By Mike Snowden

Adding variety to a strength and conditioning program is essential to keep Generation Z student-athletes excited, motivated, and engaged. The issues with this arise when coaches begin to feel like they need to add variety just to appear more innovative or more qualified or to reel in more “likes” on social media. Often, that effort causes more harm than good not only for the athletes’ development, but also on the scoreboard, which is where things really matter.

The three methods I write about here are strategies I’ve found useful in building stronger and more durable athletes in a variety of sports. Keep your principles as your cornerstones, but spice stuff up like any good chef would do. The recipe that you use with your team may closely align with or be vastly different from the athletic performance program across the state, but the big rocks are likely very similar. That’s why two bowls of chili can look exactly the same but taste totally different.

Keep your principles as your cornerstones, but use variety to spice stuff up like any good chef would do, says @Mike__Snowden. Share on X

I am lucky as a strength and conditioning coach, as our schedule allows us to have 60-minute training sessions four times each week, for the majority of the year. During the in-season period, our travel schedule dictates when we can train, but over the last two seasons, our men’s basketball team has averaged 65 strength training sessions in our home gym from our first day of official practice to our final competition. Because we get to train so frequently during the year, it is essential to add some sort of variety to not only avoid plateaus in progress, but also to keep morale high—even during tough times, such as when you need to shake off the hangover of a tough loss. This could also be that last week or two of the off-season program, when athletes can begin to lose interest and turn their attention to vacation plans or how they plan on spending their time away from campus or structured training.

The Westside Method (or Conjugate System) created by Louie Simmons of Westside Barbell in Columbus, Ohio, is based on variety. You perform the movement patterns often, but you vary the methods of loading quite frequently—hence, the reason for specialty barbells and training tools. This system began in powerlifting, so like most things, you must take only what’s applicable to the team, sport, or other athletes you work with. As strength and conditioning professionals, this is the same thing we do with other disciplines such as weightlifting, strongman, bodybuilding, and even CrossFit when appropriate.

Change Exercise Tempos

Following the principle of progressive overload, changing exercise tempo or the speed of execution of a movement is an easy way to overload an athlete without needing to raise the external load. Another beauty of this method is that it can apply to just about every exercise, and it can give you room in your exercise library if you are limited on space and/or equipment. The muscles work in three phases:

• The eccentric, or lengthening, phase.
• The isometric phase, where there is tension developed but no changes in length.
• The concentric phase, where the muscle is shortening.

Modifying the tempos allows you to increase the time under tension (TUT) and attack each phase specifically.

Cal Dietz built the Triphasic Training Model around loading each of these muscle actions with the goal of increasing power outputs in sport. One thing to keep in mind is that longer eccentric work will cause increased muscle soreness later on, so you must be mindful of the time of year you program this. A great thing about the tempo work is that, for newer athletes or newer movement variations, allowing the athlete to slow down the movement can help them process the kinesthetic cues a bit better (such as “where am I feeling this” or “am I balanced over my entire foot”). It also gives the coach more time to cue and correct any faults that may happen throughout the movement.

Four numbers, each representing the number of seconds spent during each phase of the movement, make up the tempo of the exercise, so it may look like the example in table 2. Table 3 shows a sample three-week tempo we use with incoming athletes to teach the squat pattern. You can then progress and regress your training program by adjusting the TUT for each repetition or each set based on the goal of the training program.

Add Variety to Hand and Foot Positioning

In our program, we use different hand positions to both add volume and target specific areas of the body in the off-season. During the in-season period, we may use certain hand or foot positions to work around injuries. Keep in mind the PRIMARY goal here IS NOT to develop our hand, wrist, and forearm strength. Athletes would perform training for this area daily, in what we call the “weak links” portion of our program. Altering something as small as a hand or foot position can be huge for a coach working with large groups of athletes at once. Because it is a movement that the athletes have done before, it requires minimal coaching and learning, which translates to more efficient training.

We use different hand positions to both add volume and target specific areas of the body in the off-season, says @Mike__Snowden. Share on X

Making the learning curve smaller also gives the athletes a greater confidence in their familiarity with the movement, and later on, the freedom to choose the grip or stance they’d prefer to use. In our program, at different points in the year, there are days when athletes can pick which grip variation they’d like to use for a particular movement. I’ve listed a sample bodyweight push-and-pull circuit below, using multiple hand and foot positions.

