Conditioning for sport

It will never cease to amaze me what passes for conditioning in athletics. It is very common for me to hear that athletes are running a mile or more for 'conditioning'. Even volleyball players are running these distances. This is easy to do as a coach to have your athletes go run, but it is not going to help their conditioning.

The purpose of any strength, conditioning or fitness program is to prepare for a specific reason. As an athlete your goal is to improve your skill set and strength in order to be better in that sport. Your conditioning program should also reflect that. Most sports are intermittent sprint based which means that you need to run at 100% effort and then recover from that effort in order to do it again.  Being able to run for a couple of miles is not going to help your sprinting, quite the opposite, it will actually make you slower.
 

In order to improve you need to prepare in a similar manner for your sport. For soccer you should do sets of 25-50 yard sprints while walking or jogging between sets. Football player's needs vary depending on position, but receivers and corner backs need to do 10-30 yards with a 15 second break between efforts and lineman should do 5-10 yards with the same break. Baseball and softball should perform sprints of 90 or 60 feet respectively. Basketball players need a lot of sprinting and moving and maintaining their recovery by doing full court sprints and high intensity intervals via crosstraining to improve. If you play volleyball it is more important to be able to jump repetitively without any breakdown in form than it is to sprint a lot since most movement is in a small space and requires more reaction and quickness than actual running.
 

Even cross country runners can benefit from sprints and cross training to change the loading pattern of repetitive distances.
 

By understanding the demands of your sport your conditioning can be efficiently and effectively improved without logging a lot of miles.