I have had Functional Training for Sports (affiliate links: UK
Functional Training for Sports sets out to be a manual for training athletes of most sports. It’s not a sport-specific training manual but, as Mike Boyle puts it, a sports-general training manual. It aims to develop those qualities that are common to most sports and (almost) all team sports: strength, speed, power and agility.
I bet they wish they’d chosen a different picture now…
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Silly pictures aside, what’s in the book?
Well, it’s divided into a number of chapters, as follows:
1. Adding functionality to your programme
Mike spends some time defining what functional training is and what it isn’t. Ultimately, functional training is defined as “purposeful training”. Where a purpose exists for the training insofar as the body is being trained to be able to perform a given task or set of tasks, that training is purposeful and therefore functional.
Functional training in the context of training athletes is defined as preparing them for their sport(s) by improving speed, strength and power and reducing the incidence of injury.
Aside from these main points, Mike notes:
- While machine-based training may reduce the incidence of injury in training, it increases the incidence of injury during competition because of the lack of proprioceptive input and stabilisation training that comes with moving free weights and bodyweight. This leads into the idea that functional training is about training movements and not muscles.
- That the idea of kinetic chains can be used to describe movement, an idea proposed by Gary Gray. I had not heard of Gary Gray until reading this, let alone kinetic chains, but I did look online and find the Gray Institute, whose articles I need to work my way through now!
- That there are three main groups of muscles that need more stability: the deep abdominals, the hip abductors and rotators and the scapula stabilisers. Exercises for these muscles groups are not as some people note “corrective exercises” but rather simply functional exercises designed to increase overall performance by providing stability where it is required.
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2. Analysing the demands of your sport
Mike explains two very simple points in this chapter. Firstly, that in order to devise a training programme that is functional to a given sport, the demands of that sport must be assessed. Training can then be devised to enhance the qualities that are required for that sport.
Secondly, Mike notes that this process is not the same as evaluating an athlete based on absolute criteria. An example of where this went wrong was in the 1980s, where exercise physiologists consulted by teams concluded that many players were lacking in aerobic fitness, as they tested poorly for VO2MAX. However, this failed to take into account that aerobic fitness is affected by the percentage of slow-twitch muscle fibres. Introducing steady-state endurance work into the athletes’ programmes therefore resulted in slower, less competitive athletes.
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3. Analysing your functional strength
Here is where Mike and I fall out a little bit. I mean, I love the focus on bodyweight stuff but I think that the end result is less than optimal. I guess that’s because we’re trying to achieve completely different things, with completely different sized humans and in a completely different environment (me in my garage with one tiny person, Mike in a huge complex with hundreds of giants).
Mike sets three upper body strength tests and a lower body strength test such that a functional strong athlete can perform:
- 20 to 25 pull ups
- 20 to 25 inverted rows
- 42 press ups
- 5 one leg squats with two 5lb dumbbells
It must be a lot, lot harder to do that at a bodyweight conducive to performing competitive sport (i.e. 220lbs) because at 165lbs that seems fairly basic to me. I’m also a bit confused by the really high rep approach because my maximum pull ups didn’t really change from when my max single was 20kg (45lbs) to when my max single was 72.5kg (160lsb).
I would argue that unweighted pull ups are a poor reflection of strength in an athlete with a high percentage of fast twitch fibres. I guess simplicity is the most important factor here, though, and unweighted pull ups are easier to test that weighted ones.
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4. Designing your programme
Mike makes a number of great points in this section:
- Focus on getting the basics right
- Prefer bodyweight exercises
- Progress from simple exercises to more complex ones
- Female athletes have the same fundamental requirements as male athletes
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5. Linear and lateral warm ups
Mike discusses how to approach warm-ups in preparation for linear and lateral training. I don’t really do any sprint training (on land, at least) so this wasn’t of interest to me.
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6. Lower body strength and balance progressions
Mike talks here about the key aspects of lower body training, including:
- Developing a good bodyweight squat
- Using the front squat (with straps if necessary)
- Working up through progressions to a one-leg squat
- Lunges and other functional movements
I liked the approach but I think that there is a lack of focus on the ability of barbell squatting to add muscle mass to athletes who need to gain said mass in order to be competitive. In fact, this is the main deficit in the overall programme as I see it, although it is possible that this gap might be filled by the Olympic lifts, which are discussed later. I guess if he is able to teach all of his athletes to Olympic lift, then the lack of squatting and deadlifting is probably understandable.
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7. Hip extensions and healthy hamstrings
Mike describes a number of hamstring-dominant leg lifts that are good for developing balance and functional strength. In particular, there is focus on hip thrusts and one-leg deadlifts as well as some more unusual lifts that I will be interested to try out.
However, Mike appears shy about describing big, monster hip-dominant exercises like deadlifts, mentioning the trap-bar deadlift almost in a footnote at the end of the chapter. It’s almost like he’s slightly embarassed at the idea of getting people strong, which I know from his other writing is certainly not the case. I guess as above, the Olympic lifting fills the void here.
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8. Targeted torso training
For me, this was where I really started to feel like I was out of my depth. Here, Mike goes into a lot of detail about core training and rotational training. He describes a huge number of different exercises and explains why they are needed. Definitely a chapter to come back to.
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9. Balanced upper body strength and stability
Here, Mike explains why pulling movements are key to overall upper body stability and health. He explains why scapulothoracic functional training is key to the training of the upper body and for injury reduction.
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10. Plyometric training
Mike discusses how to incorporate plyometrics into a programme. I don’t really do any plyometrics at the moment so this wasn’t of interest to me.
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11. Olympic lifting
As noted above, Mike does focus on the Olympic lifts for the development of power (and, I assume, mass). I really can’t claim to know anything about Olympic lifting. I mean, I can power clean a nasty weight if you put a gun to my head but it looks horrible and there’s a lot of upper body pulling going on. Best left alone, for me, really.
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12. Performance enhancement programmes
Mike really makes it easy to take his knowledge and turn it into a programme. He sets out the different aspects of a programme to develop speed, strength and power and pulls it all together into various different two, three and four day routines.
For someone in Mike’s position as a coach to give away this kind of information reflects strongly on his calling as an educator and is something to be appreciative of.
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Summarise, please!
If you work with athletes or you want to work with athletes or you believe that athletic training should inform training of the general population, then this is an important reference work. Given the fact that you can pick it up for a few bob these days, it should be a no brainer.
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Good article. Have added this to my reading list.
Thanks, Rob. At the rate we are recommending books to each other, our reading lists are going to be sky-high by the end of the year.
And mine just got bigger since I signed on for the PT course…
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