We’ve also used hand position to alter our supplemental lower body training at times. This has included hand-supported and free split squats, single leg squats, and deadlift variations. Hand and foot placement variations have also added another layer to our kettlebell swing progression. This includes the single-arm kettlebell swing, double kettlebell swing, and staggered-stance kettlebell swing. These variations have allowed us to build out some complexes and work capacity circuits to improve conditioning without running up and down the basketball court during the season

Common pulling and pressing movements give many hand and grip placement options. Hand-width changes on pulling and pressing can also make a huge difference in an athlete’s training program. Rotating between wide, narrow, underhand, and neutral grip pressing or pull-ups can provide months of exercise programming, or you can combine the rotations with suitable loads and rep ranges to build a complex or circuit. A few of the variations we use more frequently are the mixed-grip chin-up, close-grip bench press, and overhead pressing using a trap bar. A lot of this comes down to finding ways to get the most use out of the tools that you have available.

Hand-width changes on pulling and pressing can also make a huge difference in an athlete’s training program, says @Mike__Snowden. Share on X

Alter the Training Environment

Outsourcing your training session can be daunting for some strength and conditioning professionals who may not feel comfortable relinquishing “control” over their team. Many coaches seem to be okay with this when it comes to bringing in yoga instructors, but there are other disciplines where outsiders can be of help. My viewpoint has always been that if someone is better than me at something, connect with them and try to find a middle ground to help our athletes get better. Here in Tuscaloosa, we are lucky enough to be right down the road from the home gym of boxer Deontay Wilder, the WBC Heavyweight World Champion. After making the connection with the coaches at this gym, visiting with our team for a summer conditioning session was a no-brainer and a win-win scenario for both parties.

Of course, not everyone has that level of boxing facility right around the corner, and not all coaches or programs have the resources to bring in outside help. Still, there are ways to make this work. It is vital to “build your army” to help enhance your program.

My viewpoint is that if someone is better than me at something, I should connect with them and try to find a middle ground to help our athletes get better, says @Mike__Snowden. Share on X

At my previous coaching stop, we had a club boxing team on campus that we worked with to put together a few summer conditioning sessions. The boxing club provided gloves and mitts for the team to use, and we brought out sleds, tires, and medicine balls to put together a strongman medley to complement the boxing lesson out on our team’s football field. Going boxing with our team over the summer gave our athletes an opportunity to learn a new skill and create an additional bonding experience before the season.

As another way of changing the training environment, I have found that making even the subtle change of training outside can be valuable for basketball and volleyball athletes. At my last two jobs, we were lucky to have a “patio” right outside the weight room, which allowed us to do at least one portion of our training session outside daily. The majority of the time it was our loaded carries and sled work, but we had a few stall mats out there that allowed us to do our pulling and medicine ball work outside as well.

These patios weren’t anything fancier than a slab of concrete and a patch of grass, but they got the job done. Using your schools’ other athletic facilities can also help here. Taking court sport athletes out to run stairs at the football stadium or on the field can be enough to fire up your team. It can also build some connections with other coaching staffs if those relationships aren’t already in place.

Getting hardcourt athletes out to run on a surface other than what the athletes compete on can pay dividends later in the season. We’ve used the grass and turf quite a bit to reduce the amount of pounding we do outside of the sport. Building intermixed teams of women’s volleyball and basketball players for a competitive game of ultimate Frisbee on the field has been a great way to sneak in some extra conditioning and fun during the off-season.

Success Depends on Buy-In and Commitment

At the end of the day, safe, sound, and simple training isn’t always as sexy as some trainers and coaches on social media may make it seem. Hard work can actually be downright boring at times. It’s full of repetitive tasks that don’t always show immediate results; but, performed day after day and month after month, it can add up quite a bit. Many athletes do not always see it that way, but it’s the job of the strength coach to throw them a bone when they need it and add in some variety without rebooting the entire program.

It’s the job of the strength coach to throw athletes a bone when they need it and add in some variety without rebooting the entire program, says @Mike__Snowden. Share on X

One piece of advice that has been drilled into my head since my time as an intern is that even the most meticulously planned training program is nothing more than junk if your teams don’t fully buy into what you are trying to get done and aren’t engaged during the process. Making these three tweaks to your program will allow you to personalize the movements to each athlete or group. If there’s one thing I have learned after working with numerous athletes, it’s that setting the athlete up for success is the best way to generate athlete buy-in and avoid stagnation.

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Whoever has the data is king. I’m by far not the first to write this, and the fact of the matter is that, in this data-driven age, it couldn’t be truer. The other thing that couldn’t be truer is that the king could be you.

