I am a self confessed "serial hobbyist". I really enjoy trying new things and getting better/good at things I am not good at. This extends to creative hobbies like drawing and making surfboards as well as physical hobbies like surfing, playing golf and rock climbing/bourldering. I've had plenty of other hobbies along the way but those I just listed are now the ones I find myself coming back to over and over again.

Combining my time spent chipping away at new hobbies with my clinical background and training in strength and conditioning has allowed me to ponder some concepts that I find interesting: What's the role of strength training and gym work when you're starting a new sport/hobby? Should training frequency change as your skill builds? Is there a point where you don't need to train for your sport/hobby?

For me, getting into rock climbing and surfing was an interesting journey that involved having to overcome some demons. I have a long history of shoulder instability (my shoulder used to roll out the socket very easily, even when I was asleep!) and I broke my back when I was 18 which lead to me having a lot of pain, irritabliity and fear around arching my back. So climbing forced me to challenge my concerns around dislocating my shoulders and surfing forced me to confront my inability to arch my back without causing pain.

Because of these past issues I knew I had to start these hobbies somewhat tentatively. To aid this, I was aware of the research around acute to chronic training loads and injury risk - the basic gist is that if you increase an activity by more than 10-20% in a week then you're at greater risk of injury for the next 2 weeks. So this meant that I started pretty cautiously with these activities and very gradually increased the amount and frequency of doing those activities.

Despite this, with my rock climbing I ended up developing tendinitis twice (both times were 2 weeks after I increased from 1 climb per week to 2 times per week). Thankfully there were no big setbacks with surfing. However, I believe that if I had tried to do extra 'surfing specific' training to work on my paddling fitness, back strength and take off/"pop up" speed I definitely would have run into some trouble. Those movements were all quite new to me and having 1 or 2 surfs per week was PLENTY of exposure to those movements. To add more would have been foolish and absolutely would have increased the risk of something getting painful and sore.

Similarly with climbing, if I started out climbing and then did extra strength work for my grip and pulling strength (chin ups, hanging, rows etc) it quite easily would have sped up the tendinitis issues that I developed anyway. This has lead me to appreciate that when we are starting out with a new sport or activity we can easily hold off on training for that sport for quite a while. It will actually be quite a while before you have adapted to the physical demands of that sport (probably upwards of 6-12 months) and then need to add some specific training to the mix in order to improve. Over that time your best bet will be to BALANCE your training/movement loads by training the movements that your sport doesn't focus on.

For example, rock cimbing involves a lot of gripping and pulling actions with the arms and single leg squat type motions with the legs. Depending on the climbs there may be a little bit of pushing with your arms and some hamstring work, but overall it's very biased to those first couple of movements. So to balance that activity the smartest thing would be to work on pushing strength for the arms and hinging strength for the legs and back. After a few months of climbing you could add some extra rotator cuff and core work.

With a sport like golf, which involves a lot of twisting for the hips and back and more of a hinging position, you could balance the movement load with squats and a variety of 'bent arm' upper body training (exercises that involve plenty of elbow movement). For someone who is physically healthy, there will be no need to add rotational strength training until you have maxed out your technique and need to add more power with strength work.

If we looked at someone who did all of these sports/hobbies every week (lucky duck!) then they would have upper body pulling and grip work from their climbing, upper body pushing and pulling work from surfing, twisting from all three sports, hinging from golf, squatting from climbing and surfing and plenty of core work across all three too. There really aren't many movements left to train when you look at it like that. For these people, it would be best to centre any training time around recovery, mobility and prehab exercises and possibly some light cardio work. In time, as their fitness for all three activities improves and specific areas of weakness in those sports come to light, extra technique work would be more valuable than adding extra strength work. But if technique is quite good and that amount of activity is well tolerated then some extra strength training will be fine to add in. But I hope you can see that this wouldn't be NECESSARY for quite some time. High level and elite athletes NEED to do extra strength work to put them at the top 1% of their sport. They've put in years and years of work on technique and slowly challenging their bodies to the stresses of their sport. Just because you see videos of pro climbers doing an hour of core work after climbing for 3 hours doesn't mean that you should do that too. Just because pro golfers are doing explosive twisting exercises doesn't mean you should emulate them and do those too. Be smart. Allow your body time to adapt to the new movements and challenges and BALANCE the loads by training the movements that your sport doesn't involve.

A major caveat that I want to add to all of this is that I'm basing this concept on someone who is going into these activities with a base of good flexibility, good strength and generally good body awareness. If you're a bit clumsy, have the flexibliity of a telephone pole and the muscle mass of a new born baby then this is a different conversation! You've probably got some work to put in before you start out and while you begin your hobby. The amount of exposure to that sport that you would tolerate without injury is probably quite low; so stick to doing it just once per week for quite a while and spend time working on those other areas!

Anyway, this was more of a thought share/thought dump than anything else. I'd love to hear your opinions and perspectives.