The title of this blog says it all. Fitness is the foundation for performance. While this would seem to be common sense, it is my experience that sense is not always all that common. That is, many people overlook the role of simply being fit on performance.
The idea to right this entry comes from some comments by some of my injured sprinters a little while back. One of them is my fastest 200m sprinter whose had a string of freak injuries that have really hampered his training. First he tore his meniscus by banging it on a weight room bench requiring surgery to repair, then a year later he had to be reoperated on for the same injury, and then he got hit by a car breaking an ankle in the process. Because neither of them can handle impact and there range of motion in their knee is limited, there injuries have forced me to get creative with their training. Because of their physical limitations, we've been doing a lot of general (as opposed to sprint specific) substitution work. They both were wondering how this type of workout was going to help them return from their injuries in top form. There thought process prompted me to write. They had overlooked the role of staying fit on performance. As I mentioned previously I think this thought process is quite common.
At the lowest levels of sport, sheer fitness (or the lack of it) is often the deciding factor in the sporting event. Sure, there will always be the wonder-athlete who can role out of bed and compete at a very high level simply because they were blessed with great abilities, but even these athletes will often lose out to athletes of lesser abilities if they lack appropriate levels of fitness. As a result, these guys have been doing lots of metabolic-focused work and we're hitting. One of them is doing two workouts per day. Their general fitness is outstanding right now. One of them has made a partial return from his injury hiatus and is competing but still doing substution workouts. The other is shooting to return to running n two weeks after not running for over three months. I'm expecting big things from both and it's in no small part due to thei alternative work they've put in.