Preparation of Athletes in Fitness Centers: guidelines

it is absolutely different from the fitness or body building activities typically carried out in a gym.

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It is essential that the athlete who is about to start physical training in the gym is aware of this and therefore can avoid using inappropriate and counterproductive work methods, but erroneously believed to be useful as seen by most of the users of fitness centers. . The athlete goes to a gym to condition his body in a specific way to improve in sports practice, and not to achieve an improvement in the aesthetic condition; therefore training must be developed with work methods suitable for achieving this goal. Correctly structured athletic training has several characteristics that distinguish it from fitness and body building training:

• Multiarticular exercises
• Standing training
• Bodyweight training
• Speed ​​of contraction
• Automatism of the gesture.

. This means that the selection of exercises must fall on movements that simulate the generally developed athletic gestures, which always involve different joints. Hitting a ball, grabbing an opponent, sprinting, etc. they are all movements that involve several muscles, therefore the exercises to be performed in the athletic preparation phase must necessarily be multi-joint and therefore develop through the activation of kinetic chains. By making this selection, obviously, all the isolation exercises so dear to lovers are excluded. of the body, but so useless to athletes as they are not suitable for improving sports gestures. Most of the movements carried out in the sports field involve the joint activation of entire and sometimes different synergistic kinetic chains; for this reason, isolation exercises are not useful for athletes: it is not possible to develop the coordination and synergy necessary to optimize a complex movement by fragmenting it into smaller parts: only the repeated execution of the gesture in its completeness and integrity allows to obtain the conditioning.

erect. The "coach or" athlete must remember that performing exercises while sitting or lying down - movements widely practiced in gyms by fitness lovers, due to their less effort on postural muscles and greater comfort - are not suitable for athletic training, which must necessarily involve those postural muscles, also used in the field, which are activated only if you work in an upright position.

which currently fill fitness centers. The exercises must be performed free body, so that it is the musculoskeletal system to manage the movement only and totally. Any guide or mechanical support reduces the physical effort and above all reduces the body's ability to control the gesture, moreover it accustoms the body to receive stress in a precise direction, while on the field the athlete is subjected to stresses and forces that act from all directions. Performing the leg extension to improve the kick of the ball is a real nonsense! And the reasons for this are many:

• the footballer is not seated when he kicks the ball,
• the ball is not always in perfect line with the knee,
• the foot during the kick is not always in perfect axis with the knee,
• the body and the other leg help coordinate the kick and are not immobile during the gesture,
• both the knee of the supporting leg and the one that kicks the ball are subjected to lateral and torsional forces not reproduced by the leg extension,
• football is a dry and explosive gesture that cannot be performed on a guide.

The few machines really useful to the athlete are those for training the traction muscles (back and biceps), that is the lat machine and the low pulley, and in some cases the cables when you want to perform specific movements - typical of a particular discipline. sporty - to improve specific strength.

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At the base of sports gestures lies the ability of the athlete to quickly contract muscles and produce high degrees of strength, or to quickly repeat movements over time. The ability to quickly activate the muscle fiber can only be trained using fast contractions, consequently also the athletic training must be based on the execution of exercises with muscle contraction times similar to those used in sports. In practice, even the exercises carried out in the gym must be performed with contractions that can be fast and / or explosive and absolutely must not include slow and controlled movements as are generally traditionally used in the gym.

it does not develop a preferential control circuit for that movement that allows it to be performed automatically, as if the body were a machine designed to generate this gesture.

The automatism allows to express the maximum strength and precision, and saves energy, therefore it optimizes the body's ability to express that movement repeated over time.

Generally in the gym users are advised to feel the muscles working, to concentrate the fatigue on certain parts of the body, to control the movement to activate the muscle fibers, all this is the opposite of what an athlete needs.

The athlete must also train in the gym trying to perform the proposed exercises with the greatest possible ease, through instinctive contractions that are not rationally controlled. It is necessary to optimize the execution of the exercises to transfer the results to the field. The athlete does not think about how he contracts his muscles, he instinctively and automatically performs a gesture and must get used to working in this way even in the athletic training phase.

to achieve performance improvements. The rumor that "weight lifting slows athletes down", and is therefore an unsuitable activity for them, is true only if weights are used as in body building; the appropriate use of the overloads guarantees instead an improvement in the sporting gesture and allows to prevent injuries, as it guarantees the strengthening of the musculoskeletal system. Each athlete should plan part of their training dedicating it to physical preparation, to get the most out of the field too. If the sports club you are competing for does not have the equipment to do this, it is obviously advisable to go to a gym, but it is important to remember that the training of the athlete differs from that of the body builder.