Medicine ball throws

A popular exercise for athletes in sports which require throwing such as baseball, basketball and handball is medicine ball throws, unlike while using free weights medicine ball throws allows for large amounts of acceleration at the end of the movement and have a more similar technique to regular throwing making it more comparable to the actual sport played and hypothetically may allow for greater throwing power, although studies show that this is not the case likely due to the lack of presented overload which medicine balls offer making it poor for any strength development which is needed to be able to throw with greater force, instead athletes should focus on strength and power development using more traditional weight lifting exercises.

Sprints

My personal opinion is that in most sports which do not have a large emphasis in the importance of running sport specific training combined with strength and conditioning should yield the bulk of the benefits towards sprinting which are necessary, any extra athletic style sprinting would yield small results to sports performance while taking away from other more beneficial training types, such sports include football (soccer), basketball and hockey. However, for athletes in sports such as rugby, baseball and American football, sprint training may be a beneficial addition to their training programme, as sprint specific training has been shown to significantly improve sprint technique and likely cause physiological adaptations which other training types can not cause to the same degree. However, this training type should be done in a sport specific manner, for instance, a baseball coach at the end of practice may get there athletes to line up and sprint from one base to another, when the athlete has reached first base the next athlete can begin to run, the coach can perform this for 2-3 sets once or twice per week, it is important for a good coach to watch each athletes technique during this sprint and if an athlete is running with suboptimal technique to address it, likely through the help of an athletics coach.

Jumps

Jumping exercises are often used for athletes to develop explosive power of the lower body, unfortunately, similar to in the case of medicine balls, jumping exercises usually do not present enough of an overload to stimulate physiological adaptations. Athletes who participate in sports which have a large importance in jumping such as basketball and volleyball may decide to participate in jumping exercises with a knowledgeable coach while emphasising lower body power exercises in the weight room. These jumping exercises can be done before or after training and can be done less regularly or not at all once the target jumping abilities have been reached.