What Is GPP and Why Is It Important for Athletes?
Unwrapping the Crucial Nature of General Physical Preparation
As an athlete, you may be consumed by the concept of specialized training for your sporting discipline. This kind of training will surely be the best to prepare you for the specific physical and skill requirements of what you do. Sounds perfect, right? Except there’s a problem.
If you focus only on sport-specific training, it will leave weaknesses in your body that hamper your ability to do that training (such as sled drags and bench presses) and, therefore, your performance in your sporting arena.
This is why elite athletes incorporate general physical preparedness (GPP) in their training programs.
In this article, we discuss the meaning of GPP and why a general physical preparedness program is crucial to athletes.
General physical preparedness vs specific physical preparedness: what’s the difference?
To understand just how important general physical preparedness is, we must start with a GPP definition. What does GPP stand for?
GPP is the foundation we all need to develop and sustain over time to maintain a sustainable and active lifestyle and our work capacity. When we help athletes toward their goals, we create personalized programs that develop preparedness across what we call the buckets of GPP:
Strength
Flexibility
Endurance (cardiovascular health)
Dr. Joe Lipsky PT, DPT and Reload’s Director of Client Care, explains:
“When we are able to look at each of these three buckets (and there are more, but I think these are the three main buckets to look at) when someone is missing something of these three buckets – that’s where they start to develop issues. Whether they reach training plateaus or start to develop pain and injury. That’s generally where we see people go wrong.”
Other buckets of GPP include:
Speed
Coordination
Other fitness fundamentals
Together, these GPP buckets describe our biomotor abilities – the functions that our bodies use when we perform any type of physical activity.
Specific physical preparedness (SPP) focuses on the training and exercises that are specific to a particular sport. Speed for sprinters. Flexibility for gymnasts. Endurance for marathon runners.
Why athletes need GPP workouts
When you watch an athlete perform, you immediately see the results of the SPP training they have been doing. But they could never achieve peak performance without GPP.
It’s kind of like looking at a house. You see the beauty of the façade, the windows, walls, and the roof – but none of these could exist (and certainly not sustainably) without that unseen, solid foundation on which the house is constructed.
A program of general physical preparedness gives athletes the foundation from which to develop the specific physical attributes that are needed to reach their full potential. If you’re missing something from the buckets of GPP, this is when your training plateaus or other issues, like injury, start appearing.
Take the example of an athlete who has never really ventured into the gym. When they do, they shy away from the intimidating environment of a lot of people lifting heavy weights, breathing hard, and grunting a little bit. Combined with a little lack of confidence in performing weight training exercises, this athlete sticks to walking, the treadmill, or bike work.
“It’s great to develop cardiovascular and endurance,” says Joe, “but it’s missing a huge aspect of the strength training we need. And we know we need strength training because as we age, part of the aging process is the loss of muscle. Indeed, after around 40 years old, we generally start to lose 1% of our muscle each year… If we start participating in strength training, we can mitigate these risks.”
At the other end of the spectrum, we’ve seen athletes who live in the gym. They only do weight training and high-intensity group classes. This type of training regime neglects flexibility and mobility, as well as endurance work. The result is that your body finds it difficult to recover from the strength training and performance.
‘Specializing’ GPP
Just like when an athlete creates a specialized program for their specific sport – which must be personalized to them – it’s also crucial to personalize a GPP program.
The World Health Organization’s exercise recommends around 150 minutes of cardiovascular combined with two days of resistance training each week. But exact amounts of exercise depend upon your unique fitness goals, body conditioning, and stage of physical fitness.
For example, at the time of writing, Dr. Lipsky is training for an Iron Man competition. Right now, his training is highly focused on cardiovascular, while maintaining a little bit of strength training in GPP work to make certain he stays healthy.
On the other hand, one of our clients is a gold medal female weightlifter. Because of her goals, her GPP focus is on strength training, with a reduced amount of cardiovascular. But it’s still in the mix.
In short, the GPP program you follow should be shaped toward your goals, but it’s crucial you benefit from a little bit of everything. If you don’t, you’ll run into problems. Take the example of an endurance athlete, who needs to do things like:
Balance on one leg
Straighten and bend on one leg
Jump from one leg to the other
Maintain this type of movement repetitively
“Where we see a lot of endurance athletes go wrong, is when they only train running,” says Joe. “The more you only train running, the harder it will be for your body to sustain this level of activity over the long term… Your cardiovascular system will improve at a faster rate than your musculoskeletal system. That’s why runners need to participate in strength training as part of their overall GPP program.”
How does GPP help to prevent injuries?
Here’s the thing: if you’re injured, you don’t play. Your best ability is your availability.
What we’ve found is that developing your strength, speed, power, flexibility, balance, and so on – those foundational elements of GPP – makes you a better athlete and reduces the risk of injury.
Our job at Reload is to help our clients to do what they do best. This ranges from helping pro-athletes to perform at their peak and be always available to do so, to others whose ‘sport’ is going to their day job, looking after their kids, or playing ball with their grandkids.
In short, we help our clients to live their best lives and achieve their fitness and activity goals. It comes down to identifying what the person needs to do to reach their goals and understanding which buckets are not full to create a unique GPP program for them as the individual they are.
The role of GPP in recovery from injury
Though injury may be caused by an accidental fall or something happening to you that is out of your control, most injuries occur because our body’s capability lacks the demands placed upon it by the demands of the physical activity in which we’re participating. We lack appropriate physical conditioning.
GPP helps your body become strong enough to do what you wish to do without fear of injury. It’s about providing the strength, resilience, and capacity to do what you wish to do – be that running the Boston Marathon (and avoiding runner’s knee) or playing football with your kids in the backyard.
Getting stronger helps us to live our lives more fully, continuing to lead active lives into old age. It’s not only about recovering from the injury to get back to the sport we do. It’s about preparing our bodies to resist injury in the future.
“It all comes down to that statistic,” says Joe. “Around 40 years old, we start to lose our muscle mass. It’s a natural part of the aging process. When we lose our muscle mass, we start doing less things. Our bodies are less capable of doing things… that’s where injuries occur.”
It’s the gap between the body capability of our muscle groups and the demands of the activity. It’s why we graduate down to ‘easier’ sports and physical activity as we age. GPP helps you sustain your body’s capability, meaning you’ll be able to do what you love most, for longer. Those people who still run marathons into their 80s have great GPP – and no fear of injury.
How Reload PT helps clients with GPP training
All the GPP buckets are related. You cannot have one without another. For example, you can’t have good balance on one leg without the strength to have that balance. GPP training must balance out these buckets – you need to train on one leg to have the strength in that leg to balance on that leg.
Take running as another example. When you’re running, you must be able to move at speed from one leg to another. You’re never on both feet. You need all the GPP attributes – balance, speed, flexibility, endurance… if you lack in one area, your performance will suffer.
Therefore, it’s crucial to develop a balanced plan based on an evaluation of your current physical condition and your specific needs and goals. Before creating a plan, we take a 360-degree look at you, including your athletic, fitness, and recovery goals if you are injured.
By conducting a comprehensive evaluation, we understand which areas you need to recover from injury or improve performance (or both), and we ensure that we include everything within a GPP program to help you stay healthy and perform to your potential in the long term.
How can you start your journey to uninterrupted, continually improving peak performance founded on specialized general physical preparation?
Sign up for a complimentary fitness assessment with Reload PT.
