What do elite conditioning methods have to teach you about achieving your health and performance goals?

The question is, 'what can the average gym-goer, exec or entrepreneur learn about fitness and performance from the way that elite athletes and trainers go about their jobs?'

It is natural to be curious about how to wring whatever counts as peak performance from your body, even if you know your best possible is never going to trouble any Premiership selectors.

On the one hand, the principles of fitness training are fairly time-honoured and simple. But as humans, we are all complex and individual.

Even our own learning styles come into it. So making the connection between the science and its application can be where it gets tricky.

Achieving “peak you” – that elusive notion – is instead about having a clear “big picture” view as to why you are even in the gym or at the laptop.

Know your goal. From there, the rest can follow.

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Professional athletes are training for a definite outcome. Results on the field.

For the rest of us, the question can be does it even make sense to challenge ourselves – go hard out?

Professional athletes start off with the advantage of having a clear fitness goal.

Imagine, a fairly typical scene from childhood that takes place in parks the world over, the local primary school cross-country race.

Pre-teens of decidedly mixed enthusiasm. At the front, a bobbing knot of keen ones. Trailing increasingly far behind, the ranks of the resigned, the forlorn, the walking dead.

And when as adults we do take up exercise – which, given modern life, we all need to...

... and when we sit down on to work...

... how many of us gravitate towards what is comfortable rather than serious?

If you are naturally flexible, head for the yoga and dance classes. If you are stocky and made for the barbell racks, that is where you will hang out.

But what is the motivating goal? Training for looks is superficial, even if a fringe benefit.

Training for weight loss is legitimate, however only as an accessory to sorting out your diet.

Even training for strength or endurance becomes a nebulous thing on closer examination. How much is enough?

Is there any point getting obsessively strong at lifting weights if your daily life doesn’t involve anything much more demanding than lifting bags of shopping or reaching for a TV remote?

Maybe.

You can only train with intent – work towards some definition of “peak you” – if the resulting fitness has a clear application to your everyday needs.

That is one reason the idea of training for metabolic health has caught on. This involves maximal efforts for short durations – maybe blocks of 30 seconds – that act as a panting jolt to the system.

It is a level of working out most people would normally avoid. But it makes sense because of its proven physiological benefits.

You’re training the capacity of your heart and lungs to look after your body.

So the carry-over in terms of your quality of life is obvious.

Training for metabolic health and basic mobility is one good general aim we could all have.

Likewise, the idea of “animal exercises” – bear crawls, crab movements, frog hops and alligator drags.

This style of training is as undignified as a metabolic workout is taxing. And can be one in and the same thing.

That is why you hardly ever see people doing animal movements in the gym.

But especially as you get older, don’t you wish you could still move with the floor-scampering flexibility of a child? It is a functional everyday goal to aim for.

So thinking about the whole fitness question, it starts with figuring out what the end result is even about.

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What is the actual way elite trainers go about constructing their famously effective conditioning regime?

The first focus is on spotting and plugging weaknesses.

And a big tip for gymgoers is that working through a full range of motion is one of the most common flaws I find.

No-one ever works on their weakness as a priority. And it's easier to lift heavier weights if you do it through a shorter range.

But think about it and it is foundational. If you haven’t got a full range of motion, you can’t even train the body properly.

Besides, what else does hard exercise do except shorten and tighten your muscles?

Another rookie error that applies to gymgoers or weekend warriors is balancing training and recovery.

Recruits coming into elite academies – the wider squad of future players – have to be educated in the habits of good nutrition and adequate sleep.

In his book, 'Health Your Self', All Blacks conditioning coach Nic Gill notes how the All Blacks were put on a low carb or ketogenic-style diet after he found just how much it helps not to be overloaded with the usual sugar and starch meals.

Gill also reveals the All Blacks are advised to get at least nine hours, and better 10, of sleep each night.

The right food and rest are essential aspects of modern elite training. It is all part of the recovery, which is as much about peak performance as the working out.

Workouts have to be intense to deliver the benefits. But recovery is when you have your gains.

Exercise has to be strenuous enough to damage muscles and their fibres. The damage is the stimulus that makes them sore and forces them to grow back stronger.

But the actual increase in performance – this growth – happens in the day or two following the training session. And thus the trick of any conditioning programme is to build exactly the right amount of rest into the schedule.

So it is coming into focus. Train with intent. Pay equal attention to all the components of fitness. That include bedtimes, resting and stretching.

Then if, like a professional rugby player, you can build your whole week around that, you are on your way too.

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What modern professional training really means becomes still clearer knowing every player now has a highly individualised schedule.

