SPORTS TRAINING

Chapter: 5
Meaning of sports training: Sports training is a process of preparation of sportsman, based on
scientific and pedagogical (technical) principles, for higher performance. It is planned and controlled
process of achieving goals, in which the changes of motor performance and behaviour are made
through measures of content, methods and organization.

Importance of sports training:

1. Building up strength and endurance

2. Improves skill levels
3. Build motivation, ambition and confidence
4. Improves knowledge of their sports
5. Increases muscle tone
6. Facilitate good circulation
7. Improves agility and flexibility
8. Improves the rate of waste product disposal
9. Speeds up recovery time
10. More resistance to injury time and illness
11. Improves concentration
12. Increases self-esteem
1. Building up strength and endurance: Sports Training is extremely important and should form an
integral part of all elite athlete’s daily routines. Training allows the body to gradually build up
strength and endurance. It provides different methods of developing strength and endurance
like:
1. Doing less repetitions with more weight helps to increase strength. Squats, Dead lifts, or
Lunges helps to increase strength.
2. Doing more repetitions with less weight helps to increase endurance. Swimming, cycling
and running helps in increasing endurance. The duration and intensity of the work-outs
should be gradually increased.
2. Improves skill level: The coaches and athletes must spend more time, energy and efforts to
perform the fundamental skills of their sports. Skill training makes athletic movements more
accurate. Repeatedly practicing the skills will makes the athlete perfect in their sports.
3. Builds motivation, ambition and confidence: The sports training build motivation, ambition and
confidence in athletes.
a. Motivation: Motivation means the ability to initiate and persist at a task. To perform
your best, you must want to begin the process of developing as an athlete and you must
be willing to maintain your efforts until you have achieved your goals. Motivation in
sports is so important because you must be willing to work hard in the face of fatigue,
boredom, pain, and the desire to do other things.
b. Ambition: Ambition is the foundation of all athletic effort and accomplishment. Without
your desire and determination to improve your sports performances, all of the other
mental factors, confidence, intensity, focus, and emotions, are meaningless. To become
the best athlete you can be, you must be ambitious to do what it takes to maximize your
ability and achieve your goals.

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 c. Confidence: In sports confidence is defined as one's belief in their ability to execute a
task or win an event. It's a mind-set that says, “I can do this,” but it is based on tangible
things such as your past success in sports.
4. Improves knowledge of their sports:
1) Sports training provides knowledge of latest rules and regulations.
2) By knowing the rules of their sports an athlete should know how to maximize their
performance without breaking the rules.
3) It teaches the techniques and tactics, methods of training, different components of
physical fitness and psychological training to develop attitude, motivation and
confidence.
5. Increases muscle tones:
1) Muscle tone is the continuous and passive partial contraction of the muscles, or the
muscle's resistance to passive stretch during resting state.
2) It helps to maintain a good posture.
3) It also functions as a safety mechanism that allows for a quick muscle reflex reaction
to any sudden muscle fibre stretch.
6. Facilitates good circulation:
1) Sports training exercises increases the circulatory system stronger, more flexible and
more expansive.
2) It removes the toxins from the cells.
3) It increases the oxygenated blood to the organs.
4) It improves to deliver oxygen and nutrients via blood to each of body’s cell.
5) It makes the de-oxygenated blood from the organs back to the lungs to get
oxygenated again.
7. Improves agility and flexibility:

Agility: Agility is the ability to move and change direction and position of the body quickly and
effectively while under control. Sports training like zigzag run, shuttle run, ladder drills and cone
drills improves agility. It increases balance, control and flexibility, allowing the body to maintain
proper posture and alignment during movement.

Flexibility: Flexibility is defined as the range of motion of the joints or the ability of the joint to
move freely. It also refers to the mobility of the muscles, which allows for more movements
around the joints. Dynamic and static stretching techniques develop flexibility. It improves the
range and grace of movements. It also helps in developing speed and co-ordination.

8. Improves the rate of waste disposal: The removal of waste products is the process in which
metabolic waste are removed from the body through the blood and lymph flow. The removal of
waste products helps to maintain healthy muscles. Building up of waste products (lactic acid)
causes the muscle to fatigue. Cooling down exercise improves the rate of waste products
disposal.
9. Speeds up recovery time: A well-designed sports training program takes into the account
intensity of load and volume of load to ensure that there is a proper time for the body to recover
and develop. Nutrition to match needs, drinking lot of water, performing cooling down exercise
and proper sleep will assist in speeding up recovery time.
10. More resistant to injury and illness: Sports training help to prevent athletes from getting
injured. Athletes need to practice their sports regularly and correctly. If they don’t practice
properly, they will make mistakes. Sports training emphasis on warm up and cool down, wearing

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 correct sports gear, providing rest up between training, intake of good nutrition, focusing on
technique.
11. Improves concentration: The ability to concentrate is the key to an athlete striving to reach
peak performance. Concentration means focusing attention on what one is doing regardless of
external distraction (crowds screaming) and sometimes internal distractions. Sports training
emphasizes on learning and applying psychological techniques to improve concentration like
visualization and imaginary. These techniques improves the ability to concentrate.
12. Increases self-esteem: Sports training give athlete’s confidence they need and guide them to
gain mental strength. It helps encourage their limits and do things they thought they couldn’t.
Self-esteem is based on their success or failure. It improves their self-esteem and makes them
feel happier within themselves which is important not just in sport but in day to day life.