With technology and information easier than ever to access, strength, performance, and sport coaches have zero excuse not to measure progress and track it over time. Athletes and consumers (our clients) are starting to expect it. If we, as coaches, do not begin delivering objective, meaningful data for them to show progress, we will be out of business and/or become the “behind the times” coach quicker than ever.

The challenge, of course, is not to just collect data for the sake of it, but to collect objective metrics that actually transfer to sport and that you can explain simply to the athlete. When you choose the right metrics, it not only serves as a motivator for the athlete, but also proof that your training is worth continuing to pay for and/or you deserve that promotion you’ve been gunning for.

Furthermore, if you own a gym or work as a supervisor to other coaches, the objective athlete results at the end of a training block serve as an amazing evaluation tool for you. Which coach’s program was most effective? Which coach’s athletes did not improve as they should have? It makes it easy to objectively assess how effective each coach’s training is.

The most difficult challenge as a supervisor, however, is that you likely need separate sets of metrics for athletes in different sports and/or demographics in order to evaluate your coaches fairly. For example, let’s say you set the expectation among all your coaches that you want all athletes to deadlift twice their body weight. Is this metric relevant in the same way to an athlete no matter their sport (golf vs. baseball vs. football)? What about their position (defensive back vs. pitcher vs. offensive lineman)?

You likely need to look at speed metrics with the deadlift at a lower relative load for a golfer than an offensive lineman (from the data we have seen). So, be sure you evaluate your coaches and their progress appropriately. Rewarding a coach for improving a metric that is not meaningful for competition performance is worse than not tracking at all.

Tracking objective metrics also opens the door to discuss what went right and what can be improved upon for the next training block objectively. If you do not require your coaches to test their athletes with metrics that transfer to sport, you’ll miss out on a massive opportunity for your organization and your athletes.

If you don’t require your coaches to test their athletes with metrics that transfer to sport, you’ll miss out on a massive opportunity for your organization and athletes. Share on X

From a distance, the process looks extremely straightforward. Measure before the intervention, complete the intervention, and then measure after the intervention. Seems simple enough, right?

In your head right now, there are probably a few questions swirling around, like:

• How do you decide what to collect data on?
• What metrics apply to your sport?
• How do you go about collecting data?
• How do you know if what you are doing is worthwhile and going to be relevant?
• How much time does it take?

These are just a few of the questions that likely start to percolate in your mind when you think about the possibility of collecting data. If you take the five minutes to keep reading, I’ll answer them for you. It will change your career path, your athletes’ performance, and our field forever.

What’s the First Step?

The first step is to figure out what metric you want to test. For most people reading this, the easiest thing to do is take a look at some research, find a metric that correlates to sport-specific performance, and start tracking it. After you’ve collected some data, determine if you see the same findings as the researchers. Evaluate which athletes made bigger gains and try to figure out what other variables were at play. Making this time for critical thought and evaluation of athlete performance as a direct result of your training is a critical element in a coach’s professional growth.

Now, some of you reading this might think a lot of the research relevant to you doesn’t really tell you anything meaningful in terms of transference to sport. If that is the case, you get to ask the questions that you want and figure out the answer yourself. Do you think there is a better answer than you’ve been able to find out there? Do you think a specific theory that is dominant in your sport doesn’t exactly hold up?

For me, the first question I wanted to answer when I started out was, “Does golf fitness even work?” From there, it turned into seeing what physical markers would prove to be most important in improving swing speed. Since then, my questions have expanded in so many different directions relevant to golf performance that I have research and data collection planned out for the next 24 months—in my commercial training facility, not a research lab.

Take a second and think: It probably won’t take you long to come up with something in your sport that you think is awful and drives you up a wall every time you see it posted on social media. Is it core work, muscle activation, or perhaps training on BOSU balls? I know there’s something. There is no excuse in this day and age to be mad about it and bash others on social. Stop tweeting criticism and do something about it. Define your question, collect the data, and then share what you found with the world. This is a far more productive Twitter conversation that will move us forward.

If there’s something in your sport that bothers you, don’t bash it on social media—do something about it. Define your question, collect the data, and then share your findings. Share on X

When I started in the “golf fitness” world, I had two choices. Follow the theories, poorly done research, and supposed science-backed ways of doing things (even though there was no readily shared data) and hope for the best, while complaining on Twitter that there wasn’t any good research out there. Or, figure out for myself if what I was doing was working and then continually ask more questions, test them objectively, and share what I found. I chose the latter, and I hope you do, too. Your data collection and research won’t be perfect (mine certainly is not), but it will move your industry forward in a way that is positive for everyone involved, especially your athletes.

