Should you Train Like Your Favorite Athletes?

You’ve probably heard the advice before about not following the training program of your favorite athletes.  It’s generally good advice. Why? Mostly due to the fact that you are not them. But this doesn’t give you a lot of background, nor does it paint the bigger picture of why you were interested in your favorite athlete’s training program in the first place: you probably want some trait they have. You assume that you can find some commonality in their preparation that would apply to you.

And you may actually be correct, but you’d be missing one very important aspect of preparation: you skipped the first two points of development that enable the finer qualities to come out. Those finer qualities are probably what your favorite athlete was training to achieve.

I’m specifically talking about what I call structural balance phase, and a more general strength and aerobic base-building phase. Most people who want to jump to the sexy, completely ignore the base-building of these two phases of development.

Before you can expect to have the level of results from an advanced program, you yourself have to be advanced. Advancing in athleticism and strength from beginner to intermediate levels are essentially like getting good at anything else— you get better by simply showing up and going through the required motions. However, making progress at the advanced stage comes much slower, and frankly sometimes a lot of experimenting.

The early stages of athletic development typically yield the most progress. It’s really the best case for why you should never ignore those first two phases: if you have the most to gain by improving your posture and getting 15-20% stronger than you currently are, that’s where you should begin— not by training something that may only move the needle a 1-2% for you.

Another way to pitch it to you: when you reach an advanced stage in training, you no longer get the massive improvements you gain as a beginner and intermediate athlete. Think about the first year you trained in the gym, or on the mats: from day 1 to day 365, you got exponentially better: 100% to be more exact (maybe more!). Those types of improvements are impossible to attain for an advanced athlete many many years in (if it’s even possible at all). Thus, if you’re a beginner or intermediate level athlete and trying to follow a program designed to squeeze a 3% gain out of a professional athlete, you leaving the double digit performance increase you may be able to get out of a program much simpler.

You’re stepping over dollars to pick up nickels!

That is the peril of attempting the programs of your favorite athlete. However, maybe you are at the stage they’re at and could greatly benefit from a certain attribute they’re training to achieve. How would you know this though?

There’s many ways to figure it out, but the easiest would be to talk about the stages of development, as I see them. There are many, but for ease of discussing, I’ve broken down the three most important distinctions and how I assess every athlete who comes through my doors.

1) STRUCTURAL BALANCE

This is where every training program starts. You may spend as little as 2 weeks here, or as many as 8-12. To me, structural balance is the combination of training:

• Muscular imbalances (correcting asymmetries)

• Muscular imbalances in the agonist/antagonist relationship

• Basic (functional) hypertrophy (if a muscle is obviously too small or weak for the person, this needs to be addressed)

• Proper mobility through basic ROMs (ranges of motion).

Sometimes I have people come in to work on their back squat. With some modifications, they end up squatting 50-60lbs more than their previous max in one session. Now, they didn’t get 50-60lbs stronger, they simply needed some help in the technique and structure department. 

2) STRENGTH + AEROBIC ABILITY

This is where we we really test your actual strength and actual aerobic abilities (where applicable). I put this second because I have seen so many athletes who seem weak, but really are suffering from a nagging structural imbalance. If we spend the proper amount of time on improving structure, we can really assess where their strength truly is.

Once that is out of the way, we are firmly in the territory of building your strength and aerobic ability, we could remain in this phase for quite a while (multiple months), or shorter. Usually, a lot of training comes back to this phase, for me.

Goals in this phase includes:

• Training for muscular size (hypertrophy)

• Training to increase objective raw strength (increasing numbers in lifts).

• Improve power output.

• Improve aerobic health and conditioning through various means.

3) SPECIAL STRENGTH / SPECIAL PREPARATIONS

This may take years and some athletes will never train here. Why? The amateur athlete who keeps the previous two points in check and simply shows up enough to practice their sport for fun, will likely get all they need. That said, this same athlete may work on these skills for 4 week periods before a competition, or to peak a particular phase of training.

If you’re a bit more competitive, a professional athlete, high level masters division competitor, or just a hardcore weekend warrior type: this is where things can get complicated. They do not have to be, and the magic of simplification and actioning and excelling here is all in the assessment of yourself/your athlete. I can’t believe I’ve written this much without mentioning the need for assessment and understanding the individual (or yourself), because that dictates everything here. When you have a proper baseline here, the goals become very easy to pick out.

Things we may address here:

• Sport specific movement.

• Sport specific strength curves in movement.

• Specialized athletic qualities. Examples: aerobic power, or ability to put out explosive power while sustaining a near max heart rate, for example.

• The list truly goes on: the qualities are very specific to the sports the athlete plays.

Conclusion

It’s not wrong to train like your favorite athletes and to borrow exercises, but wholesale changes or adoptions of their training program to your current program is likely short-sighted. The irony is, it is usually those who are not on any type of cohesive, planned program that are trying to do everything “x” athlete is doing. So my best advice is to get assessed, make a plan, stick to it, and maybe add some of the spice along the way. The assessment of where you’re at and where you need to be usually will put you squarely in one of the three camps I described above. Don’t be surprised if you have to address a little bit in each category though. Maybe that’ll make a good “Part II”— let me know below!

-Mark