Providing you ‘train the way you play’ you will halve you training time and double your game performance.
This article is the first chapter of the Netball & Fitness Skills ebook. It will show you how to train successfully on minimal training.
Train the way you play and this will prevent you spending hours training for sporting attributes that have no relevance to your game.
It is training relevance that will get you fitter three times quicker. You can waste so much time on high levels of endurance fitness only to put in low level performance on court.
This is what ‘training smart’ represents combining fitness training with your game skills. This is how you become a performance player at any level of competition and is how our Rep teams become so fit and skilled in six short weeks.
How are you looking upon the game of netball?
All netball players can attain a high level of performance, as agility, reflex action, balance, coordination and omnidirectional movement are hardwired into all of us.
You may have lost some conditioning in the off-season or slowed up a little from illness, but your physical attributes are only sleeping. How quickly you reactivate those attributes hinges on your training format.
At Rep trials, players can be a little cumbersome because of poor running and footwork technique - their skills not up to par from improper training methods. This is not an indication they lack ability, as ability can be brought out in any player. Like a smouldering fire, you only need to stoke it up not re-light it.
Correcting poor technique to improve game skills is the easy part, as everyone wants to perform well. With the right coaching and training, players from 7 to 70 will jump up the ‘fitness and skill scale’ from one training session to the next. If you are not improving from session to session your training format needs looking into.
For example, players’ footwork on court will improve before the galleries very eyes, through one simple action, used by boxers’ to outmanoeuvre their opponent. It is literally three times more effective than all the hundreds of footwork drills ever invented. The results are instant, in any age group, being low impact activating your fast-twitch muscles.
Video & details in Chapters 3 & 7 of the Netball Fitness & Skills ebook.
Becoming fit and skilled is NOT a slow process if your actions are aligned to the game played.
It’s the same premise with court speed knowing which movement technique produces fast controlled speed. Humans are not natural runners, unlike a cheetah or your pet dog with limbs and respiratory system designed to move fast. We are NOT designed for quick, fast movement and must be taught how.
It is the same with a gymnast’s ability, being 90% technique training, because we don’t have the physical anatomy of a monkey or cat’s limbs and joints.
Imagine what a monkey could do with the pommel horse or parallel bars without any training.
It is not age, physique, gender or talent that sets game performance but the know-how in training game skills and specific netball fitness.
Netball fitness defined
The word ‘fitness’ has so many definitions and involves so many different areas of activity. But fitness by itself has only one definition and is defined by your ability to recover. The quicker you recover after hard efforts the fitter you are. That is, recovery time after medium and high intensity work, measures your aerobic capacity level.
But be careful how you measure your fitness specific to netball. For example the beep or multi-stage fitness test is a pointless exercise for netball players, as it does not measure the player’s skill levels in passing, catching, pivoting, footwork, leaping, goal shooting etc.
These skills are all a part of a netball player’s overall fitness.
For example, a goal shooter who has superb footwork in the ‘D’, is extremely flexible, shoots with 99% average and has a netball brain but is somewhat overweight are you going to exclude her from the team because she came last in the ‘beep’ test?
The fastest people running a straight line often have the slowest footwork on court. A runner or a cyclist all they have to do is go as fast as they can from the start line to the finish line. The biggest percentage of their training is to build an extensive aerobic base and anaerobic threshold.
Court & field game players’ training is a little more involved because of the added skills required to move play forward. You need to train athletically for omnidirectional play.
The six fitness fundamentals of netball
To lead out, create space, contest the ball, to intercept and outwit your opponent you need to meet these six athletic fundamentals of the game…
While these game fundamentals are individually discussed in their own chapters, you build these fundamentals through the physical attributes required to play netball.
Traditionally this is done where players engage in a series of drills.
Unfortunately most of the fitness attributes needed for a netball player to improve his or her performance are missing from a standard drill. Drill work by nature is slow in response and not all attributes are even engaged. This is because the explosiveness of movement cannot be built-in to a linear drill. Only partial reflex and quick reactions can be achieved.
Wouldn’t it be more efficient to train all your fitness attributes at once? And you can by training 3-dimensionally and not 2-dimesionally like a runner or cyclist.
The 17 netball fitness attributes
It is impossible for any single drill to train all 17 attributes specific to netball. You need a lot of them to do it and there are some attributes you can’t train with drills, such as suppleness of your Achilles heel and fast reaction times.
Chapters 2 through to 7 will show you how to gain high netball skill levels and all 17 fitness attributes together.
The 17 attributes of netball athleticism are…
Moving from high-end fitness to high-end performance
As netball is an athletic sport, not an aerobic racing pursuit, we have learned at Rep training not to waste time on high-end fitness that will never be drawn on in the toughest of netball games.
Sidenote: High-end fitness for competition is also inherent with a high VO₂max and lung capacity essential for endurance racing sports, lasting anywhere from an hour to several hours of racing. The wattage output of cyclists and runners requires an extraordinary amount of power and strength and the training to match.
Court game players at the highest level would never tap into this level of extreme fitness.
By integrating game fitness into skills training is how you become netball fit in weeks not months. Training becomes so much more enjoyable with better results.
If you decide to lift your fitness late in the pre-season or even when the netball season is underway, you will see immediate weekly improvement through athletic skill training. But training under traditional endurance racing and gym formats, as a court game player, your fitness will mark time a lot of work for little return.
You are a netballer first and an athlete second
Netball training is omnidirectional in movement and NOT linear like running or cycling. This makes your training athletic by nature three dimensional.
However you are not an athlete first, but a netballer.
It’s important to remember this when playing. You are a member of a team all working together. Athletes are individual competitors.
We train all our Rep teams athletically, the way the game is played, and not under the format of gym workouts, field sports or endurance racing, which is training without relevance.