How Do I Know It Will Be Worthwhile?

As I mentioned above, everyone today has a question they want to answer or a theory that they will gladly bash on social media. Taking the step to actually go ahead and collect the data—to objectively find out if what you believe is correct—is hard, but necessary. Often, the barrier stopping someone from taking this step is that they aren’t sure it will be worth their time.

What if you do all the work, actually collect all the data, and then find out you were wrong? Wouldn’t that mean you aren’t as smart as you thought, and won’t people laugh at you? Won’t that hurt your career?

First of all, if people pay enough attention to what you do to criticize and judge it, you are doing something right. Second, if your data collection is sound, and you do figure out you were wrong, that’s great! Particularly since the topic for which you chose to collect data was important to your field (assuming you did step 1 correctly), and you now have objective information to share and educate others in your space with.

Being afraid to be wrong is the single biggest flaw that coaches have in their thinking today. It is a terrible disease that stops them from actually collecting data and being willing to fail. You have to go into data collection with an open mind. You are not looking for the right answer to support what you think. You are looking for the truth, and it will often surprise you. At the end of the day, if you find truth, you’ve done more than 98% of the coaches out there in terms of furthering your field.

Go into data collection with an open mind. You’re not looking for the right answer to support what you think. You’re looking for the truth, and it will often surprise you. Share on X

Personally, one of our greatest findings to date happened when I was wrong. I wanted to test a reduced-volume overspeed protocol against a high-volume protocol from the most popular overspeed company in the golf space. I thought their protocols were extremely excessive in volume requirements. I felt that having a golfer swing almost 12,000 times a year in addition to their normal practice and play increased the risk of overuse injuries already rampant in golf. I was 100% confident I was right, and they were wrong.

When all was said and done, my team and I completed a six-week and then an eight-week follow-up study on the two protocols and found there was no difference in the swing speed gains produced by either protocol. They both produced the exact same results. At first look, I was initially disappointed, embarrassed, and depressed. I was wrong.

But then I realized what this meant. We had completed the first and only two studies looking at volume in overspeed training and had found that golfers could do 66% less work (9,000 fewer swings a year) and still see the same results. Wait—this was huge!

Out of a “no answer” to my question came the greatest answer possible. While I had thought the lower-volume protocol would get better results because athletes would not be as tired, it turned out my athletes could do less work and see the same results. This was a huge finding in the golf world, and I believe it has implications for other sports as well.

My hypothesis was wrong, and I had to eat my words a little bit, but the findings have changed the lives of thousands of golfers and hopefully saved even more from unnecessary injuries. I’d be happy to continue to be wrong like this the rest of my career.

So, in the end, if you pick a meaningful metric or variable to measure and track, it doesn’t matter what you find. The finding will be meaningful no matter what. You will either find that the metric helps your athletes, or it doesn’t. The answer in both these scenarios is hugely helpful.

How Do I Collect Data?

Now that you have your question figured out, how do you actually collect the data? The most critical step is to figure out your system. Once you have your data collection system figured out, it becomes a plug-and-play operation based on all the new questions that you have throughout the year.

The key to any system is consistency and quality. Let’s say you want to simply test how strong every athlete on your team is. There are 30 athletes, so you ask your assistant to help you test everyone. If you both give different directions and they have each athlete test to failure while you go based off RPE, your numbers will be useless. This probably seems like common sense, but the quality of your data set is everything. Protect it with your life.

This probably seems like common sense, but the quality of your data set is everything. Protect it with your life. Share on X

For the strength testing example above, you and/or your staff should give each athlete the same directions and cues. You should give them all the same number of warm-up sets, and there need to be predetermined objective rules to determining good reps versus bad reps, etc. You should be able to give your system to the high school kid running his friends through a training program, and he should be able to follow the directions to a “T.”

While this part can be a bit tedious, once it’s done, it’s done. This was my single biggest mistake early in my quest to figure out if “golf fitness” actually worked. I made the mistake of not standardizing all of my tests and having staff help me without establishing consistent and validated measurement systems.

While my current database is about 1,000 golfers large, it could have been 50% larger. I had to throw about 500 data points out due to three years of testing that I could not honestly say were done consistently. If I had kept those data points, it would have brought the integrity of my other 1,000 data points into question, not to mention that the conclusions we would be able to draw would be flawed.