Objectives of sports training:

1. It develops better concentration and reduces probability of depression in the athletes.

2. It helps your body and minimize the accumulated stress.
3. It develops skills and fitness specific to a particular sport.
4. It helps participate at a level appropriate to one's developmental stage.
5. It helps to develop the capacity to make logical decisions about sports issues.
6. It monitor and enhance Performance with a scientific evaluation system.
7. It develop awareness of power and relational issues in groups and organizations.
8. It develop confidence and a better understanding of how to deal with conflict situations
creatively and with clarity.
9. It helps to work effectively within a group toward common goals.
10. It provide reasonable leadership.

Principles of sports training:

1. Principles of Individuality: Everyone is different and responds differently to training. Some

people are able to handle higher volumes of training while others may respond better to higher
intensities. This is based on a combination of factors like genetic ability, predominance of muscle
fiber types, other factors in your life, chronological or athletic age, and mental state.
2. Principles of Specificity: Improving your ability in a sport is very specific. If you want to be a
great pitcher, running laps will help your overall conditioning but won’t develop your skills at
throwing or the power and muscular endurance required to throw a fastball fifty times in a
game. Swimming will help improve your aerobic endurance but won’t develop tissue resiliency
and muscular endurance for your running legs
3. Principles of Progression: To reach the roof of your ability, you have to climb the first flight of
stairs before you can exit the 20th floor and stare out over the landscape. You can view this from
both a technical skills standpoint as well as from an effort/distance standpoint. In order to swim
the 500 freestyle, you need to be able to maintain your body position and breathing pattern well
enough to complete the distance. In order to swim the 500 freestyle, you also need to build your
muscular endurance well enough to repeat the necessary motions enough times to finish.
4. Principles of Overload: To increase strength and endurance, you need to add new resistance or
time/intensity to your efforts. This principle works in concert with progression. To run a 10-
kilometer race, athletes need to build up distance over repeated sessions in a reasonable
manner in order to improve muscle adaptation as well as improve soft tissue strength/resiliency.
Any demanding exercise attempted too soon risks injury. The same principle holds true for
strength and power exercises.

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5. Principles of Adaptation: Over time the body becomes accustomed to exercising at a given level.
This adaptation results in improved efficiency, less effort and less muscle breakdown at that
level. That is why the first time you ran two miles you were sore after, but now it’s just a warm
up for your main workout. This is why you need to change the stimulus via higher intensity or
longer duration in order to continue improvements. The same holds true for adapting to lesser
amounts of exercise.
6. Principles of Recovery: The body cannot repair itself without rest and time to recover. Both
short periods like hours between multiple sessions in a day and longer periods like days or weeks
to recover from a long season are necessary to ensure your body does not suffer from
exhaustion or overuse injuries. Motivated athletes often neglect this. At the basic level, the
more you train the more sleep your body needs, despite the adaptations you have made to said
training.
7. Principles of Reversibility: If you discontinue application of a particular exercise like running five
miles or bench pressing 150 pounds 10 times, you will lose the ability to successfully complete
that exercise. Your muscles will atrophy and the cellular adaptations like increased capillaries
(blood flow to the muscles) and mitochondria density will reverse. You can slow this rate of loss
substantially by conducting a maintenance/reduced program of training during periods where
life gets in the way, and is why just about all sports coaches ask their athletes to stay active in
the offseason.
8. Principles of variance: The Variation Principle suggests that minor changes in training have more
consistent gains in sport performance. Training programs include variations in intensity,
duration, volume, and other important aspects of practice. Training is a long term process and
can become boring for both the athlete and the coach. So a successful coach should plan variety
in to the training program to maintain the interest and motivation of athlete. Sometimes,
changes and variety may be done by changing the nature of exercise, training group and the
environment.
9. Principles of Frequency: The frequency of training should be increased for faster improvement
depending upon adaptation of load. Training frequency refers to the number of training sessions
in defined time. E.g. training frequency may vary between 5 to 14 sessions per week depending
on sports, the component being developed, the individual’s fitness goals, the level of
performance of athlete. It is important in order to find a balance that provides just enough stress
for the body to adapt and also allows enough rest time for healing.
10. Principles of continuity: Continuity in training refers to maintaining a regular schedule of
training with minimal interruption. According to this principles, training is a continuous process.
It should be regular. The discontinuity of training reduces the physiological capacities of the
sportsman. The lapses in sports training do happen. They can be managed, but they cannot be
overlooked.
11. Principles of Active participation: The performance of an athlete is the results of athlete’s effort
and coach’s skill. The principles of active involvement means that for an effective training
programme the athlete must participate actively and willingly. The athlete should put his full
efforts while training.
12. Principles of Periodization: Periodization is a strategy for varying a training program over time
to achieve a desired result. It is the systematic planning of athletic or physical training. The main
objective of periodization is to avoid stagnation and overtraining.
Periodization training program divides the training year into different phases and cycles.
1) Periodization phases:
Three distinct phases of training year are:

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 1. The preparatory phase: It is the basic creation phase to attend the previous
training state.
2. The competitive phase: It consists of all pre and main competition phases.
3. The transitional phase: It is the period of active rest and the training is
reduced.
2) Periodization cycles: Periodization training is divided into several cycles from off-
season, pre-season, in-season and the post season. The phases of training takes place
are
1. Micro-cycle: Weekly training
2. Meso-cycle: Monthly training
3. Macro-cycle: Yearly training

The time period of this training blocks can vary significantly between sports.

13. Principles of Intensity: Exercise intensity is defined as the amount of effort or work that must be
invested in a specific exercise workout. The athletes are only advised to incorporate high
intensity training into their training programs after they have developed a sufficient base. If too
much intensity training is carried out the athlete will be at risk of getting injured.