GPP vs SPP

12/18/09

In the training world there is General Physical Preparation (GPP) and Specialized Physical Preparation (SPP). GPP is designed to provide balanced conditioning in a variety of skills, whereas SPP concentrates on a single or a few skills that are specific to a particular sport.

Is one better than the other? No. However, if there were a contest in which a series of varied events were chosen randomly for competitors to compete at, a GPP practitioner would most likely dominate.

I created a simulation to demonstrate the basic argument. The simulation considers 10 SPP scenarios. For each scenario, 500 randomly generated GPP practitioners compete against 500 randomly generated SPP practitioners and are judged over 10 skill categories. The simulation calculates the percent of the time GPP wins, SPP wins, and GPP and SPP tie.

Assumptions:

• One cannot have 0 amount of skill. Even if one is terrible at something, it is still a small amount of skill.
• To go from GPP to SPP means to concentrate more in a skill.
• Someone with more skills will beat someone with less skills.

I considered GPP to be skill distributed uniformly randomly among the 10 skills. I considered SPP to be varying concentration of skill in Skill 1. I considered the following SPP scenarios

Here is a graph of the results

The GPP vs SPP simulation is available here.