Sport Specific Training: Jake Jensen on the Soviet System

Based on Episode 118 of the Just Fly Performance Podcast, a conversation between host Joel Smith and strength coaches Jake Jensen and Jeff Moyer on applying the principles of master Soviet coaches to modern training.

Sport specific training does not start in the weight room. It starts with a question about the sport itself. That is the thread running through this round table with Jake Jensen, who translates the work of Dr. Anatoliy Bondarchuk and now coaches hockey in Berlin, and Jeff Moyer, a longtime apprentice of Dr. Michael Yessis who runs DC Sports Training. Both men build athletes through the lens of Soviet coaching systems, and both reach the same starting point: before you load a barbell, you decide what the sport actually demands, what the athlete is missing, and how you will know the work transferred. The rest is exercise selection and honest measurement.

Key Takeaways

• Train for what the sport demands. Sport specific training starts by asking what the sport actually requires and whether maximum strength is the real limiting factor, not by defaulting to a heavy barbell program.
• Strength is relative, not absolute. Both coaches keep most lifting around eight reps and judge general strength against the athlete’s technique, speed, and other qualities. If 50 pounds on the squat does not move the broad jump or the 10-yard sprint, it does not matter.
• The transfer lives in the middle of the pyramid. Special developmental and special preparatory exercises, the SDE and SPE layers of Bondarchuk’s pyramid, are where training carries over to the field. Bondarchuk was 70 to 100% confident that an SDE gain meant a sport gain.
• Build hard skills before soft skills. Teach the ideal movement in a calm setting first, like hip and shoulder separation for a quarterback, then layer in the chaotic, perception-and-reaction demands of the game.
• Track transfer with simple test exercises. A max set of push-ups, a jump mat, or a repeat-sprint test is enough to tell whether the program still works; keep the workout stable until the KPI stops moving.

Why sport specific training starts with the sport, not the barbell

The instinct in most weight rooms is to get an athlete strong first and sort out the details later. Jensen and Moyer flip that order. Drawing on Yessis, who apprenticed directly under his system, Moyer treats maximum strength as one option to be justified, not a default to be assumed.

Does the sport demand it? And then the other question is, does that athlete really need maximum strength? Is that the limiting factor that’s missing?

That single question reorders the whole program. If the limiting factor is technique or speed or the ability to change direction, then piling weight on the bar spends adaptive reserves on the wrong adaptation. For a coach, the practical move is to audit the sport before the athlete: list what the game actually rewards, then check whether the person in front of you is short on that specific quality.

Do you really understand what’s important for your sport? Because if you do, then it changes your paradigm.

Jensen’s point lands hardest in team sports, where coaches often anchor on one favorite quality, mobility or pure speed or sled work, and miss that the sport has moved on. His example is the NHL, where rosters shed their biggest enforcers once skating speed became the currency. Know what the sport pays for, and exercise selection follows.

How strong is strong enough for an athlete

Both coaches train general strength, and both cap it. Moyer says he almost never programs below eight reps, which keeps training sets under roughly 80% of a one-rep max, the same ceiling he attributes to Bondarchuk for most work. The reason is not timidity. It is that maximum loads compete with the very thing the athlete is trying to learn.

He’s always coming back to technique and motor learning, and it’s hard to learn with max intensity.

So the question is never how much an athlete can lift in isolation. It is whether the strength shows up everywhere else.

How strong is strong enough? It’s always a question that’s been thrown around for ages in our field. To me, it’s just gotta be relative to the other abilities that are being produced.

Moyer’s test is brutally simple: if a kid adds 50 pounds to the squat but the broad jump and the 10-yard sprint do not move, the strength gain is noise. He points to a 12-year-old who squats well above body weight for reps and moves her own body weight on the bar at high velocity, then notes she does not need to get any stronger. The application for a coach is to set a strength standard relative to the sport, confirm it against jumps and sprints, and stop chasing the bar number once the athlete clears the bar that matters.

Transfer of training: the middle of the Bondarchuk pyramid

Bondarchuk’s training pyramid runs from general work at the base to the competition itself at the top. The interesting layer, both coaches agree, is the middle: the special preparatory exercises (SPE) and special developmental exercises (SDE) that are supposed to carry the gym work onto the field. This is where transfer of training is won or lost, because Bondarchuk attached a confidence number to it.

In Anatoly’s system, anything that’s special developmental or more specific, an SDE or a CE, he was somewhere between 70 and 100% confident that improvement in that exercise would constitute a concomitant improvement in sporting results.

In the throws, that confidence is easy to honor: a heavier hammer thrown farther predicts a competition hammer thrown farther. In team sport it is much harder, because no strength coach will promise a head coach that a faster 40 guarantees more touchdowns. Jensen’s argument is that the difficulty is exactly why coaches leave the SDE layer on the table, and that is a missed opportunity.

Imagine if we’re training athletes only in SPE and the game. Think about how much development is on the table if we’re not using that SDE.

For Jensen, a true special developmental exercise for a team sport has to force a tactical decision, not just match the muscle action. The coaching takeaway is to map each sport skill to the special exercises that develop it, and to keep building that middle layer rather than bouncing between raw lifting and full scrimmage.

Hard skills before soft skills

Moyer organizes the special work with a framework he credits to Yessis and to Daniel Coyle’s writing: hard skills and soft skills. Hard skills are the ideal movement performed in a calm, controlled setting. Soft skills are those same movements expressed inside the chaos of the game.