After you are sure that your testing will be done consistently, you need to establish how it will be tracked. We use paper during the actual athlete testing (this allows us to get up to 10 athletes through more than 30 different metrics in under an hour) and then transfer those numbers to our database in Excel afterward. This is the system we designed to fit into our 60-minute training slot in our commercial setting. In different settings, you will likely need different formats. It doesn’t matter what that format is; it just matters that it works for you and is consistent.

Other than paper expenses, the cost of collecting and storing your data is pretty cheap. Every time you test, you will have to block an hour or so to enter the data (maybe longer, depending on the size of your collected sample), but you should consider it a critical part of creating your report card. The data doesn’t lie—interpretations might, but the absolute data does not. It will tell you very clearly (if you picked the right metrics) how you did as a coach and opportunities for improvement in the next training block.

Why Collecting Data Will Make You a Better Coach

There are two reasons why I believe testing, collecting data, and evaluating it has made my team and me better coaches. First, it forces us and our athletes to be accountable to what we call “test weeks.” Every athlete in the gym knows when test weeks are, and they know that if they slack off during training between test weeks, we will see it and call them on it.

For my coaches, it serves as their report card and an opportunity to assess how effective their training has been. It holds them accountable to objective data and to their athletes. If the athlete doesn’t improve, I require the coach to figure out why and explain it to the athlete while they review their results. For me, it serves as a quarterly check-in and evaluation of our programs as a whole to see where we can improve, where we are doing well, and how we want to continue to evolve our programs. Our data also serves as an additional quality control team member.

It is simple to see how the data collection can essentially turn into a part of your quarterly reviews for coaches. What is probably the most powerful, however, is that after you have collected data consistently for two years, you can start to see year-over-year and longitudinal changes occurring. This is where research lab studies pale in comparison to what the private sector and university team settings can produce.

Research lab studies pale in comparison to what the private sector and university team settings can produce because coaches can collect data on the same subject for multiple years. Share on X

It is near-impossible to get a subject to agree to be studied for multiple years. It is not that hard to convince an athlete that if they want to play their sport for many years to come, they need to train consistently. Because you track metrics that transfer to sport, and you improve those metrics every test week, the athlete sees the improvements, becomes more motivated and bought in, and continues to train with you. The athlete looks forward to the test weeks throughout the year and is happy to participate in them because they want to compete with themselves and their peers to see who improved the most. This is your opportunity to collect longitudinal changes over time (and eventually share the results with your field) that are near impossible to collect in traditional research labs.

As you collect the longitudinal data, you are evaluating the progress of the athletes as a whole, as well as each individual athlete over time, multiple times a year. It is hard to think that any coach who is in tune with their athletes’ objective progress over time would not get better by seeing trends and traits that respond better at different times to different stimuli.

Finally, collecting the data will make you a better coach because, inherently, you will have to teach other coaches who are not collecting data and evaluating it closely (the 98%) what it means and how they can improve their athletes. It is the age-old medical model of learning. Watch—Do—Teach.

How Many Data Points Do I Need?

This is a logistical question, and there will always be a criticism of any research or data set. Traditionally, you should shoot for having an “n” of 30 (30 subjects). That being said, countless studies with fewer than 30 subjects are published in peer review journals. The honest answer is you want as many data points as you can possibly get.

When we released our initial data set, we had about 300–400 data points. People came out in droves on social media and with personal email attacks telling us the sample size was too small, and it was irresponsible to release the information. The next sample we released was over 600 data points. The criticism only got louder.

We are now close to 1,000, and the number of people still saying it is too small is shrinking. The really cool thing, though, is that the number of athletes and coaches who reach out and visit us from around the world because we continue to challenge the status quo and produce usable, meaningful data is rising at an incredible rate. It is now a huge driver of networking and teaching for us.

If you collected the data honestly and are confident in the data set’s integrity, ignore the people trying to poke holes in your numbers and/or attacking you on social media. Share on X

Work to collect as many data points as you can and then just report your honest findings. Especially if what your data shows runs counter to mainstream beliefs and how people make money, you will get people trying to poke holes in your numbers and even attack you on social media to some degree. If you collected the data honestly and are confident in the data set’s integrity, however, take the noise as a compliment that you are doing something right. They will quiet down eventually.

How Long Does It Take?

