Some of the best training info came from the eastern bloc, such as Russia (back in the day the Soviet Union), Romania, Bulgaria, Germany, etc. It’s said if you walked into one of their weight rooms you wouldn’t find much more than barbells, dumbbells, kettlebells, all of various sizes and shapes.

Weapons of Mass Construction.

You didn’t see them sitting on their butts on machines because that type of training is for lazy people that either don’t know the two most important words to effective training or just flat out don’t know what they’re doing. I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt and give them the later.

Those two most important words are HARD WORK. Using machines that put you in fixed positions that you can’t deviate from not only doesn’t transfer very effectively to any sport, but also can cause injuries down the line because of pattern overload and lack of any proprioceptive awareness and stability required by smaller muscles. Unless you’re a body builder that doesn’t require functional size and strength, don’t train like one.

Here’s a few principles that should be applied to your training, especially if you’re an athlete.

1. Compound exercises that recruit the most muscles: Exercises that use two joints will require significantly more muscles and recruit significantly more motor units than a single joint exercise.
2. Ground-Based Training: Exercises performed while standing trains several more muscles through integration by having to transfer force through your body. For instance, performing an olympic lift such as the power clean, force must be transferred from your feet up the kinetic chain through your hips and core. Whenever training exercises in a seated of lying position, less coordination through your nervous system and muscular system is required. So you’re essentially losing something.
3. Train both sides of the joint for structural balance: How many pushes you do should be balanced with pulls. As an example, if you’re doing 4 sets of 8 repetitions with a barbell bench press, you should be doing at least 4 sets of 8 repetitions with some variation of a horizontal pull. If not, you could develop some structural imbalances, which could lead to shoulder problems from tight muscles. And if you’re using 185 pounds for the bench press for the 8 reps and only 150 for a horizontal pull such as a barbell bent over row, the volume isn’t the same just because the sets and reps are. 185 X 8 reps X 4 sets = 5920 total pounds while 150 X 8reps X 4 sets = 4800 total pounds. That’s a difference of 1120 total pounds. Not exactly balanced is it?
4. Train for explosiveness: Most sports take place explosively. How much force you can apply into an object will determine it’s speed of velocity. This can be characterized as explosive strength, and is a key determinant in sports where the resistance to overcome is relatively great. A practical example would be a wrestler or grappler that has to produce a strong force explosively into his opponent to take him down. The majority of your concentric contractions should be a fast as possible even if the object isn’t moving fast. Sometimes it’s the brains intent and sometimes the object must actually be moving fast, such a speed strength exercises.
5. Train unilaterally and multi-planar: Sports are chaotic in nature and thus take place in all three planes of motion (frontal, saggital, and transverse). Training with unilateral exercises not only works the prime movers associated with the exercise, but also requires more stabilization than a bilateral exercise. With transverse exercises, especially relevant to the core, trains your body to stabilize and brace the spine with decelerative eccentric actions and anti-rotational exercises.
6. Train with variation: If you perform any exercise and more importantly, any rep range to long, performance improvement decreases. This is a manifestation of accommodation. To avoid this, you must utilize the next principle.
7. Track and Measure your training: Repetitions and exercises must be changed once an athlete adapts to them. This is identified by measuring and tracking your training. Without doing this there’s no way of knowing when you’ve adapted. Numbers don’t lie. Programming blind or just plain free-styling with your training is a great ingredient for poor to no results. Every exercise, set, and rep is measured at USI and tracked to avoid plateau’s as much as possible.
8. Train the hierarchy of strength qualities: What this means is if you’re training to improve multiple strength qualities, it’s important to know what order to train them in. For instance, if you’re training for power, hypertrophy, and strength endurance (conditioning), you wouldn’t want to train anything other than power first because you will only have power when you’re fresh. If you trained one of the other two qualities first you would use up the necessary energy substrates that would be needed to produce power. There is a hierarchy with strength qualities, and if you want to maximize your time and results spent training, you must either know this hierarchy or get with someone who does.
9. Don’t mimic skills: Loading a specific movement relevant to a sport movement changes the firing patterns of the movement negatively, and thus affects the mechanics of the movement within the sport itself. For instance, if you’re a jiu-jitsu practitioner and you’re constantly having to sit up while someone’s in your guard to break their posture, don’t waste your time thinking you need to strengthen your “core” with crunches when you’re essentially already doing them within the sport. Instead, you should be focusing on what you’re NOT getting from your sport.
10. Train your weaknesses: The majority of people have no problem training what they’re good at, but show them a lift or muscle group where they’re weak or just suck at and most will avoid it. We all have egos and like to see big lifts, but training your weaknesses will more often than not increase your strengths.

These are just a few principles of many and within these principles are methods. Perhaps you didn’t realize how much science goes into training. Remember this: There’s a big difference between training for general fitness and training for sports science. If you’re an athlete, it is critical that you train like one, and not like it’s just your hobby three times a week once you get off work.