Mixing It Up
One of my least-favorite exercises: overhead press circa 2011. I look extra annoyed because I forgot a hairband that day.
I started several ultimate teams in Greensboro in the 2000s. There were always a lot of enthusiastic players who would join up. They got less enthusiastic when it came time to practice and totally apathetic when they were encouraged to do running workouts on their own.
The first tournament would inevitably go like this: everyone amped up for the first game, can’t wait to play, running onto the field between points, annoyed if they were told not to play a point. By the middle of the second game people would take an extra point or two off, no one ran out between points. After two more games there would be lots of exhausted body language and long water breaks as people actively avoided going in to the game.
It all comes down to “you can’t get in ultimate shape just by playing ultimate” (and you can substitute any sport for ultimate in that sentence). You have to train your body to endure the sport at a higher intensity. If you just play a pickup game once or twice a week and go to practice, but don’t do track workouts or weight training, you will have a hard time making it through a six or seven game weekend.
The caveat to all this is that when you’re younger, some people can get away with not doing much outside training. But it always catches up to you as you get older. I would probably not have done much outside training on my own when I first started competitive ultimate in the early 2000s. I was fortunate to be heavily involved in martial arts at the time and the combo kept me in good enough shape to play tournaments without subs.
For those who have kept up with this blog, you know how that ended up - knee surgery. I was getting lots of endurance and cardio but not much strength training and it led to an over stressed left knee. It was when I started lifting and doing CrossFit style workouts that ultimate started to become easier on my body.
There are schools of training for pro athletes that focus just on weight training to improve speed and jumping ability. Power cleans, squats and dead lifts improve leg and hip strength and mobility and that translates to more speed and power.
It is important to focus on the muscles you will be using, but in a way that pushes them farther than you could simply by playing the sport. It doesn’t take much extra work, either. Especially for us non-professionals. One or two times a week in the six weeks leading up to a tournament usually gets me in the kind of shape I like to be.
I’ll be testing this again starting next week because there is another tournament I’ll be playing in early November. I’ll be sure to revisit the week before to see how it is going.
