The difference between special sports and physical fitness sports

Specialized sports are directional ability training centered around the competitive/performance goals of a single event, while physical fitness sports are general ability building centered around people's comprehensive physical literacy. The two are not an either/or oppositional relationship, but a mutually supportive upper-lower relationship.

Last week, I met a parent who was taking his child to class at the gym. The 10-year-old boy has been practicing table tennis for three years. Now he can't smash well and has sprained his feet. The special coach asked him to stop special training for two months to replenish physical fitness. The parents were extremely anxious and felt that the coach didn't want to teach well and wasted their children's time to practice their skills. This is probably the biggest misunderstanding that most people have about these two concepts: they think that physical fitness is a useless "show", and specialization is the real thing.

In fact, if you really get into playing a sport, you will understand that the essence of specialization is "partial subject". If you look at the training schedules of professional marathon runners, 80% of them are long-distance running at different paces, and the remaining 20% ​​can only be supplemented with core and ankle strength. The goal of all training is only one: PB. Athletes who practice fencing practice lunges and the explosive power of the fencer all year round. It is normal for the dimensions of the left and right legs to differ by two or three centimeters. For the ultimate special performance, they will even actively sacrifice part of the body's balance. I once had a conversation with the provincial team's physical fitness coach when we were having dinner. In the early years, they gave priority to specialties in training. They first selected young talents with good hands and talents to practice specialties to death, and then replenished their physical fitness when they encountered bottlenecks. The advantage was that they achieved results quickly, but the disadvantage was that many young talents were injured when they were sixteen or seventeen years old and retired early, and the upper limit was extremely low.

Physical fitness is just the opposite. It does not serve the goal of any single project. Its essence is to lay a "universal foundation" for your body. I took care of a sophomore boy in high school two years ago. He was 1.8cm tall and had never done any sports before. It took him 4 and a half minutes to run 800 meters. He had to rest for two minutes when climbing the third floor. Later, he practiced physical fitness for half a year and did everything: kettlebell swing for explosive power, agility and ladder training for coordination, battle rope training for cardiopulmonary training, and occasionally badminton and swimming. When he was tested again half a year later, he scored 3:20 for 800 meters, and the mild fatty liver disease in the physical examination was gone. Later, he fell in love with basketball and signed up for a basketball training camp. He got started more than twice as fast as novices at the same stage. His sliding and taking-off power patterns did not need to be corrected by the coach at all. This is the role of physical fitness: when you have fully developed the basic abilities of strength, endurance, flexibility, and coordination, you can learn any special event quickly and are not prone to injury.

Of course, many people now think that "physical fitness is useless". There are many golfers around me who have been playing wild basketball for more than ten years. They say that I just sweat from playing badminton and don't want to play games. Why bother to practice physical fitness? There is actually nothing wrong with this statement. If your sports need is to "have fun" and you have no requirements for performance, and you don't care whether you will suffer from strain, then you can just play the special events you like and don't have to take time to replenish physical fitness. But I have to tell a true story: Last year, a 42-year-old golfer came to me and said that after playing badminton for five years, his shoulders were so painful that he couldn't lift them, and there was fluid in his knees. The doctor told him not to touch the racket for at least half a year. I tested his core strength. It was so weak that he couldn't hold a plank for 30 seconds. Every time he smashed the ball, he didn't use his core rotation at all. He relied on his shoulders to throw hard. If he couldn't keep up, he would twist his knees. It would be strange if nothing happened over time. If he had taken an hour or two a week to practice core and lower body stability in advance, he wouldn't have suffered this crime at all.

To put it bluntly, it’s actually a bit like learning a language. A specialty is where you practice simultaneous interpretation and business negotiation to hone your ability in a certain scene. After practicing, you will be very good at this scene. However, if you don’t have a solid grasp of basic vocabulary and grammar, practicing simultaneous interpretation will not only make progress slowly, but also easily develop a lot of bad habits that cannot be changed. Physical fitness is the basic stage for you to memorize words and learn grammar. Once you have a solid foundation, you can use it whether you are doing simultaneous interpretation, literary translation, or just traveling abroad.

Of course, this does not mean that physical fitness is necessarily more important than special events. I have seen many children who only practiced physical fitness since childhood and did not engage in any special events in their teens. On the contrary, they have no interest in sports. After all, physical fitness training is relatively boring. The sense of accomplishment and competition brought by special events are the core motivation for most people to persist in sports for a long time.

Really speaking, there is actually no need to distinguish the two so clearly, let alone to step on each other. If you are taking the professional competitive route, you must focus on special events, and physical fitness can be used as a supplement to make up for your shortcomings. ； If you are an ordinary sports enthusiast who wants to play for a longer time without getting hurt, or if you have a child at home who wants to choose a sports specialty, you might as well leave more time for physical fitness. Only when the foundation is solid can the building be built tall, right? Oh, by the way, a friend asked me last time if signing up for a fitness class at the gym would mean I don’t have to run a marathon? There is no such thing as being so rigid. If you like running, you can treat running as a specialization and use physical fitness classes to make up for your shortcomings in strength. You can do whatever makes you feel comfortable. Exercise is to make yourself comfortable, and it is not to answer exam questions. There are no standard answers.