Does your weight training programe enhance or hinder your motor skill learning?

In order to improve your sporting performance you may do some form of resistance training.  This may be to make you faster or fitter, or to prevent injury.

If you are rehabilitating from an injury, you may be looking to isolate certain muscles to help get them stronger. The pain associated with injured muscles may interrupt the nerve signals and motor control of  that muscle.  Working these muscles in isolation at an early stage allows you to concentrate on regaining some from of strength and control.

However, in healthy athletes and for those at medium stage of rehabiltiation, working muscles in isolation will hinder your motor patterns, and could actually make them worse. Extrapolating data from the injured population about how their muscles work and then applying this to healthy sporting populations is tenuous at best.

In sport your muscles work fast and together. Trying to consciously "trigger" or "engage" one muscle group before another will not work in the heat of competition. Rotator cuff exercises commonly used in tennis training may slow your serve down because you are encouraging work in isolation and at the wrong speed. 

 Exercises such as press ups, dips and pull ups all use your rotator cuff muscles to stabilise the shoulder joint,  in conjunction with a pushing or pulling action.  In a healthy athlete, there is no need to isolate the core or shoulder- everything is working well together already.

A thrower, a boxer or a cricket bowler all do fast explosive actions with their shoulders, so this too should be incorporated into their resistance training programme. This can be with medicine ball throws, or with drops onto the ground that allows the shoulder girdle to absorb force and impact in a manner similar to the sport.

Using opposite leg and arm actions is the advanced stage of development for children- either walking or throwing- so enhance this pattern by incorporating such movement in the gym.  Same sided exercises actually regress the motor learning pattern to a developmental stage. Athletes with some form of learning difficulties would benefit from opposite sided activities to help their fine motor control.  Sitting down and doing exercises is also a regression- unless your sport requires you to sit down!

Finally, avoid jumping jacks like the plague, they are a completely abnormal movement pattern that does not occur in any sport. 

Enhancing Sports Performance
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