The answer to this question largely depends on how many athletes you work with within the sample that you want to look at. As an example, at Par4Success we have about 100 golf members on whom we are able to collect longitudinal data, and we have an additional 200 or so new golfers who come for assessments throughout the year. We have collected about 1,000 data points in three years with three test weeks per year. Extrapolate that to your current population, and hopefully that helps to answer that question for you.

Now if you wanted to look at a specific element of training, and you have 30 athletes that you could split into two groups, you could easily run a training study in six weeks to see what shakes out. This is what we have done while looking at eccentric flywheel training, overspeed training, and other topics.

My recommendation would be to look at doing a combination of both, and over the course of a few years, you will have quite a large database to draw conclusions from and help move your industry forward. Encourage others in your space to do follow-up or similar studies to further your initial findings even more.

How Do I Make Sure My Data Is Usable and Interpret It?

This simply goes back to the integrity of your data sample and making sure that you collect each data point in the same manner. At Par4Success, we have made training videos for every single test, and we require all new staff to watch them. Then we have a team review of all testing procedures before every single test week. This ensures that we test consistently and that our inter-rater reliability is solid.

In the beginning, when we cleaned up our data sets, we took the additional step of actually validating the inter- and intra-rater reliability for each test, but this is likely a bit of overkill for most of you reading this. Many of the tests you will likely perform (medicine ball throws, strength tests, vertical jump, etc.) probably already have published studies on these values.

The most time-consuming part of the process is the fun part: figuring out what your numbers show. Unless you have a stats and/or Excel expert on your team, you likely will need to find a friend or hire someone to help you with this. This is the most dangerous part of any data collection—the interpretation.

While the data never lies, the most dangerous part of any data collection is the interpretation. Make sure you have a stats expert help you with this. Share on X

As I mentioned above, the data never lies. However, you can run enough formulas and look at the numbers from enough angles to have the numbers tell you anything you’d like them to. Ever heard of “creative accounting” in Ponzi schemes and the financial crisis of 2008? You don’t want to get caught up in “creative data interpretation.” How do you know, if you look at “r” values for correlations, whether to select a one-tailed or two-tailed t-test? If you don’t know what that means and/or the answer, that is probably a good indication you need to find someone to help you with all the data interpretation.

When you do find a stats expert to help you out, you will be able to tell them your questions, your hypothesis, and which variables you want to see the relationships of. They will be able to give you the stats answer. This is probably the hardest time to stay objective and make sure that your emotions or preconceived assumptions don’t influence how you look at the numbers. If you can keep emotions and preferences out of it, you are well on your way to finding the truth of what your training did or did not do.

Great Tools to Collect Data

Below, I have listed some of the best tools that we currently use to track and measure progress in training sessions and over time, and what we have found them to be helpful for. There are lots of different ways to utilize these tools, and I am excited for the future information and data that will come from their use.

Exxentric kBox and kPulley

The great thing about these two tools is their direct connection to any device via Bluetooth. They enable you to look at all sorts of power and speed metrics and track them over time. You can identify when power output drops in sets and objectively look for changes throughout your training block and yearly with any athlete.

The kPulley proved to be a game-changer for our rotary athletes, increasing their swing speed by 150% compared to a control group that did not use it. I believe the opportunities to explore other areas of transference to sport are huge with these two devices.

Assess2Perform Ballistic Ball

This is an amazing tool that we use in training sessions for immediate feedback on athletes’ efforts with medicine ball work. We haven’t objectively measured the impact of using the Ballistic Ball versus a traditional medicine ball in training yet, but that is on the docket. We are also looking to draw correlations between velocity and power numbers with medicine ball tests to swing speed in golf.

Our initial database focused on the distance of the medicine ball thrown. We have determined that distance with the Ballistic Ball is comparable to a regular medicine ball of the same weight, so we are looking at other metrics as well. The opportunities here for golf and other sports are huge for future data collection and studies.

Push Band and Assess2Perform Bar Sensei

We are in the early stages of looking at velocity-based work with our athletes, and both of these bands offer great options for athletes and their training. Athletes can easily take both on the road, and the improvements in this space are moving fast. It is going to be fun to see where both of these tools go in the future in terms of what metrics they track, and which ones are the most meaningful. We are still early in our use of these bands, but definitely would recommend some of the articles written on these products by Carl Valle for comparisons and to figure out which band is right for you.

Barbells

Tried and true, use barbells to track your athletes’ compound lifts. How strong is strong enough for your athletes? This is data we are working on in the golf space, but is there a clear relative strength that exists for your sport? While these tools have been around forever, there are still niche opportunities in sports when looking for transference and how to continue to improve the way you prepare your athletes.

