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What school of thought are you? This is a bit of an off shoot on the previous post around technique. In the gym do you try and get exercises as close as possible to the movement patterns of your sport, or do you keep training non-specific and power up the big motors and trust the technical training with the coach tunes the strength to the movement? Or a hybrid approach?

I remember working with a National swim coach and National Champion back-stroker, many years back. I was always trying to come up with exercises that were similar to the backstroke and I came up with this seated cable exercise that really got close to replicating the back-stroke arm movement. Well did I get an ear full. The coach thought the exercise was too close to the in-pool movement pattern and thought that it was disruptive to the nuances and fine tuning of the actual stroke. Needless to say the exercise was dropped, even though I didn’t agree in that how can 30 reps twice a week really influence the 1000s of strokes they do in the pool over the same time period?

None the less that event has stayed strong in my mind to this very day and it is something I ponder a lot i.e. powering up the big motors/muscle or getting more subtle. Any thoughts?