Sports Performance and Pro Athletes

When people talk about sports performance, they are referring to what athletes do and how well they do it. How fast you run, how high you jump, or whether your team wins or loses against another. Sports performance is also defined as the manner in which success in a particular sport is measured. How people perform in sport is based on a number of broad factors.

These are neuromuscular factors, mental and psychological factors, environmental conditions, and coaching and external support. Sports performance training focuses mainly on improving neuromuscular factors, training the body and how it relates to the nervous system. The other three need to be tackled in different ways.

Sports Performance Training

Sports performance training is all about training with performance in mind: training so that you can be better, faster, stronger and win next time around. It’s about training so that you can improve your effectiveness as an athlete in whatever sport or exercise you do. It’s more specific than working out to get fit and healthy, as it involves training aimed at your specific sport. For this reason, it is often called sports specific training.

For example, volleyball players may specifically work on improving their jumps, while football players might work on acceleration in sprinting. Specific goals like these require specific exercises, and that’s really what sports performance training is. A rugby player and a gymnast have very different performance requirements, and will thus require very different training programs.

Sports Performance Training Programs

A sports performance training program is designed to be optimal for athletes of particular sports, and contain everything to help them excel in that sport. A good program will also take into account injury prevention, improving efficiency and minimizing wasted effort, increasing postural control, balance and stability, as well as muscular endurance, and elevating maximum power output.

A sports specific training program will use specific exercise routines to improve the exact combinations of strength, speed, power, muscle mass, agility and endurance that an individual’s position requires. A great deal of thought goes into designing training programs for professional athletes to ensure they are tailored to their exact performance needs and goals.

Sports Performance Goals

You don’t need to be a professional athlete to do performance training or have performance goals. You might want to improve your soccer game, win a swimming race or jump higher than all of your friends. If you have goals beyond just fitness, these are to do with sports performance. Even if you basically just want to get fit and healthy, performance goals can still be helpful.

These are goals that are related to what you can do, rather than something like how much weight you’ve lost. Setting performance goals for yourself is recommended for keeping up motivation for your workouts and training. They boost confidence, rather than making you feel bad about yourself. This is not the same as the sports fitness training professional athletes engage in, but it can help you feel more like one.