Coordination is Key
All sports and activities require some form of strength to perform. Whether it be core strength or upper-body you’ll find that the more you practice train and build your strength the better you will naturally perform.
Of course while some sports will require greater fitness (triathlons) and others greater lung capacity (swimming) there are a variety of sports that require a great deal of coordinated strength training. This means training your whole body and making select muscle groups perform as one to make your sports performance more coordinated and powerful.
Here are a selection of sports that will require a good deal of additional strength training to perform adequately:
Rowing might surprise you as one of the most strength and fitness intensive sports around. You can’t just simply jump into a boat and start powering through it. Without good strength and coordination, you’ll soon find yourself up a certain creek but with a paddle you simply haven’t mastered.
There’s a reason that professional rowers have some of the largest hearts in professional sports. It’s not because they’re caring individuals anyway. Rowers put a great deal of training into their endurance, leg muscles, arm muscles, back muscles and having a powerful heart will allow blood to get pumped where and when it is needed. In fact more muscles than most other sports. That’s why the rowing machine in gyms is recommended as one of the best warm up methods.
In weight lifting you might be excused for thinking that you simply have to practice the same lifts over and over. However, this is simply not the case. Professional weight lifters have to put an unfathomable amount of time and effort into a coordinated routine of strength training exercises for a variety of muscle groups.
Weight lifters need strong bicep and tricep muscles, shoulder muscles, core muscles, back muscles and leg muscles. This means that their routines in the gym must encompass each of these from day to day.
Upper body strength is crucial to rock climbing and additional training will be critical in ensuring that you are able to suspend yourself in a variety of awkward positions as well as being able to ideally hold your body weight with one arm for at least a small amount of time.
This will require a great deal of training of the arms shoulders and back. Pull ups are a natural exercise to improve these areas. Additionally, rock climbing requires excellent grip. Grip training can simply require the use of a small hand held grip extender.
By putting in additional training away from the sports that focuses on the key muscles involved, you will be able to improve your strength with less fear of injury in an environment where you can isolate and fine-tune the muscles required.
Gregory Darnley uses extensive strength training to ensure he can perform in his favourite sports. He enjoys Karate and rock climbing.