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Often the main goal of sports rehab is recovery of an injury as well as injury prevention so that the athlete can safely return to play their sport. Rehabilitation/return to sport training is treated the same way. Another example would be if the goal was to jump higher, weighted box jumps would rank higher than knee extensions when strength training. If we were to get even more specific, winning difficult games would be more beneficial than winning easy games as you’d most likely be facing difficult opponents in the finals of a tournament. If we were to rank each training method based off that goal in terms of specificity, playing and winning games would rank highest, going to practice/training specific parts of the sport would come second, and strength and conditioning would come third as it is more general than the previous two. For example, a common goal for competitive athletes would be to win the final game of a major tournament. The less specific, the more time it may take towards reaching those goals.
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The more relatable the training, the more benefit it will have towards reaching your goals. So how is specificity involved in sport performance? The rule of specificity states that training should closely match the activity that you wish to improve. All of these training methods are great opportunities to improve performance in your sport.
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Possibly throughout your athletic career, strength and conditioning might have also been introduced. So what do we do? The most common options are to begin practicing our sport outside of games such as performing drills, specific plays, and technique/form work on running, jumping, throwing, etc. Many times we reach a stage in our athletic lifetime where we get more serious about performance and doing well in our sport. Whether you play a sport recreationally or competitively, hopefully we all play because we enjoy it. By: Yong Park, Sports Performance Specialist
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