Others

Vertical jump tools, scales and tape measures, and a myriad of other tools are out there. Tracking changes in metrics and also determining relative power and strength numbers are great areas to look at for data tracking.

Collect the Data That Matters

At the end of the day, if you took nothing else from this article, please be sure to only collect data on things that move the needle on the field, the court, the course, or wherever your athletes play their sport. Don’t just track data for the sake of tracking.

If it doesn’t influence performance, stop tracking it and look at something else. Make sure that you don’t fall into the trap of “creative interpretation” of the data. Report what your numbers say and be reasonable with your conclusions. There’s no need to try to make every data point an industry-changing event.

Above all else, your curiosity and willingness to challenge the norms and fail while doing so will drive our industry, your career, and your athletes forward. But none of that will happen unless you commit to prioritizing the integrity of your data set. If you are able to do all this, your throne likely awaits…

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…we have a small favor to ask. More people are reading SimpliFaster than ever, and each week we bring you compelling content from coaches, sport scientists, and physiotherapists who are devoted to building better athletes. Please take a moment to share the articles on social media, engage the authors with questions and comments below, and link to articles when appropriate if you have a blog or participate on forums of related topics. — SF

We absolutely can teach speed—contrary to what the color commentary guy on Monday night football may spout for effect to the masses. High school sport coaches work with athletes at a very important time in their athletic careers when they often come into our hands extremely raw. With proper coaching and consistency, our athletes can rise from the most inauspicious of beginnings.

But coaching means more than having a few drills and exercises in our repertoire. It is multimodal, and we need to be comfortable with an array of tasks. Giving explicitly clear cues, for example, or sometimes saying nothing at all. Filming and giving athletes feedback at their level is tremendously useful to help them understand the changes that you’re hoping to take place. Certainly, drills that are very close to the task of sprinting can prove useful.

While these ideas go a long way to help athletes develop, the process is not instantaneous. Coaching is often an exercise in patience.

Speed Evaluation: Whole Movement Observation and Feedback

For this post, I opted to highlight my work with a developing athlete who has real potential entering his junior year. He’s on the cusp of the varsity lineup and somewhat mirrors the reality of our day to day experience as high school coaches.

During our first two sessions, I filmed his running at maximum velocity and during his acceleration phase. The sessions were free of feedback to prevent any premature influence, so I centered my efforts around some very simple cues based on what the video told me. I noted the athlete needed two very simple things.

First, he needed to learn to relax at maximum velocity. Using a kinogram and the five positions of maximum velocity, especially at maximal vertical projection (MVP) and touchdown, I observed his lack of peacefulness. He was straining, and his strike segment lacked hamstring extension, which possibly contributed to a reduced stride length.

His issue was simple but very important. In a post about the ALTIS Kinogram Method, Stuart McMillan and Dan Pffaf wrote:

Neutral head carriage, with eyes looking directly ahead. The human body is an inverted pendulum subject to imbalance through improper head position, and that impacts weight distribution further down the chain. Therefore, if the head is out of position, there will be an impact in lower-body joint dynamics. Athletes who throw their head back or push their chin forward create imbalanced forces. In the upright running cycle, the head should be held in neutral alignment with the cervical spine. Understand that any deviation from this will also negatively affect lumbar vertebrae position, and possibly pelvic alignment.

Indeed, at full speed, my athlete’s pelvis was rotated too far forward because his head moved out of position further up the chain.

Video 1. A flying sprint is a cornerstone of running mechanics as it serves as a reference goal for acceleration and submaximal locomotion. Video and constantly audit technique over the course of a career.

Second, I had to address his acceleration phase, which lacked violence, or “splitting without the rip.” His rear arm extended very long and slow while his heel dropped excessively upon ground contact. His neck was bent forward to create the illusion of driving forward. I opted to start with a remedial two-point start to rework accelerations from the ground up so he could learn how to push.

Derek Hansen has said, “Poor arm swing can quickly weaken posture and negatively impact the delivery of both horizontal and vertical force into the ground. Having the arms free to swing powerfully is critically important for proper sustained acceleration on the way to top speed.”

Video 2. Errors in arm action may seem to be problematic, but wait until those flaws actually cause efficiency issues to address it. How the upper body connects to the lower body depends on the athlete, so individualize as much as possible.

Thoughts on Cues

Cueing is an oft-debated topic on social media. It’s easy to dismiss or argue the validity of certain cues depending on your own experiences. No matter what the cue is, if it elicits the desired response, it’s always correct in that scenario with that athlete. Cues are sometimes taken too literally by people for whom they are not intended.

