Hybrid athlete? You mean Human Generalist
Do you even athlete bro?
I’ve been at this long enough to see fads come and go. For instance Zone 2 cardio is super popular right now was made popular by Phil Maffetone in the 80’s and 90’s. I came across his work in around 2009 and at that time it was super popular among fitness professionals.
Hybrid athlete training is a phrase that bothers me because it implies that you need to specialize at being a human. Humans are great generalists when it comes to overall physical fitness. I will acknowledge that most hybrid training revolves around strength training and endurance sports.
You CAN specialize in those two fields and “embody” the modern hybrid athlete but don’t be fooled that you are just specializing in two small spheres of the athletic world. One of my favorite events to watch is the Olympic decathlon. Short distance, long distance, power, jumping, throwing etc. A demonstration of physical competencies across multiple domains. If that’s not a fancy way of saying “hybrid athlete” then I don't know what is. We could even look back at the physical competencies needed by our hunter gatherer ancestors to see how important a generalist approach was. We don’t need to look back that far.
Let us instead review the gross motor skills checklist for 7-8yo
Holding and moving across monkey bars without support.
Safely performing a forward roll.
Running smoothly with arms opposing legs and a narrow base of support (feet not too far apart).
Running around obstacles while maintaining balance.
Stepping forward with leg on opposite side as throwing arm when throwing a ball.
Kicking a soccer ball with reasonable accuracy.
Kicking a football with reasonable accuracy and consistency.
Jumping over an object and landing with both feet together.
Catching a small ball using hands only.
Walking on a balance beam.
Walking backwards heel-toe.
Standing and maintaining balance on one foot.
Using a skipping rope.
Hopping on one foot.
Riding a bike.
The average person looking over this list might say “man doing all these things well would make someone appear relatively fit, possibly even athletic.”
I would love to see some type of loaded carry/lifting skill on this list but that's just because I’m a meat head and I know my 7yo can deadlift 110% of his bodyweight for at least 5 reps.
The term athlete is so loaded in our culture and can elicit multiple meanings and feelings depending on who you talk to. This is part of the problem. We create an environment where we lose sight of what's important and parse out various channels and opportunities so we can win at physical activity instead of promoting health and wellbeing across the board.
If we look back at the list for some of us these are things that we could accomplish not because we trained them but because we played. As adults a play mentality and the opportunity to play is lost and that is where training and exercise do their best to fill in.
My hope as a coach is to create space for us to question and explore what having a physical practice means. To encourage folks to really think about what it means to move, work out, train etc. It’s easy to compartmentalize our physical activity to just yoga, strength training or running.
I want folks to set themselves up with a solid foundation. Let’s demonstrate to ourselves that we can meet our generalist needs first hitting markers across the movement spectrum before we specialize our practice. Remember you are a human and at some point demonstrated physical competency across multiple domains. Maybe it's time we revisit the list of what a 7-8yo can do with gross motor skills to see how we stack up against our younger selves. Maybe it’s time to ReWild our physical practice.