Again, the principles of fitness are simple. Build endurance by running. Build strength by lifting something heavy.

A total workout only has to tick off the five fundamental patterns, or natural functional movements, of a push, a pull, a hip hinge, a squat, and a pillar.

You can push and pull with the arms in many directions. You just have to get pushing and pulling.

A proper hip hinge exercise like a deadlift or bridging movement is essential. And a squat. There are many ways of thrusting with your legs.

Pillar exercises are working the trunk – the core – in a way that strengthens it to resist the wild flailing of the limbs which result from those four other movement patterns.

Uncomplicated enough.

Endurance work is much the same.

So training boils down to prescribing sufficient doses of both resistance training and cardio?

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Sports training has gone through a general philosophical shift towards a fine-tuned individualisation of every person’s conditioning routine.

The baseline prescription is just the starting place for a process of endlessly more refined tweaks.

This tweaking is both macro and micro.

In the good old days, players were trained to fit their positions on the field. They had to be big and strong enough, or sufficiently fast and nimble, to match the classical notions of a role in the team or their sport.

Now the training is tuned more to the particular genetic advantages a player may bring to their performance in that role. You have forwards doing extra sprint work and backs doing extra strength.

And everything is checked against the resulting outcomes. That is why it is a science... with a bit of art thrown in.

If I got somebody’s squat strength up by 20kg, but they’re not doing any better on the field, we haven’t really made them a better player.

Old school training did treat the team as a “one-size-fits-all” proposition.

These days, an elite group may have a week start off with its foundation of group-focused conditioning, but in the second half, it shifts more towards individualised needs.

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This fine-tuning approach can be applied in great detail now that a fitness coach gets all the data.

For example, in team sports, players wear a GPS tracking device sewn into the back of their jerseys, not just during matches, but during training sessions as well.

It counts up the kilometres run, along with accelerometer-based measurements like the number of collisions or tackles suffered, or even kicks taken.

Recovery is a precise balancing act. I want to know when a team or individual has actually had a hard running game, so I can scale back that week’s training accordingly.

When you do not have a GPS... or a FitBit... or some other piece of technology, you can use a subjective scale of work and fatigue.

You can look at the numbers and say, yep, it was a hard one. The workload might then be cut so as to build in the extra recovery time.

In elite sport, the whole year is laid out in these broad macro terms. Pre-season may start a squad off at a 50 per cent workload and steps it up by a calculated 10% every fortnight.

It is all geared to arriving at peak fitness for most important event of the year or the finals.

Or for international athletes, whatever the season holds after that. Or for an event in the weekend warrior.

Or even a holiday, to look good on the beach in someone who want to look good in swimwear.

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Resistance training can be used to train for three variables – strength, speed or size. The emphasis is changed depending on how fast you move, how heavy the weight, or how many reps are performed.

Ballistic movements - 1m per second - build fast explosive power. Or a slow, hard 0.3m/sec if the aim is to maximise pure strength.

Then somewhere halfway in-between to create simple muscle bulk. With a couple of other 'artistic' tweaks.

The science behind this is that strength is largely a neurological thing – the ability of the brain to recruit enough muscle fibres to shift a high load. Nerve pathways have to be built.

Whereas size is about the actual muscle fibre tears – forcing them towards maximum growth – and speed work focuses on training the fibre contractions.

Again, all individuals will be sized up for the balance of what they need in terms of strength, size and speed.

When we’re doing squats, we might say right, we want you to make it three seconds down, pause for a second at the bottom, then come up explosively. Or instead, make it four seconds down, four seconds up, no pause at the bottom.

Fine-tuning to turn out the person at their very best possible .

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Could an amateur ever find the time to mimic this level of detail? Probably not... but with the right coach - me - they can come close.

Being a professional athlete is different because everything in their daily life can be geared towards that final goal of what happens in a stadium come the weekend.

Their training is such a cocoon that they even have a player welfare manager these days who looks after life outside sport for the players, gives them guidance in terms of that.

You may not have Welfare Manager to take care of your life outside your health and performance but you can have a fully qualified strength & conditioning coach and physical therapist to illustrate the general principles and come up with a checklist of how you might frame your own quests for fitness.

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Put thought into what is your over-arching goal. Tackle weaknesses as much as build strengths. Remember nutrition, recovery and stretching are all ingredients of achieving “peak you”.

And get a coach who sees the big picture view. Don’t get locked into what doesn’t produce results – that is, results on the field of life.

It’s about understanding what fills your batteries and what drains them.

PS. When you want a CALL to discuss how you can benefit from my 17 years of experience working in elite sport as a strength & conditioning coach and physiotherapist to reach your 'peak you're, comment CALL below