Three Elements Of Needs Analysis

To determine the demands that an athlete needs to meet, the S&C coach should consider:

Prior to writing a training program, you need to know the specific requirements of your athletes. Usually, a needs analysis comprises three elements:

1. Movement analysis

2. Injury analysis

3. Fitness testing

1. What are the movement demands of the sport?

For a field or court sport:

• How many changes of direction?

• How much high-speed running?

• What is the duration of each sprint effort?

• What is the work : rest ratio?

For a few examples of individual sports:

• Sailors spend a lot of time in core isometric holds.

• Shooters will time shots between breaths and even between heartbeats (emphasising CV fitness to slow the heart rate).

• Archers need immense arm and back muscular endurance to hold flexed for hours of loosing arrows.

To know how to design a specific program for a sport, you really (REALLY) first need to understand the demands of the sport. 

2. How do athletes in your sport get injured?

Often S&C coaches try to undo the damage an athlete's sport does.

• Swimmers spend so much time training repeated shoulder protraction. Often, the S&C coach trains them for shoulder retraction to avoid so-called "swimmers' shoulder".

• Unilateral athletes like cricket bowlers and other throwers (shot put, javelin, etc.) spend so much time training just one side of their body that we have to do work on the other to train away the spinal twisting that can create their well-known back pain.

• Cyclists are known for low bone density in their hips and lumbar vertebrae since their sports place almost no body weight (load) through these areas of terrible ergonomic positions.

• How common are hamstring injuries in Australian rules football and soccer? Are there any interventions the S&C coach can do to help?

Other times we need to make athletes stronger to avoid dangerous positions.

• Injury prevention programs can be part of the warmup run by the S&C coach (e.g. Netball's KNEE program, FIFA 11+ in soccer). 

• Is squat strength related to change-of-direction knee kinetics linked to ACL injuries?

• How important is neck strength in preventing concussions?

3. How well does an individual athlete meet the movement demands?

Once we know what an athlete needs to do (either to perform key movements of their sport, or to avoid injuries) we next need to know how well an athlete can meet these demands. Remember that "fitness" is not a single ability so you will need a range of fitness tests that test a range of physical competencies to know how well an athlete meets the demands of their sport. An excellent resource on the topic is a book called Physiological Tests for Elite Athletes that describes testing protocols for a range of different sports. For example, the AFL Draft Combine tests:

• Yo-Yo (shuttle run)

• 2 km time trial

• Agility test

• 20-metre sprint

• Running vertical jump

• Standing vertical jump

While it's easy to get caught up in the "more is better" philosophy of fitness training, can an athlete be "fit enough"? Remember that an athlete's time is limited so rather than simply training an athlete to improve and improve their already huge back squat, perhaps consider ways to challenge them with more than just load (e.g. instability, overhead, accommodating resistance, slosh pipes). 

Note that when I say "fitness", I mean the four dominant physical qualities:

1. Endurance -the ability to perform repetitive work

   • Cardiovascular

   • Muscular

2. Flexibility - the ability of a muscle to stretch (note that the muscle's flexibility is just one component of a joint's range of motion; many of with are not trainable)

3. Strength - the ability to exert maximal force

4. Speed - the ability to exert force quickly