Every athletic discipline requires thousands of hours of repetition to perfect technique. These hours are unavoidable and are simply considered practice. Paradigm Athletics recognizes this dedication and hard work while advocating that attention to foundational athletic conditioning always be incorporated into an athlete’s daily practice. The highly specialized work required for professional performance often creates inherent weaknesses in overall athletic conditioning. These weaknesses can easily be addressed with just a few hours a week dedicated to core, foundational conditioning.
Athletic performance can be judged by 10 factors of fitness as outlined by Jim Cawley of Dynamax Medicine Balls:
- Power
- Strength
- Cardiovascular endurance
- Muscular Stamina
- Speed
- Coordination
- Agility
- Balance
- Accuracy
- Flexibility and range-of-motion
When an athlete cultivates great capacity in only a few of these factors while failing to train the others, that athlete’s performance will be hindered. For example, a long distance runner doesn’t need great strength for winning performance, but the amount of endurance and stamina training actually wastes muscle strength away so time must be taken in training to address this by product of endurance athletics. Ballet dancers have cultivated very elite levels of flexibility, balance, coordination, and accuracy but often lack strength, power and muscular stamina. For dancers, ballet class and rehearsal is the extent of conditioning and this narrow focus necessarily limits building capacity beyond the demands of dance. If we train to increase all the factors that make up athletic performance we will increase athletic capacity and hence performance in our specialized disciplines. “A pyramid is only as tall as its base allows,” is an apt analogy that drives this model of training.
There is always more performance to be gained no matter what level of success an athlete has achieved. Incorporating years of experience both as a professional athlete and coach, Paradigm Athletics understands the demands of elite athletics and how to program training for any person that wants to become better, stronger, and faster.