A lot of young athletes will play multiple sports because they actually like those sports.  Occasionally you will hear the phrase, “well, Johnny is just doing this sport to stay in shape for such and such.”  Although, it probably isn’t going to hurt you to play that other sport, let me illustrate to you exactly how it might help you out or provide no benefit whatsoever.

The football to basketball transition.

I remember doing this for the first time my freshman year.  You play football all season.  You run those suicides at the end of practice.  Sprints.  Conditioning stations.  All those drills where you are trying to help your buddies finish so that you don’t have to run extra.  You think you are properly conditioned for basketball when it rolls around.

Not so fast my friend.

That first week of basketball, I was dragging like you couldn’t believe.  I didn’t take any significant time off between football and basketball.  At most a few days.  So why did it seem like I was in such bad shape?

Football and basketball are two different cardiovascular demands.  In football, you run a play full speed for 2-5 seconds, then you jog back to the huddle and have around 35 seconds before you have to go again.  Basketball is constant movement.  A lot of start and stop with change of direction.

The sport that can really help you with basketball is soccer.  Different sports and played on different size fields, but the cardio demand is very similar.  Soccer is a bunch of start/stop/change of direction.

The cross country for a lot of other sports transition.

Cross country is a perfect sport for, obviously, distance runners for track.  Ultimately, I think it can be good conditioning for other sports as well.  It might not get you in a similar game shape, but it will provide enough of a cardiovascular base that you will hold your own until your conditioning matches up with your new sport.

The only problem I have with cross country as a conditioning for another sport is when I have an athlete come to me for speed training.  Let’s say it’s tennis.  They want to do cross country for the conditioning which trains primarily the slow twitch fibers.  But, at the same time wants us to do speed training so they can get to the ball quicker, which is mainly the fast twitch fibers.

This is a conflict of training methods.  You can’t develop slow twitch and at the same time fast twitch.  It just cancels each other out.  So, it is somewhat beneficial from the conditioning component, but from the speed angle, might not help out as much.

I would like to believe that an individual tries a sport because he/she truly has an interest in it.  Not so much that the only reason is to get better conditioning for another sport.  But, if that’s what it takes to get you to try the sport, so be it.  Maybe that is what it takes to get just one more person actually thrilled to be running cross country or like whatever other sport they try to use for conditioning.