Speed Training - What You do Near Tournament Time

Many of the clients at the Genesis Performance Center play a sport of some kind. Because many of these clients are highly motivated types of people, they often play these sports competitively and want to do as well as possible in tournaments. The level of the tournament can range from school leagues to professional (i.e they do it for a living).

Part of the personal training, or athletic training /strength and conditioning program is to get them to peak for the day of competition.Every sport is different, every athlete is different and if you want the program customized for you, then you need to sign up! But there are some principles that hold true for almost any sport.

1. End your training with a “strength and power” phase of training. Some training programs are for growing muscles, some are for building endurance, but the program just before your competition should be one that emphasizes speed, strength and power.

2. Don’t do your conditioning workouts too much, and don’t do them too early. You only need a few weeks to condition yourself for endurance/fitness. Don’t waste your recovery ability on that stuff far from the tournament. And when you condition – ONLY use stuff that will be used in your sport. Long distance running is useless unless you are a long distance runner.

3. Finally, taper correctly for goodness sake. 2 weeks of no training before a competition is not a taper. It’s a disaster. In most cases, drop training 20-80% in the week approaching the competition depending on how you feel. Tapering is an incredibly complex topic and needs to be customized.

Most importantly DON’T PANIC. If you have done too little and there is only a week to go before tournament, its too late! You cannot “cram” for physical performance. Do your best but learn from your mistakes.

But, more common, is that people do TOO MUCH before competition and enter feeling drained. The feeling you want is “I can’t wait to compete” when the game begins.

Things like this can make the difference between winning and losing (and for sure you don’t want to be off yoru game when your opponent is peaking). That is what our athletes training program is for.