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Quantity vs. Quality In Athletic Assessment
By carsoncityfitnesssystems www.carsoncityfitnesssystems.com
Far too often, coaches and athletes choose to focus on quantity over quality in the training environment. What does this mean for you? And what's the difference?
Quantity based assessments look at strict numerical data. Heavy bench press weight, vertical jump height, and 40-yard dash speed are all classic quantity measures. Quality based testing assesses athlete's ability to perform foundational movements correctly. Lunges, pushups, planks and balance drills are now being used not just as exercises, but as tools for discovering weaknesses.
The problem with a strictly quantity based approach is that even athletes with fundamental weaknesses may perform well by utilizing compensating muscle patterns. As an example, weak glutes are one of the major causes of lower back injuries because the lumbar spin compensates and tries to take up the slack, leading to mechanical overload and failure. Over time, this compensating for weaknesses will break an athlete down.
If the only criterion used in designing an upper-body training program is bench press weight then two athletes that lift the same would be given identical workouts.
This program may work great for one of the athletes, but the other might have some fundamental weakness such as core instability, and rather than creating strength through training, the athlete stagnates or invites injury.
Quantity based testing has large amounts of data, however, which allows rapid comparison between athletes. After all, the 40-yard dash has been used to gauge football speed for decades. A coach can instantly see how his athletes are measuring up.
Quality based testing looks the foundational movements and grades the ability of the athlete to complete the motor pattern with correct form. Thus, the performance assessor can quickly and clearly identify any weaknesses and then use this information to design a plan geared towards the improvement of these movements.
By improving the quality of movements, quantities will be given the ability to increase relatively quickly, whereas the reverse is not necessarily true. For instance, if the glutes haven't been firing correctly, and deadlift strength has come to a grinding halt. The athlete can by re-train the correct firing patterns, improving form and increasing weight, because more muscle is able to be called into play. Fixing quality creates a win-win situation.
Even in functional movements, improving one area may improve others. For instance, if an imbalance exists in the athlete's left and right lunging ability, correcting the weakness enhances squatting ability, with no direct work on fixing the squat movement.
The ideal assessment would involve a blend of both quantity and quality testing. Quality testing would be the same across the board, as foundational movement is where it all begins, where quantity testing is more situation specific.
Once the idea of improving movement quality has taken hold, training automatically becomes more functional, since awareness promotes adherence. Traditional quantity exercises such as the squat aren't dropped. Rather, they are balanced with more unilateral or unstable work, creating a more effective, healthier athlete. In conclusion, by adding a battery of functional movement tests to your strength training arsenal, you can produce results more quickly and with greater reliability than ever before!
