Elite Sports Performance

What is the distinction of "athletic" endurance versus  standard "steady-state" endurance?  Steady-state endurance training essentially trains an athlete to perform at a sustained or gradually increasing pace of low-intensity output over an extended period of time.  Athletic endurance training by contrast trains an athlete to sustain repetitive short intervals of high-intensity output  with brief periods of low exertion or rest.  Most sports require athletic endurance more so than steady-state endurance. Our program utilizes various forms of High-Intensity Interval Training (HIIT) as our primary approach to building "athletic" endurance.  HIIT training is a time-honored technique for minimizing recovery time between high-output intervals, allowing athletes to perform high output movement repetitively for long periods of time,  versus maximizing the time an athlete can perform at relatively low-output intervals.

AGILITY...the ability of an athlete to change direction, accelerate and decelerate quickly and efficiently.  Most athletes will employ agility and quickness more than speed during the course of competition.  Often times "quickness" in small areas mimics speed.  Agility probably more so than the other athletic traits can be developed the most through drills.  And, we drill our athletes in all aspects of agility, including lateral quickness, acceleration-to-deceleration, reaction, balanced movement, rapid feet and other techniques.

A well-conditioned muscular body is an athlete's most valuable asset.  At the heart of all conditioning is STRENGTH!  A physically strong athlete is most likely to be able to stand the rigors of training in the other areas of athletic development, avoid serious injuries and be an imposing figure on the playing field, court, or other arena of competition.   The ESP program employs a unique form of Interval lifting that makes all workouts scalable to each athletes max capabilities in terms of strength, while simultaneously promoting maximum muscle endurance.  Muscle endurance is an often overlooked but invaluable aspect of strength training.  Just as traditional cardio endurance is important to an athlete so that they don't become easily winded, muscle endurance is important to an athlete so that they don't become easily fatigued.   That is the shortcoming of traditional power-lifting approaches to strength training: Yeah...the athlete can lift a lot of weight, but they can't lift it twice.  Our approach conditions the athlete to be able to lift heavy AND for sustained periods with minimal recovery time, meaning their muscles fatigue less which allows them to remain in the game longer.

At the nexus of strength, speed, agility and technique is POWER!  Power is the ability to not just move mass, but to move mass explosively!  Power is the elixir that turns a Ground-Rule Double to a Home Run.  It's the ingredient that turns a good block in football to a "pancake" block.  Power turns layups to dunks in basketball and  gets the ball into the goal before the goalie can react.