There’s hard skills and then there’s soft skills. The hard skills are the ideal things that they have to do in a perfect situation. The soft skills is how it’s implemented into the perception and action, chaotic environment.

The sequence matters. Moyer will not throw an athlete into a perception-and-reaction drill if the underlying mechanics fall apart at full speed with no defender. His standing case study is a quarterback who broke his throwing elbow because he was an arm thrower with no hip and shoulder separation. The fix was to build the hard skill, real power from the lower body and trunk, before layering it into reading receivers and dropping back. He puts a number on what proper mechanics plus targeted strength produced.

On average with my quarterbacks, when we work on the separation, they put on 15, 20 yards to their throwing power. Baseball players average about 10, 15 miles an hour on their fastballs. My golfers average about 50 yards improvement in their drives, from learning proper mechanics and doing strength exercises that relate to that.

A coach can borrow the order directly: video the athlete’s key movement at full speed, fix the biomechanics in a clean environment, then progress the same pattern into reactive, game-like settings.

Exercise selection: special exercises as a shortcut

If the best athletes already move well, why bother with a catalog of special exercises? Jensen’s answer is that special work is a shortcut for the athletes who do not get there on their own.

I think the special exercises are a shortcut, especially for athletes who just aren’t as athletic all the time and just don’t get it. The best athletes have the degrees of freedom, they have the capacity, they have the movement potential, and they just play along.

A gifted athlete given enough freedom will often figure out the movement; the rest need a targeted exercise to get their system used to moving correctly faster. Moyer pushes back on the pure let-them-figure-it-out school, tying it to the overuse injuries that pile up when coaches never teach mechanics. The two views meet in the same practice: choose special exercises that develop the specific quality an athlete lacks, rather than running everyone through the same menu. Jensen frames the payoff of getting exercise selection right as freedom, not more volume.

We don’t need to spend so much time doing one thing. We can do it all. We just have to be smart.

Tracking transfer with simple test exercises

The feature both coaches prize most in the Bondarchuk system is how easy it is to monitor. You pick a test exercise, a key performance indicator, and you watch it. When it stops climbing, the program has done its job and it is time to change something. Jensen learned just how simple the test can be straight from Bondarchuk.

Do a set of max push-ups. How many can you get? I watch it, and they go up and up and up until they don’t anymore, and then the whole program needs to change. And that’s a test exercise right there.

The test scales to whatever a coach can measure: a jump mat, a repeat-sprint test in hockey skates, force-plate power, or distance tape on the floor for an explosive lunge. Moyer changes his KPIs by training phase, leaning on strength lifts and jump tests early, then on timed 10- and 30-yard sprints as the program sharpens. The payoff of stable workouts plus honest tracking is that a single block can do a lot of work.

This summer he trained with me for eight weeks, he had three workouts. That’s it. Everything he did was better. Speed strength was up, max strength was up, jumps went up 30% from where he’s been.

The one caution Jensen adds is monotony: a veteran will mentally check out of the same session for a full season, so the stable-workout approach fits athletes who will buy in. For most developing athletes, the lesson holds: pick a simple KPI, keep the program steady, and let the test exercise tell you when to move on.

Frequently asked questions

What is sport specific training?
It is training built backward from the demands of the sport rather than from a generic strength template. Jensen and Moyer start by asking what the sport rewards and what quality the athlete is actually missing, then choose general lifts, special exercises, and skill work to develop that quality and confirm it transfers to the field.

What is transfer of training in strength and conditioning?
Transfer of training is the degree to which a gym exercise improves sporting performance. In Bondarchuk’s system it is graded by exercise category: the more specific the exercise (a special developmental exercise or the competition exercise itself), the higher his confidence, 70 to 100%, that a gain in the exercise produces a gain in the sport.

How strong does an athlete need to be?
Only as strong as the sport requires relative to their other qualities. Moyer keeps most work at eight reps or higher and treats strength as enough once it stops improving jumps, sprints, and sport technique. Added load that does not move those markers is, in his words, not needed.

What are special strength exercises (SDE and SPE)?
They are the middle layer of the Bondarchuk pyramid. Special preparatory exercises match the muscular and energetic demands of the sport movement; special developmental exercises go further and, for team sport, force a tactical decision so the strength expresses inside a game-like situation. They sit between general lifting and the competition itself.

Does general strength training transfer to speed?
Moyer says yes, when it is programmed and monitored well, and argues that coaches who deny it are simply doing it poorly. The catch is that general strength must be balanced against technique, motor learning, and the athlete’s recovery, since heavy loading eats the adaptive reserves needed to develop speed and skill.

About the authors

Jake Jensen is a strength and conditioning coach and a translator of Dr. Anatoliy Bondarchuk’s work for Ultimate Athlete Concepts. He has worked with collegiate football programs and, at the time of recording, served as head strength coach for a professional hockey club in Berlin. A former competitive powerlifter, he focuses on applying Soviet training methods to team sport development.

Jeff Moyer is the owner and head coach of DC Sports Training and a longtime apprentice of Dr. Michael Yessis. He specializes in biomechanics, special strength exercises, and athlete monitoring across youth, collegiate, and professional sport.

Joel Smith is the host of the Just Fly Performance Podcast and the founder of Just Fly Sports, a former collegiate strength and track and field coach who focuses on speed, power, and athletic development. Listen to the full episode with Jake Jensen and Jeff Moyer on Just Fly Sports.