Stop Wasting Time Conditioning Your Players by John Mietus
Paul Assaiante is perhaps the most successful coach in the history of American sports. That doesn’t mean many people know who he is. Assaiante coaches squash, the indoor racket sport, at Trinity College in Hartford, CT. At one point in his coaching career his team won 252 games in a row and 13 consecutive national championships. Overall his coaching record at Trinity is 399-13, and he is still actively leading their program as well as the U.S. National Squash Team. Here is his philosophy on conditioning:
“When I first arrived at Trinity, I decided that while my team might not be as technically adept as (other schools), that they would be fitter at the end of a match. I make them train on the court as much as possible, with a racket in their hand, so when they feel the propulsive sting toward the end of a long match, they say, ‘I want this. I have worked to get this. I know I can overcome it.’ I want the burn to come on the court in practice so that it always arrives the same way and they deal with it calmly and play through it… Exercise is never a punishment. I never make the guys run laps or do pushups as a penalty.”
Assaiante is making a universal point about sports that needs to be addressed and reinforced: Conditioning is sport specific. You cannot become a great cyclist by swimming thousands of meters, you cannot become a great distance runner by playing tennis, and you cannot become a great basketball player by running lines. You may improve your lung capacity, or your sprint speed, but the real fitness of the sport comes from playing the sport exhaustively and learning how to cope with your body’s limitations. The mind plays a crucial role in this, as it must learn how to react to body’s struggle. With no game-like conditions to go along with the fitness, the mind does not learn how to perform skills while tired, but only learns how to run between arbitrary distances or do pushups, or whatever. The idea that this type of fitness improves fitness for the sport itself is outdated and incorrect. It likely originates from the military drill instructors who send their recruits on long runs and to do pullups to improve general fitness. That’s a fine way to improve the human body for general tasks, but it does nothing for the competitive athlete (as witnessed by the fact that Army has very few national championships in basketball).
When we talk about the great players in basketball history and where they come from, it’s always from places where the game is played competitively for long amounts of time, every day. The Rucker courts in Harlem, the beachfront backboards in Santa Monica, and the YMCA gyms of South Chicago. Nowadays the playground game has been somewhat replaced by AAU and organized sports, but kids who learn to excel at basketball are typically the ones who are playing the most basketball. Very rarely do you hear about great basketball players coming from the Crossfit Gyms of Boston or the weight rooms of Orlando. Why? Because that’s not where the sport itself is played! To become great at the sport, you need your players to play as much of the sport itself as possible. This will teach them more about their body’s capacity than any sort of irrelevant conditioning exercises. As a coach you do not need to train your team like a drill instructor trains troops. Not because you lack discipline, but because you would be wasting time that could be better spent performing the sport.
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