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As the number of strength and conditioning coaches swells, here’s a simple question: What is conditioning? It puts the C in S&C. Is it just a fancy word for cardio?
Every physical act be it dancing, hiking, playing a sport, running, lifting weights, jogging, cycling requires the heart to do a few things:
This is a simplified list. But the demands you place while sprinting are different from running. And in a sport like tennis, things get complicated with sprinting at different speeds and swinging rackets. Cricket has its own distinct demands with every group: bowlers, batsmen, wicket keepers having distinct needs. Hiking up a mountain has its own demands.
Now playing a sport is almost always the best preparation to play a sport. But playing a sport is taxing. And puts the athlete at the risk of overuse injuries. So using sport to improve one’s capacity to endure is fraught with the risk of overuse.
Enter: conditioning. The idea is to simulate the unique demands of a sport by deconstructing its requirements: If a tennis player needs to sprint, hit a ball, recover, and sprint again. Train the sprint capacity. And repeat just that. That could be one component of a tennis player’s requirement.
Conditioning can make it simple to train for a task without actually subjecting yourself to the task in large doses.
To train for a hike up a 16000 foot mountain, you might need to simulate a steep ascent that sends your heart rate spiking and dropping. You can play with how quickly your heart rate spikes. And how long you give it to recover before spiking it again. You can play with trying to maintain elevated heart rates for longer durations. The combinations are aplenty. And the beauty of it is you can use one of many tools to achieve this: running, sprinting, cycling, sleds, medicine balls, pull ups, barbells, airbikes etc.