How To Improve Athleticism

Think speed, power, agility, explosiveness make you a great athlete? Yes, but they are not the primary quality of athleticism. Getting bigger, stronger, and faster empower athletic ability. But they do not improve athleticism.

What is the most desirable physical trait for an athlete? What natural athleticism comes down to is not strength, not power, not flexibility, not speed - it’s responsiveness.

The Difference Between Speed And Responsiveness

There is a huge difference between speed and agility versus responsiveness. You can be fast and quick - but to be responsive, you have to also be accurate. Your timing has to be on point.

Many athletes, especially up and coming competitive players are going full speed all of the time. You don’t want to go “all out” all of the time. The best athletes in the game know when to go all out, and when to hold back.

If you’re always all out, that is very easy to guard as a defender. It’s like fighting an angry blind person - they have no control.

Responsiveness In Agility Sports

In any sports that require agility, injuries are happening mainly because of a lack of responsiveness in the moment.

Most (as in 99.9%) of athletic training focusses on developing an engine - through strength and speed. If you put a big engine in a car that has little responsiveness, where the steering and alignment are not precision-built to the size of the engine, it won’t be able to handle the power of the engine.

This is what is happening to young athletes today. They are too strong and too fast for their bodies to structurally cope with.

Especially when dealing with uncertainty and variability and unpredictability in sport, going full speed and making split-second decisions under those conditions is a fast-track to an injury. Why? Because under those conditions, your reflexes kick in.

When Reflexes Kick In

You need to build strength and speed to support your natural reflexes and natural coordination.

Reflexes take over …. you won’t have time to think when big plays need to be made. You won’t have time to think, and your body is just going to react.

So when your natural reflex kicks in, your body has to be ready to deal with the reflex. This means that your body has to be able to do what the reflex demands that you do.

Example: if you have a reflex to duck and roll to avoid a collision on the court - if your knee cannot compress fully, when you react according to that reflex, you’re going to get injured.

Your Reflexes Will Adapt Over Time

Depending on what your body can handle, overtime it will learn what it can and cannot do based on it’s own structural integrity.

Train According To What You Need

It is not smart to Google “how to train like a professional basketball player” when you are in senior year of high school. What business do you have following a basketball program for someone who is in the NBA? Completely different levels of preparation, of physical development, and of demands.

You need to listen to your own body, work with your own body, and develop your athleticism as the primary way of training. Getting bigger, stronger, and faster is not making you more athletic. Instead, strength and speed empower athleticism.

Defining Athleticism

Athleticism means coordination, rhythm, timing, and structural integrity. How do you improve athleticism? How do you capitalize on your own natural athleticism to reach your athletic potential? You need athletic engineering; an athleticism training program.

You need to engineer yourself to become an athlete. And that is far more than just putting on sizzle strength, and speed.

How To Train Responsiveness

That is a big question. There are many aspects to this process. To use a simple analogy, the responsiveness of your smartphone depends on the hardware AND the software. The whole process we refer to as “Athletic Engineering” is essentially to develop and enhance both, to become more responsive. 

Responsiveness is your ability to respond (to any situation). Here is a clue for you. If you can’t perceive a situation clearly, then your chances of responding successfully are not high (to use the analogy from above, if Siri doesn’t understand what you asked for, she won’t give you the correct answer even if she knows the correct answer because she couldn’t decode the question properly).

To be more responsive you need to enhance your perception to be able to sense clearly what you’re responding to. Perception is one thing. Capability is another. Both are very important for responsiveness. 

For perception, the condition of your spine is the most important thing. This is an area many athletes either neglect completely or simply don’t know how to train.

Your spine is the whole communication network for your body — your perception is handled there. Every day it needs to be ‘stretched’ and moved. The less flexible and maneuverable your spine is, the more you lose your ability to ‘communicate’ (i.e. respond).

If you’re an athlete and you don’t take proper care of your spine, you’re missing a lot in your training. 

The whole process we use to train (engineer) an athlete is to make them very finely tuned and naturally highly responsive. It’s like taking a dog that might be strong, might be fast, but doesn’t understand a lot of commands and barks and reacts to everything while wasting a lot of energy, and training it to become a highly trained police dog who can understand and follow commands instantly with speed and precision, and even knows what to do intuitively without commands.

An efficiently responsive athlete will outperform an inefficiently reactive one, and waste less energy / risk less injury doing it.