What are the special sports?

The essence of the special sports we often talk about is systematic training and competition content designed around the ability requirements of a single mature sport. Currently, there are nearly a hundred special sports included in the official competition system in China, covering track and field, ball games, water, ice and snow, combat, intellectual sports and other directions. The familiar sprint, basketball, swimming, figure skating, boxing, and Go are all typical special sports.

I spent half a year in the youth training camp of the provincial team. When I first entered the camp, I practiced general basic physical fitness for three months. After I finally decided on the direction of running the 100-meter sprint, all the training content was "stopped" in an instant - I no longer had to run 3,000 meters to practice general endurance, and all strength training was centered around Designed around the explosion of fast-twitch muscle fibers, even the warm-up movements are specially adjusted for the hip force generation mode at the start and during running. There is almost no overlap with the training content of teammates who practice middle and long-distance running in the same camp. This is the most intuitive difference between special sports and the general public's daily fitness and basic physical training.

Not just professional teams, there are many scenarios where ordinary people come into contact with special sports. For example, if your child enrolls in a table tennis interest class, the coach will focus on correcting the swing movements and practicing footwork. This is the introductory training for table tennis.； If you always feel that you have no strength to smash the ball when playing badminton, find a coach to practice targeted muscle memory of waist and abdominal strength and racket swing, which also falls into the category of special training. To put it bluntly, special sports are like custom-made sports shoes, which fully meet the needs of specific events and cannot be replaced by general running and jumping fitness.

Interestingly, there is no completely unified conclusion on the boundaries of special sports in the industry. For example, Frisbee and flag football have become popular in the past two years. Many practitioners in the traditional sports circle feel that the rules of these sports have not been completely finalized, nor have they formed a unified national training and ability evaluation. The sports system is not a serious special sport, but now many cities have officially organized city leagues, and some primary and secondary schools have even opened relevant school-based courses. Many young sports practitioners have also classified these as emerging special sports. The views of the two sides are still colliding.

Oh, yes, last time I accompanied a friend to take the rock climbing social sports instructor certificate test. More than half of the assessment content was special ability tests specific to rock climbing, such as the force generation skills of the rock wall fulcrum and the standardized operation of the protective rope. It is not something you can pass if you are usually strong and how many pull-ups you can do. This is also a special test. The most core feature of sports - the threshold is never general physical fitness, but the accumulation of skills and abilities specific to the project. Even a project like Go, which seems to have no physical requirements, requires a lot of memorization of fixed formulas and game training to get started. It is not just a matter of taking two steps and you have touched the edge of a special event.