The golfer who wants more distance. The pickleballer with aching knees. Both of these people have sport-specific problems (and maybe a general life problem as well). People tend to be undertrained in a lot of dimensions of fitness, and the fastest wins for most of us come from basic, boring strength and conditioning that’s designed for GPP (general physical preparedness), not a sport-specific protocol. Sport-specific training plans tend to look more exciting and engaging, which means they tend to sell well, but they are overkill and potentially counterproductive for a lot us. If you’re getting paid, or hope to get paid, to play a game then it makes sense to pay a premium for your training. But if you’re the kind of person who’s playing a game with an open beer waiting for you on the sideline, you probably don’t need to hire the NFL’s top S&C coach.
GPP
Building a good base of GPP consists of developing strength, speed, endurance, and mobility. It’s what college and pro athletes work on in the off-season. For a lot of us this can be really simple like basic weight training, steady-state cardio, some high-intensity cardio or sprint work, and some kind of mobility work - stretching, yoga, Pilates once a week. From there you can move into the more athletic forms of exercise, things like: single leg squats, explosive cleans, sprint starts, lateral hop-overs, medicine ball throws, ladder drills, dot drills, etc. This level of training is way more advanced than most adults get into. It will take you far.
SSP
Think of the GPP as increasing your potential to play the game - it’s great training but won’t always transfer directly into your sport on its own. So, once you have a good foundation of GPP you can work on Specific Physical Preparedness (SPP), which is just a fancy term for “getting good at the sport you play.” The simplest, and usually most fun, way to do this is to just play the game. But this is also where drills and specific practice come in: layups, serves, shooting from 35m instead of 25m.
SPP does not mean doing things like trying to swing a golf club with a resistance band attached to it or practicing lateral cuts with a weighted vest. It’s easy to imagine that doing a movement with a heavy weight attached will make you stronger when you do it for real - but you’re actually training yourself to move more slowly and probably increasing the risk of things like rotator cuff injuries. Setting-up weird mimics of your athletic movements with gym equipment typically results in what’s called “Negative Transfer” - the practice makes you worse, not better. You see this type of stuff marketed a lot because it sells well. What you want is a combination of underlying qualities (strength, power, agility, etc) that you train in the gym and specific skills (graceful free throws, hammering long drives, a lightning backhand) that you train on the field or court.
Prioritize Your Training
If you participate in any kind of sport or activity with an aspect of physicality to it, like basketball, bowling, backpacking , biathlon, BMX, or bocce, what matters is how you feel doing the thing and the day after you do the thing, not how much you lift in the gym. You don’t need a huge deadlift to play pickleball, and there’s a point at which your strength training can interfere with your sport simply by costing you time that you could spend playing or practicing. Of course, if your sport is a strength sport (weightlifting, powerlifting, strongman, CrossFit) then making the weights and reps go up is your practice. Kind of obvious, but worth stating clearly.
It’s also absolutely fine if you spend so much time in the gym getting huge and strong that you aren’t as good at pickleball as your showoff neighbors if you enjoy being in the gym (besides, Mike and Tracy are assholes anyway). The point is just to make an informed choice with clear expectations about where you spend your time and energy.
Action
Name your game or games and the specific parts of it where you fade or where something hurts. That’s your high-value training target. If you aren’t sure how to address the gap in your sport (and life absolutely counts as a sport in my book), let’s talk.