Athletic Conditioning vs. Performance Training

This is a question I get asked often, "When should I be doing athletic conditioning vs performance training with my clients?" These aren't necessarily the exact words that get used but this is the root of the question. In this article I will explain how to frame these concepts and use them to build your workouts.

Athletic Conditioning (AC) refers to the components of athleticism, such as speed, agility, power, balance, coordination, strength, explosiveness, etc. Taken literally it means conditioning in an athletic way. Well, if you are training clients and you are doing fundamental movements such as squats, lunges, push ups and pull ups, you would meet this literal definition. You could also be training any number of the components of athleticism. This type of training is vital to athletic development. By training the components of athleticism you improve the general physical preparedness of the athlete (sometimes referred to as GPP), improve overall athleticism, and build a foundation for improved performance. 

Performance Training (PT) generally includes sport specific movement training geared to improving specific performance components for the athlete. Basically every sport could be used as an example, soccer, tennis, volleyball, football, basketball, rugby, lacrosse, cricket, and on and on... and on. 

The question I like to ask here is, "What does the athlete need to improve to be better at ___(fill in sport here)____?" 

The answer dictates the program. Is its speed? Power? Agility? Core strength? Balance? Control? It may be more than one (in fact it probably needs to be more than one). The training program will be designed to improve the performance for the athlete. Now, when should we have the athlete do Athletic Conditioning vs. Performance Training? 

Here is the take home for this concept. AC and PT are basically the same thing, just on 2 ends of a spectrum. What? Let me explain... 

What movements do we use to train AC? Squats, lunges, pushes, pulls, rotation, and the like. 

What movements do we use to improve PT? Squats, lunges, pushes, pulls, rotation, and the like. 

So what's the difference? The difference is everything. Success is in the details. How many squats? What kind? With how much weight? How much rest? The answers to these questions determine where your workout falls on the Athletic Conditioning vs Performance Training  continuum. 

If the athlete needs to improve, let's say... speed. For, let's say... soccer. What kinds of things will you have them do? Squats, lunges, sprint technique drills, core strength and stability exercises. Sure. You do all these things and more. All these things fit under the Athletic Conditioning definition. But the are also used specifically for the soccer athlete to improve speed in our example.

Let's just take squats and lunges and roll this out... We use squats and lunges, probably with some sort of resistance, to build strength. We use faster versions of these exercises, maybe even explosive versions, to train the body to use that strength to produce more force, more quickly. We manipulate the number of repetitions and rest period between sets to condition the athlete. We can use squats and lunges for both AC and PT. It all depends how we manipulate the variables.

So, here's the training tip, it's not that some exercises are Athletic Conditioning while some are Performance Training. And it's not that you need to choose either AC or PT. It's about how you manipulate all the variables of training to optimize adaptation to the training stimulus and maximize results.