Why Pro Athletes' Workouts Won't Work Out For You

Professional athletes and their coaches are a great source of content for fitness sites and magazines. So you'll often see a pro MMA fighter on the front cover of Men's Health, or a celebrity coach on a women's fitness magazine cover. Look in sports magazines and it's even more pronounced, with professional athletes giving their input in depth, explaining what they eat and offering sets and rep schemes. It's most extreme in bodybuilding magazines where you'll often see a whole workout taken right from the training regime of a world champion -right next to an advert for whey supplementation.

These people are the best in the world at what they do. Surely when they talk, we should listen? After all, if you wanted a guide you'd want someone who'd been there before you, wouldn't you? Don't these people know how to get where they are? Surely their knowledge can benefit us?

In a word, no. 

Professional athletes are where they are, doing what they're doing, because they're totally abnormal people. Doing their workouts isn't going to get you where they are. 

Professional athletes are not like you and me. That's how come I didn't have to get up and do a radio interview at 5 this morning before going to the grounds for a three-hour training session. It's how come when I choose clothes, one thing I don't have to worry about is whether the branding is on show to keep my sponsors happy. I also don't have totally unusual genetics or totally unusual abilities. The yawning gap between professional athletes on the one hand, and you and me on the other, is probably best illustrated by two examples: basketball and bodybuilding. Take a look at a professional basketball team. What do you see? Chests. You have to tilt your head back to look at the faces, because all these guys are about seven feet tall. The average American man is 5'10" tall. The average professional basketball player is 6' 7" - quite a difference. You're not going to grow nine inches by doing box jumps, and many of the athletic abilities these people display - that get them into training in the first place - aren't very trainable either. Vertical jump, a key athletic metric and a key sign of someone who's one day going to be slam-dunking, is notoriously difficult to train.

Guess which population ends up on podiums? And that's before we talk about performance-enhancing drugs...

See Also: Plyometric Training Benefits For Team Sport Players

Pro athletes have a wealth of experience you and I don't have. By the time a professional athlete is my age - 32, in case you're wondering - he or she has probably spent more time competing that most of my contemporaries have spent training. These people aren't just genetic outliers: they were putting the time in in childhood and never stopped. 

The Risks Of Long Term Injuries: Disastrous For Pro Athletes

Pros have different needs and opportunities too. For a pro athlete, an injury today is disastrous because of today - because of the missed game, the lost track meet, and the damage that can do to team and career. At the same time they're often training close to their tolerance because they need the competitive edge in performance, and the risk is worth it to them. Look at the number of pro ball players who wind up getting Tommy John surgeries, or the professional soccer players with their litanies of knee and hamstring injuries. Talk to a few powerlifters about ACL damage. For most of us, the heights of excellence in performance these people scale are, and always hand been, totally out of reach - and the injury risks they're exposed to aren't worth it.

The risks of long term injuries aren't worth it either.

But you're not a professional ice hockey player, so it doesn't make much sense for you to spend the next ten years with groin strain. Nor does it make sense to court the joint injuries that plague pro athletes toward the end of their careers. And that's before we even talk about performance enhancing drugs...

It's important to remember, too, that pro athletes are under a different kind of pressure from you. A professional athlete doesn't have to find time to train. They're paid to do it. It' all they have to do: train and perform. They don't get off work and drive to the gym; they work there. If that's not you, how can you fit in a three-hour training session designed for a genetically abnormal person with nothing else to do?

Leaving aside for the moment the issue of performance enhancing drugs, which are way more prevalent in pro sports than most people realize (Hi Lance!), pro athletes are not like us. They're genetically different. They weren't just the fastest in their class, or their year, or their school. By the time they're at college on an athletic scholarship they're among the best in their district or neighbourhood and from there the selection becomes more ruthless. Sure, they train - but they're selected for suitability. We're not. That's why we weren't chosen from among millions to push the envelopes in a sport. That two different people will respond differently to the same training program is commonplace. The more different they are, the more they'll respond differently. And we're talking about a huge difference - in aerobic capacity, rate of force development, metabolic rate, muscular maturity, recovery capacity and a dozen more metrics the professional athlete is very, very different from the general population.

See Also: Add 10-Minutes To Your Day... And Workout!

It's also worth observing that the workouts that these people follow often aren't that good anyway. 

Huh?

Aren't These The Workouts That Got These Guys Where They Are Today?

Well, yes and no. 

Often you'll see a coach boasting that his training regime brought his kids' scores way up thanks to his secret workout techniques, or his unique insights - which can be yours for a dollar amount. But what really happened? He was delivered a busload of the most gifted teenagers in the country. And he gave them back three years later. Now: between the ages of 18 and 21, didn't you grow? Get more coordinated, faster, more muscular? This is a population that would respond to any stimulus. They will tolerate less well targeted programs than the general population. Almost anything would have delivered improvements - because these guys were going to improve anyway.

Finally, it's time to address the issue of performance enhancing drugs. These often take the form of anabolic steroids - essentially testosterone. The fact is that use of stimulants, steroids and growth hormone in professional sports is totally commonplace. It's not just widespread; it's endemic. Steroids don't just make you gain weight easier: they make you faster and stronger, and they make you recover way, way faster. So if you're my age and you're looking at doing a workout regime that's designed for a 25-year-old genetically gifted guy a foot taller than you who's been training seriously for fifteen years, has a masseur, a physio, and an armful of anabolic steroids and growth hormone, aren't you doing something wrong?

So what should you do?

Take the latest celebrity training advice with a pinch of salt, for a start. Look at disciplines that consistently produce improvements or that are widely used across disciplines. If you want to improve your physique, you should probably squat, sprint and do pull-ups. They work for pretty much everybody. 

Switch the focus of your attention. That doesn't mean treadmills and pink dumbbells are your fate - the truth is that gigantic changes are possible with moderate effort, sensibly applied, at almost any age. I personally know people in their 70s, people who were once seriously obese, disabled people, who put a couple of hours in a week and saw their bodies transformed. But they didn't transform into Magic Johnson. 

See Also: What Is Cross Fit And What Are The Benefits?

If you're looking for a program, apply the same criteria. Don't be disheartened - just be realistic!

If you think I've hit the nail on the head, or you've got a bone to pick, get hold of me in the comments section below!