Needs Analysis for your Sport

Before any strength & conditioning program is written for an athlete, there needs to be an understanding of what the demands of their sport are, and an assessment of the athlete’s current athletic ability.

A needs analysis aims to break down the key movements, strength and power needs, and common injury sites of a sport. Once you have established the key qualities to train for the sport in question, the next objective is to build a profile for the athlete’s you wish to train. Remember that you should not try and shoe-horn athletes into generic, one-size-fits-all programs. Each athlete has individual needs based on their training history, performance goals, injury history, strength, and power profile at the time of assessment, and role in their sport.

The most common method to gather data for athletes is through testing. Testing helps you build a complete profile of the athlete’s capabilities and sets the scene for how you will plan your program. Once the testing is complete, the data will help you decide on what qualities you would like the athlete to develop.

Take for example a tennis athlete who has a history of adductor strains and has poor lower body strength. Tennis demands plenty of lateral movement and stability in the lower limbs, so because of this, the focus for this athlete should be plenty of work in the frontal plane and single-leg strength training for the stability aspect. The frontal plane work should have rotary components, change of direction components and deceleration components. Building other general qualities shouldn’t be neglected, remember the goal of strength training is to build a robust athlete to mitigate risk of injury.

Once the needs analysis and goals of the program have been established, it is now time to decide how often the athlete should train, at what intensity, how the program will be periodized, exercise selection, exercise load and volume and recovery methods. These are the steps to building your athlete’s training program.

To give you an idea of the type of things you need to consider when creating a needs analysis for your sport, have a look at this one I did for football. This is not complete but has some of the key themes I thought would be important to show in this post.