Many of us use a sport as a fantastic way to stay healthy and in shape, and also have some friendly competition! Whether your sport is football, tennis, golf, martial arts or anything else, you can definitely benefit from working out in the gym as a support for your hobby. The thing is, you don't want to do too much exercise in the gym where you end up leaving your muscles too sore to work effectively and at their best for your hobby. Below I will explain the best ways to focus your gym sessions so that you become a better, and more consistent amateur athlete!
The area of work to focus on strengthening your compound movements. By definition, a compound movement is any move that involves two joints moving at the same time. The most common examples of these movements are squats, deadlifts (these movements involve the knees and hips, bench press and shoulder press (these movements involve the shoulders and elbows). These compound movements will help increase your strength and muscular endurance - depending on the rep ranges you use - but they also have another massive benefit; strengthening tendons. Tendons are connective tissue that connect muscles to each other. Having strong tendons not only reduces your chance of injury, it increases power and resilience through them. With strong tendons you can truly express the ability of your muscles in your sport, and really get the most benefit out of your hard work!
The second key area of focus for me is mobility and range of motion at the joints. We are using our joints, specifically the hips and shoulders, across many directions of movement and through the full range of motion (ROM). We need to make sure that we have the capability to allow our body to go through its complete ROM while being stable and not risking an injury which would not only put us out of our sport for a while, but may also affect other areas of our lives such as our job. In previous blogs I have discussed poor posture and ROM, and all the same rules apply for helping you and your hobby. You will be able to quickly identify if you have poor mobility and in your joints, and this is caused by the muscles either being shortened and tight, or lengthened and weakened. If our muscles are tight, then we need to increase flexibility. If our muscles are weak, then we need to strengthen them. Adjusting our mobility and flexibility around joints so that we can move them through a healthy range will allow us to play our sports more comfortably. It will also make sure that we don't injure any muscles around the joints, which is obviously something that we want to avoid! A Personal Trainer or Gym Instructor at your local gym will be able to give you a quick flexibility test, which will be very useful in helping you know what to work on.
The last important area of work is on sport specific movements. Every sport has its own specific movements that you wouldn't see anywhere else. For example, you would be very surprised to see a footballer move in the same way that a tennis player would when they're hitting a ball. Therefore we need to work on strengthening our body to help support the regular movements that we do in our sport. An easy way of doing this is to work on single arm and leg movements. These are quite universally applicable, as many sports involve working on one leg at a time (for example, pushing off of one leg to start a sprint or change direction). As good as these movements are, we need to be more specific as we go through a workout. It's worth taking a step back and think about the type of movements that you would do in your sport, and then thinking of any exercises that replicate these. We need to think about movements that work in different planes of movement; so moving forwards and back, side to side, up and down, and also twisting. There are plenty of exercises out there that cover these movements, and this is where the creativity of a Personal Trainer can come in handy. Working on and improving these sport specific movements will help you prevent injuries that can sometimes be specific to your sport, but also make your body work more efficiently in the moves and in turn will make you more powerful and co-ordinated in your sport.
So there you have it, three ways that the gym can support your sport on the court/pitch/course! As always, please do get in touch if you have any comments or want to carry on the conversation about this topic!