Advertisement In any kind of a fitness program, a person will have a goal in mind. How directly the workout addresses this goal is one aspect of specificity. For example, if you had the goal of improving your golf game through strength training, you might include an exercise to increase the strength of your wrists. A person preparing for the ski season might include leg exercises to increase strength and endurance. These are easy examples of how the specificity concept can be implemented.
But simply choosing exercises that “look like” the movement you want to improve isn’t all there is to it. In the golf example above, even if we find a great exercise, we still have to figure out how best to use it.
Because golf is a sport in which you swing the club at a high velocity and then have a long break until you swing it again, it wouldn’t make sense to do a large number of slow repetitions of our wrist strengthening exercise. Doing so would violate our rule of specificity. Consider the movement and muscle groups you want to work, but also consider velocity and rest periods associated with the movement.
An aspect that is overlooked in specificity training is injury prevention. Sticking with our golf example, a right-handed hitter is swinging the club from her right to her left. Blindly following specificity would have her performing trunk twisting exercises that only had her moving in this direction and not from left to right.
Doing so, however, is likely to increase the risk of injury to her back and knees due to the muscle imbalance that would be created.
In an exercise routine, you should try to have it be specific to your activity, but also consider opposing muscle actions — movements that aren’t specific — in order to fully develop the body. Choose some activities that are specific, but also choose ones that work on areas that are not involved in your given activity to keep your body strong and stable.
Travis Erickson is director of strength and conditioning concentration at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse. E-mail questions to erickson.trav@uwlax.edu.
