General Specific

A few years ago world famous cyclist Lance Armstrong entered the New York marathon and despite only ever having run 25km in one session previously he completed the 42km marathon in just less than 3 hours, meaning he averaged 4 mins 15secs per kilometre. This is doubly impressive as Armstrong didn’t start with the elite runners but with the hordes of casual participants making it impossible for him to achieve a race pace until the crowd had thinned a few kms into the course.       

In case you haven’t heard of him Lance Armstrong is a cancer survivor, cycling world champion, Olympic bronze medallist, seven time Tour de France winner and the reigning champion of the best-ever-cameo-in-a-movie competition. He has one of the highest recorded VO2 max – aerobic capacity – scores and ranks firmly amongst the best endurance athletes ever to grace the earth.

The particularly interesting thing about Armstrong’s entry into the New York marathon – for me at least – was that Runner’s World magazine predicted that given his VO2 max Armstrong would achieve a time of 2 hours and 1 minute. Why was he 59 minutes over the predicted time? Was Lance taking it easy or were the writers at Runner’s World just making stuff up?

Neither. The mistake was to look solely at the VO2 max results and not take into account that Armstrong is used to competing at long distance on a bike and not on his feet. Lance had adapted specifically to the demands of long distance cycling and while this prepared his cardiovascular system for running a marathon his body was unused to the structural stresses of running. To put it another way, they checked out his engine but forgot to look at his chassis. Cardio vascularly Armstrong held up fine and wasn’t even all that out of breath when he finished the race but he was suffering terribly from shin splints, sore hips and many other impact related injuries. 

Exercise is specific; your body adapts exactly to the stresses placed upon it. Doing bicep curls will not improve your 400m sprint time or pretty much anything else except your ability to do bicep curls. If you’re having trouble understanding what I’m saying, try thinking of it like this: if you fall and graze your knee your body forms a scab over the graze and not anywhere else. Just as your body adapts specifically to the stress of the cut it will adapt specifically to the stress of exercise.  If you want to get better at running you need to run, there is no better training for jumping than jumping and I guarantee that the clean & jerk is best improved by cleaning & jerking.

However, as coach extraordinaire Dan John points out, specificity works but at a price. If all you did was clean & jerk every day you would get very, very good at that lift or you would get crushed. Unless you are incredibly well blessed by genetics you can only handle so much sport specific training without injury or decrease in performance. Swimmers and cyclists are two groups that really need to learn this so if you participate in either of these sports please startle whoever else is around by loudly shouting “More is not the same as better.” 

So if exercise is specific, and you can only train specifically for your sport so much of the time, how do you train enough to see improvement? This is where the principle of ‘transfer’ saves the day. Transfer is the effect where improvements in strength/power/endurance in one movement lead to improvements in strength/power/endurance in another similar movement. Specificity still applies however, so the more specific the training movement the more specific the transfer effect will be. For example, a bicep curl might improve your ability to move a can of baked beans from your hip to your shoulder but it won’t make it any easier for you to pull yourself onto a ledge despite the fact both these movements involve the bicep muscles. The exercises that exhibit the most amount of transfer are:

compound movements (movements which occur around more than one joint).

movements which require you to support your own bodyweight.

movements which involve moving your body rather than just an external weight.

 Obviously exercises that meet all three criteria have a greater degree of transfer than those exercises that only fit two, one or none of the points. For example a squat fits all three criteria, an upright row two of the criteria (you support your own body weight and it is a compound movement), a bench press one of the criteria (it is a compound movement) and a preacher curl none of the criteria.

So to get the most out of training and to reduce the risk of injury you should make sure you train to improve both your general physical preparedness and your sport specific conditioning. Your general preperation training should be made up mostly of exercises that have a high degree of transfer so that it is more likely to benefit you regardless of your sport and your sport specific training should be as specific as possible to get the best possible results from your workouts when you are out competing.