Basic sport-specific skills

Basic specific sports skills are essentially the smallest unit of ability that corresponds to a certain sport, breaks away from the general physical fitness category, and can directly support the completion of specific technical movements. For ordinary people, it is far more capable of determining the upper limit of your sports performance and the risk of injury than general training such as running volume and weight lifting.

You must have seen this kind of person: after half a year of marathon preparation, the monthly mileage has steadily exceeded 150, but he still collapses after running 30 kilometers in the marathon, and his knees still hurt.； I have been playing badminton for five or six years, and my ability to kill is not as strong as that of a young man who has just practiced for a year. The plasters on my elbows and shoulders have never been broken. Most people's first reaction when encountering this situation is that they "have not practiced enough" and then turn around and increase the amount. In fact, they have fallen into the trap of "ignoring basic special skills".

The industry has been arguing for almost ten years as to whether sports training should focus on general qualities or specific skills first. Most of the people who hold the "general first" view are youth sports school coaches. They feel that children under 14 years old have not yet established a specific interest in sports. They should first develop a solid foundation for general qualities such as strength, flexibility, endurance, and coordination, so that they can quickly switch to any sport in the future. There is nothing wrong with this. I have seen too many children who only focused on practicing table tennis when they were young. In the end, because their core strength cannot keep up, they are stuck in the bottleneck period of the youth team and cannot make progress for several years. On the other side, most of the supporters of "special anchoring" are amateur sports trainers. After all, most adults play sports for a clear hobby. Some people just want to play basketball for fun on weekends. You can't force them to spend half a year to bench press to 1.5 times their body weight, right? For these people, the investment-output ratio is much higher by spending their limited training time on basic special skills that are directly linked to the project.

Two years ago, I met an amateur runner. He was 32 years old. He started running in order to lose weight. After running for a year and a half, he signed up for a half-marathon. Before the race, he started to have knee pain after every 15 kilometers of training. He went to the hospital to check for organic damage. The plan given by the rehabilitation doctor was not to take medicine or stop running, but to do it every time. Practice two movements three days a week: stand on one leg with your eyes closed for 30 seconds in one group for 6 groups, raise and lower your heel on the spot with slow control for 1 second, and practice 30 in 4 groups - these are the two core basic skills of long-distance running: single-leg support stability and ankle joint landing rigidity. He practiced diligently for a month, and later successfully completed the half marathon. His knee pain almost never happened again, and his pace was improved by one minute.

Of course, some people complain, saying that those who talk about basic special skills nowadays are all dogmatic, always forcing people to pick out the details of movements, without considering individual differences at all. This is actually true. In the past, there was a debate in the basketball circle about "should a standard hand shape be used for shooting?". Some people used Marion's "chest push shot" as an example, saying that people who do not have standard movements can still play in the NBA. What basic special skills are needed? In fact, many people confuse "basic special skills" and "standardized action shapes". The core basic special skills of shooting are not about elbows at 90 degrees and palms free to punch. It is the continuous transmission of the power of the lower limbs from the ankle to the waist and abdomen to the arms, as well as the control of the ball by the fingertips at the moment of release. You can see Marion's strange movements. These two abilities are fully utilized. On the contrary, many amateur players have learned the standard hand shape and rely entirely on arm swings to shoot. After practicing for half a year, they still can't make the shot, because they have not touched the core basic special skills.

To put it bluntly, general physical fitness is like the pile of ingredients you buy for cooking, including chicken, duck, fish, meat, and vegetables. The basic special skills are heat control and seasoning logic. No matter how complete the ingredients are, if you don’t know how to control the heat or add salt, the fried dishes will still be inedible.

If you happen to have a sports hobby that you have been persisting in for a long time, but you always feel that your progress is slow or you get injured frequently, you might as well stop the plan of increasing the amount first, and review every point of discomfort or difficulty in exerting force. Most of them can correspond to a certain basic special skill that you have not fully practiced. There is no need to pursue any fancy high-end techniques, and there is no need to compete with others in terms of training weight or mileage. Once you have polished the three or five core basic special skills, you will find that the bottlenecks that have been stuck for a long time can be broken easily. Of course, if you exercise just to make an appointment with your friends to get sweaty and take pictures for Moments, then you can be happy as long as you want. There is no need to worry about this. After all, the ultimate meaning of exercise is happiness.