What exactly is Specificity, and how do you train it?

Vladimir Zatsiorsky, a former strength and conditioning coach for many olympic teams of the Soviet Union, defines it as an issue of transfer of training results.

So basically, what training would produce the highest carryover to the sport. What I often refer to as the highest ROI, Return On Investment. And that investment is your time.

A few problems that trainers have with specificity has to do with a term called “functional” that’s thrown around a lot. Many trainers a taught that someone functional must be training movements as opposed to training muscles. So any exercise that’s more isolated would be a “non-functional” exercise and wouldn’t transfer over very well. This isn’t absolutely false. Forget about the movements and focus on the muscles that are involved in the movement. If that means training a muscle with a more isolated exercise than so be it. It’s all about ROI.

I train a lot of Jiu-Jitsu competitors, so I’ll use them as an example.

A few of the areas that need to get stronger for Jiu-Jitsu are:

Triceps: Having strong triceps keeps your opponent away from you. Two examples would be you’re in your opponents guard and he’s trying to sit up to break your posture or sweep you. Keeping him flat on his back requires strong triceps. If they’re weak you’re in trouble. Your opponent has you in side mount and is tight. Having strong triceps really helps create some distance between you to allow you to recompose your guard.

Here’s Ryan Burns hitting a Close Grip Fat Bar Press with Chains.

A few high ROI tricep exercises that we do at USI are board presses, push up variations, dips, presses with bands and chains, over head presses, various extension exercises. When they’re strong and you’re lean with high relative strength, try the hand stand push up test. I seen about 1 out of every 10 guys that can do this.

Erectors: If they’re not strong it won’t be hard to break your posture. Also, having strong erectors helps to compensate for all the crunches you have to do while you’re on your back. It’s very important to have structural balance or you’re more prone to injuries. I’ve seen several Jiu-Jitsu athletes hurt their backs and one common denominator is pathetic erector development. The more hypertrophy you have in your erectors, the more protected your back is.

Core: Two main jobs of the core are to brace your spine and prevent or control rotation. These need to be trained specifically. If you’re getting a lot of crunches from your sport, there’s no reason at all to do more. Instead, you need to be focusing on training what you’re not getting in your sport, and training to maintain structural balance. Jiu-Jitsu, just like any sport, will use some muscles more than others, which can and probably will cause some imbalances. Ironing these out is akin to realigning a car. If your car has an alignment problem and shakes once you get up to 60 mph, you’d be a fool to put a bigger engine in it so you could go 90 mph. That would just brake the car down faster. The same goes with training. Fix your structural balance (your alignment) and you will be stronger and perform better because your body will move better. It’s important to have both bracing and rotation/anti-rotational core exercises within your training.

Here’s an example of a abdominal bracing exercise.

Here’s Jiu-Jitsu purple belt Matt Cebulak performing a Low to High Kneeling Long Bar Cable Lift, which trains both abdominal bracing and anti-rotation.

Neck Extensors: Your head is always being pulled down. Again, an attempt to break your posture. Your upper body will go where your head goes. Strengthening the neck extensors will make this much more difficult for your opponent. This also helps increase the strength to your upper body by allowing more room for the nerves the intervate with their motor units because of increased neural efficiency (neural recruitment).

Grip: Your grip is the first thing that attaches you to your opponent. The grip is often a weak link with many. Strengthening this will also increase other lifts due to articulation and increased force development. Here’s a video of a barbell curl with the Fat Bar done as a cluster set.

This is just one of many different exercises that help strengthen the grip. For a more detailed post on this topic, read “The Power Of A Good Grip”.

It’s very common in my industry for people to confuse what’s trendy with what’s cutting edge, and this is definitely true when it comes to specificity. Many have gotten confused with what is or isn’t functional, and what is or isn’t specific, or often termed sport specific for a particular sport. These people never mention squats, olympic lifts, dead lifts, chin and pull up variations, over head presses… Basically all the best exercises to get someone strong, but all require the most hard work. You never hear anything about loading parameters (rep ranges, rest times, sets, volume, frequency). All that’s mentioned is exercises that only a circus clown should be doing.

To summarize, training the muscles involved in performing movements within your sport IS specificity. Training the movements involved in your sport should be done WITHIN your sport itself. The key with training specificity in the weight room is picking the best exercises that give you the biggest ROI and training the proper energy systems that your sport needs.

I realize I didn’t mention any lower body exercises. These are extremely important. I will discuss the lower body as well as some common injuries and exercises to rehab them in a coming post.

If anyone reading this would like to discuss this further, drop me a comment. I don’t have much free time to write lengthy posts. I’m to busy actually training people for a living.

PS. I am now writing my posts on the USI Website. I will continue to copy and paste them over to this site for awhile, but eventually I won’t be adding anymore to this site. I appreciate anyone that reads my posts. Check out the USI Website. I will be adding a lot more posts on a more frequent basis at this site.