Balanced movement equals focused movement and energy. Regardless of the end product, when we move with equal and well aligned posture we are much more likely to keep our energy and expenditure moving in the intended direction, and this happens all over the body. In addition, coordinated and synchronized muscle firing is truly the purest form of utilizing all of the athletic potential in a human body. This is what a true athlete will focus on when they want to fine-tune mechanics and skills, which in the end will open up their potential to increase how much time they can spend under tension in training or competition.
Exercise: Single-Leg Deadlift (with contralateral loading)
Holding a dumbbell or kettlebell in your right hand, extend your right leg behind you, squeezing your right glute and preventing your pelvis from rotating. Push your hips backwards, loading up your left glute and hamstring, all the while keeping a solid trunk posture (retracted shoulder blades and flat cervical spine). This should allow your right arm to reach the weight straight downwards, you can use the other arm to balance your body by placing it out to the side, or challenge it more by folding it into the small of your back. Hold this loaded position for 3 seconds and then quickly return yourself to a neutral stance. Make sure you do the other leg as well!
3. Muscular Strength and Endurance
Oddly enough the athletic quality that most people will begin with should be a little further down the road. Strength is your ability to produce force, and endurance is your ability to produce force for an extended period of time. Athletes will use this phase of training to maximize force output in particular joint actions specific to the tasks that they need to complete regularly. Worded simpler, this phase can make an athlete better and moving or accepting outside objects (often another athlete's body, a projectile such as a baseball, or even the ground itself. Once an athlete improves how much force they can expel or receive, they can then increase how many times or for how long they can repeat this with similar results. So if i can lift 225lbs with my lower body 15 times it is understood that my muscles will be able to replicate that type of output when I am training on the field, which hopefully means I can deal with the consistent physical stresses of higher level training.
Exercise: Find your 15RM Squat
Once you have the proper technique in a squat, you can delve into your muscular strength and endurance. By learning the maximal amount of weight you can lift with proper form 15 times, you have a great benchmark to train that basic exercise and develop the ability of those major muscle groups to reproduce force. This is a great phase to focus on building muscle mass or improving your volume of weight training. But remember, this type of training should progress in a cyclical fashion, meaning that you should allow yourself to peak and drop the weight a few times before you change to the next phase, this will allow the natural adaptation of your muscle and avoid overtraining or the plateau effect.
4. Synchronized Power
Think back to high-school physics, power is a product of Work / time. Work is what we learn in the Strength and Endurance training, time is what we train when we learn power. Athletes are more than big, heavy, weight-lifting machines. Athletes move and react with incredible speed in each individual motion. While squatting 300lbs may help your leg strength, it doesn't do much in making you jump 35 inches vertically. The key here is minimizing the time it takes to perform 1 simple repetition, that equals power output. Often times power is synced in with plyometric training, which is certainly true, but it doesn't have to be. Simply taking that same squat routine that you performed previously and doing it in 20 fewer seconds each set would actually be training your power. Once our body has learned the previous 3 biomotor abilities, we can take that synchronized movement and move so quickly and with such focused energy that we actually leave the ground, in other words the force we put into the ground was greater than the force the ground of gravity to keep us down... we lift-off and leave the ground... pretty spectacular when seen done properly, there is that diving interception at the goal-line... and thats just amazing to watch.
Exercise: Measure your Maximal Vertical Jump
After a proper warm-up, find a nice flat wall with some open space and grab a little handful of dusty chalk. First you need to measure your standing reach, line up parallel to the wall and reach up as high as you can; slap the wall with the chalk on your fingers as high as you can without your heels leaving the ground. Now, standing still against the wall, go through an arm-swinging counter-movement jump and slap the wall with your chalky fingers as HIGH as you possibly can. Measure the distance in inches between your Standing Reach and the Highest of 3 Vertical jumps. You now have your vertical jump in inches. Train it, and increase your maximal power.
5. The King of the Mountain: SPEED
The Key for almost any athlete is going to involve not only how powerfully they can move once, but how quickly they can repeat and translate that power through repetitions. Speed is the translation of power either on the ground (i.e. sprinting) or in a limb moving around it's center (i.e. throwing a baseball). Speed is the absolute combination of every one of the previous abilities, and the true measure of human performance. Improving all of the physical qualities of your body will in turn elicit greater speed. Things like neuromuscular coordination, flexibility, stability, balance, endurance, body composition, and your nutritious fuel will all impact how you do when you are truly trying your hardest, and to maximize these categories will in turn help you become more athletic in the long haul.
Exercise: Test your 40-yd Dash
Here is your chance to meet with a real professional or a coach. When we are measuring our speed it is something that will be hard to truly do on our own, as we need to be focused on the task and keeping our best effort and technique. You have clearly done a great job getting to this point in your training, if you really want to progress further, let a pro help and use their expertise in fine-tuning your skills and fitness.
In conclusion, realize that this is not an article to tell everyone they need to train like a professional athlete to be "Fit." Everyone has potential to increase athleticism, from a 24-year old guy new to the gym, to a 65-year old woman who has difficulty walking down stairs. The qualities of an athlete are widespread and exist in every single physical body... its simply a matter of finding the right exercises and focuses to improve them. In the big picture, athletes improve all year round and don't get locked into routines or plateaus. They find their weaknesses and ways to turn them into their strengths, and then as a result your strength improve anyways. The structured, multi-focused plans of the worlds best are really not secrets, they are science. Find your way to achieve, and find a guaranteed way to a fulfilled life.
