What is strength and conditioning?
Part 1 of PerformancePro’s Strength and Conditioning series gives you an overview of the essential role strength training plays in your everyday life and personal fitness.
The goal of strength and conditioning (S & C) is to enhance both sporting performance and an individual’s ability to cope with the physical rigours of daily life. This is achieved by building a stronger more robust physique.
Strength and Conditioning – more than a skill
The simple kick of a ball is a good example to illustrate the role of strength and conditioning.
A skills coach teaches you how to kick a ball, whereas a S & C coach helps you build the physical assets to better perform the kick. In this example, the essential S & C foundation ensures better flexibility through full range at the hip and strong thigh, hamstring and glute muscles. In turn, this delivers a more powerful kick with greater trunk strength, muscle coordination and therefore improved stability during the kick.
As you can see, this approach is equally relevant to general day to day health and fitness and is appropriate for everyone.
Your Strength and Conditioning – where to start
So where do you start with your own strength and conditioning?
With all effective strength training programmes, we need to know where you’ve come from so we can work out where to go in the future. This initial stage covers everything from biomechanical, muscle balance and various trunk and strength assessments to functional movement analysis and anthropomorphics i.e. body composition, limb measurements and weight.
The key here is identifying where potential weaknesses lie and where improvements can be made. We then build a needs analysis. From there, we can programme the client with the appropriate protocols to reach their goals.
In Part 2 of PerformancePro’s S & C series, we look at the key components of strength training. In Part 3, we focus on Strength and Conditioning training at pro level.
Contact us to discuss the next step with your strength training and conditioning >>