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What is Sports Specific Training Equipment?

Sports Specific Training Equipment can be defined as equipment that meets one or all of the following:

• Equipment that is specially constructed to provide resistance to various movements which are encountered in sport.
• Equipment that allows the user to improve specific sport traits. (e.g. starting strength, acceleration, etc.)
• Allows the athlete to assume a body position that is similar in nature to the body positions used in actual competition.

Sports specific training equipment, also called Functional Strength machines, can be explained by the fact that they permit the strict regulation of the load and the spatial characteristics of the movement in order to use extensively the appropriate regimes of muscular work and to program the characteristics of the force over time. They reproduce stereotypical training movements and are economical for the athlete in terms of time and energy.

"...the important limitation of many strength training machines is that they are designed to train muscles, not movement. Because of this, they are not the most important training tool for athletes" Dr. Mel Siff - author of "Supertraining

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