Something Simple

As is often the case in strength training, the simplest things that you do will often have the biggest effect on your training. The "nuts and bolts" is what holds it together and makes it better, not all the fancy bells and whistles.

Your Idioms. I have them.

Just recently I started a new job at The Spire Institute working with Michael Johnson Performance training high school/prep kids. Yesterday I had the opportunity to go down to the courts and watch the boys basketball team run through their practice, which brings me to todays point: go watch your athletes play/practice once in a while. 

This point is something that I'd never really thought about before (although I'm sure it's old-hat to a lot of coaches). When I was at BU, I never really got the chance to watch the athletes practice or play because of my own personal schedule. I watched women's hockey skate once, but I didn't learn a whole lot because there wasn't a ton to learn. Those girls were already creeping up to the top tier of their sport; BU is one of the better hockey schools in the country and many of those girls had been weight training for at least 2-3 years. 

Going to watch the boys practice gave me all sorts of information about them as individual athletes that I wasn't getting from seeing them in the weight room. I could see the guys who were lacking in flexibility/mobility/stability and couldn't get their center of gravity low enough to dribble the ball and run fast at the same time. I got to see the guys who couldn't stabilize their body to produce enough power to get to the rim during layup drills; guys I would've expected to be able to dunk. The guys who are snipers, but lack the quickness to be able to separate themselves from defenders for a shot. 

It's very easy, as a coach, to sit down to write a program and say "this athlete plays this sport so they will have poor mobility here, bad flexibility here, be dominant in this muscle group and weak in this muscle group". This isn't a bad thing, because as coaches we have learned enough to know that this is usually true, but we can't forget that each athlete is still an individual and will have very individual needs. Fine tune each of your programs so that your clients and athletes are getting the best of what will make them better.

Have a great day and go lift some heavy shit!