You would be amazed at how many players and teams train for endurance drills rather than for athletic skills.
Skill training is accumulative through muscle memory (your brain storing your neurological actions) and stays in your system. Once an area of fitness is built into your memory you have this for life. The same as riding a bike you never forget how.
This is the main reason why you can become fit quickly when you train for skills first. Aerobic capacity will follow on from your skill training regardless.
How you train is how you will play
Even after two decades absence from netball the ability to perform netball skills will always remain with you from your stored muscle memory.
Of course if you picked up bad habits along the way then these traits will also stay with you. This makes it vital to train the right way and if necessary correct any bad habits.
What you do in training your brain will remember this action…
Even strength building is a skill, which many conditioning trainers don’t seem to understand for court based sports. You are not a body builder so why train muscles in groups? You are an omnidirectional player, more in line with a floor gymnast, than possessing the attributes of a weight lifter.
There’s a better and smarter way for gaining, flexible full body strength, that is detailed in Chapter 5 no gym, no weights just clever strength training techniques, building strong dense muscle fibre to take the rigours of the game.
Performance training delivers quick results
When you train, be it for ten minutes or an hour always think performance not workload. Going at your training like a ‘bull at a gate’ is not performance training. All that will happen is you will become exhausted whilst wrecking a perfectly good gate.
Our Rep squad training certainly has a high workrate but founded on performance training. Because we have limited time to train for weekend and one-day carnivals, we have learned to shift from traditional training methods to performance training and the results are the same every year well contested games.
Performance training is training smart that is training the way you play, which will deliver results only geared towards netball itself. What better way is there to train for fitness than through game specific skills?
These specific skills will deliver quick results as you are engaging all your athletic senses and physical attributes at once - not one at a time as static drills encourage.
Performance training is necessary to move quickly taking the ball to the goal shooters, especially in Fast Fives. Your training in this ebook teaches speed movement and the ball skills to match. Put both together and you will become a performance player.
Chapter 2 - Ball handling fitness
It goes without saying that ball handling is the foundation of playing netball. Training on your own will make you more skilled than through a team training format. On your own you become more determined.
Chapter 3 - Super quick footwork
We now focus on what moves players around their opponents - fast nimble footwork. This very specific game is what will move you around your opponents like they are standing still. Very few netballers know about this incredible method that works 100% without failing any player at any level.
Chapter 4 - Netball court stamina
Next up - if you think you are not fit or athletic, this won’t be for long, as that’s all about to change without a huge workload.
Athletic fitness builds quickly in weeks not over months or years as it does with endurance racing fitness. The game of netball is stamina based so it is important to train this way and not train for pure endurance, like a triathlete or 5/10k runner, which would be redundant training for court game players.
Chapter 5 - Specific netball strength
Not all strength work is equal. Body building strength format and weight lifting is not conducive to netball.
We need to look at two systems to build a strong body one method being through the skills of the game and the other through specific strength training occupations.
Strength building must be put into perspective, as a lot of time can be wasted on muscle development that will never be used. Don’t for a minute think a lean player can’t be stronger and tougher than a bigger muscular player. Size has little to do with being stable and well balanced on court.
Chapter 6 - Fast court speed
The problem is that sprinting is a dedicated sport. Netballers are not track sprinters. You will only sprint metres at a time and sometimes only once in a passage of play when footwork takes over.
While you don’t need a sprinter’s speed you do need to develop the technique for sprinting, moving fast over 3, 5, 6, 8 strides.
To gain fast court speed is easier than you may think if you know one basic technique of sprinting detailed in this chapter.
Chapter 7 - Explosive take-off power
This chapter connects all your skill training together, chapters 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6.
To take-off quickly, to jump higher and to out run your opponent you must train with explosive actions that’s the key - not speed. And the only way anyone can do that is through true explosive training. No linear drills involved.
This training becomes apparent when comparing humans to the animal kingdom. Animals don’t need to train to jump higher or sprint faster, as they are created with the limbs and muscles for speed and leaping whereas humans are not.
Traditional methods to gain explosive speed from a standing start can be disappointing. Hours of training to jump higher can also be frustrating to see worthwhile results. But this is all about to change in this chapter…
Chapter 8 - Speed burst energy
There is a ‘running action’ not widely known that will give you a refreshed attitude about fitness. This physical attribute will improve your fitness and health. And from this you will certainly gain a ton of energy to play netball and not fade in the last quarter.
You will see why young children have so much energy and it has nothing to do with being young. Something cyclists and runners have known about and apply for decades. Now you will be able to as well.
Chapter 9 - Training on your own
This next section we put your training together without the need of programmes or coaching.
Netball training is NOT a programme but a routine both being very different formats. Programmes finish and routines get better and better. And there are a couple of smart ways of training on your own that will deliver top notch results.
Chapter 10 - Limited time to train
If you have no time to train but still want to play, you can’t afford not to train to some degree.
With limited time to train you can perform well above average by utilising two areas of netball. In essence what you are doing is decreasing the workload, sacrificing some fitness, but not the performance factor.
Rather than trying to do a little of everything just do a couple of things really well. This next chapter will show you how to build high level performance on basic skills.
Chapter 11 - How to stay in form
Now that you know how to train it’s imperative to maintain your fitness and game skills to make sure no element of your training becomes neglected.
Most athletes and fitness enthusiasts try to keep their fitness in check through an organised programme or training schedule. I believe this to be a mistake, as programmes are problematic being seasonal and ridged by nature.
This last chapter is to show you why routines are better than programmes. And why a diary will keep you in good shape and form all year round. No tapering needed.
Visit ILoveNetball's fitness website for further information on the two ebooks.
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