For example, I’ve recently seen the cue “run tall” debated. The argument is that running too tall will reduce ground reactive force and lead to slower running times. However, if an athlete flexes at the waist too much or leans back at max velocity, this cue could correct the problem. If you don’t think this is an issue with your athlete, the cue to run tall could be redundant and change something for the worse.

I recently cued an athlete to pretend they were riding a bike when performing dribbles. Another athlete didn’t respond to this cue; he needed “pretend it’s a rainy day, and you don’t want to get your sneaker toes wet in the puddles.” Silly? Perhaps, but each created positive changes in the respective circumstances.

Admittedly, I’m guilty of over cueing athletes at various points in my career. Those cues pushed some athletes into a conscious state of running and, thus, some level of “paralysis by cueing.” Even if cues are correct or near and dear to your heart, they don’t guarantee immediate change. I’m getting better at using consistent cues even if they take time. One of my favorite cues lately when doing plyometrics is “high as possible, as fast as possible.” Nothing fancy, but easily understood. Sometimes asking questions such as, “Can you go higher for me? Can you go faster?” are excellent cues.

Most athletes respond better to simple, repeatable cues to keep them confident and allow for better rehearsal, says @grahamsprints. Share on X

Language is complex, and any given utterance might be interpreted in different ways. There are specific things you can say to athletes that put them in the best position to “get it” and succeed. With the athlete who is the subject of this post, I opted to keep the cues very clear and simple. I find most athletes respond better to simple and repeatable cues to keep them confident and allow for better rehearsal. If they can use a cue readily without being any less automatic in their rehearsal and effort, it’s probably a successful, or at the least, useful cue.

To help my athlete keep his head more neutral in hopes of running with a more relaxed, upright posture, I rolled with “Eyes in front on the hunt.” I have used “Eyes to the horizon,” but on the hunt felt more appropriate as it conjures an image of relaxation with a quiet intensity. Peacefulness, in this instance, is more akin to a predatory cat stalking prey than a yogi.

For acceleration phase cues, I used combinations of the following:

• Bang-bang. This cue implies pushing without over pushing and employing violent arms and quick hands. His arms tended to be long and slow backside, which is the antithesis of the violence needed during acceleration.
• Aggressively push your hips and sternum toward the finish line. The cue helped this athlete displace his hips without over flexing at the waist while keeping a long spine throughout.
• Give me some violence. I used this cue if his start seemed to lack some “umph.”

After all of this, he showed noticeable improvements.

I find, however, that we need to exercise some patience here. For all of the aggressive, bang-bang, violence cues spoken, we could have solved many of these issues by putting some weight on a bar. He’s definitely not strong enough yet. We addressed his squat mobility in the summer program I run at Crossfit133 in Georgetown, MA. We were slow to have him increase the loads on traditional strength exercises like the squat and deadlift because of these issues.

For all of the aggressive, bang-bang, & violence cues, we could have solved many issues by putting some weight on a bar, says @grahamsprints. Share on X

I know there has been much debate online recently. It’s easy to cherry-pick examples of elite athletic freaks like Kevin Durant or a sub-10-second 100m runner and say that weight room strength doesn’t work or isn’t necessary. But stride lengths get longer when sprinters apply more force to the ground.

In my experience, increasing strength is one of the factors to increasing force against the ground in developing athletes. This is especially true when:

• an athlete sprints routinely
• lifting doesn’t impact the sprint work (using low reps on main lifts, great technique, and lots of rest)
• the goal is not gaining mass
• correct posture is prioritized when performing all sprint tasks

Indeed, it would be hard to convince me that this athlete, who sprints several times a week, would not also benefit from increasing his mass-specific force. I’ve found that improving upper body strength experience helps to counterbalance out of the blocks and gives athletes confidence to project violently. Moving ahead, I encouraged my athlete to get back in the gym and work on adding general strength while continuing to sprint two to three days a week.

Hybrid Exercises for Proficient Movements

Again, saying something doesn’t necessarily make it or so. Rather than simply speaking things into existence, I often pair drills that are equal parts drill and actual movements. These hybrid exercises get us away from timing every rep and put the focus on performing movements with the most proficiency possible on a given day.

For my athlete, I switched up the acceleration and max velocity main sessions and potentiating exercises every two weeks and implemented some ideas from Christian Thibaudeau’s Neurotyping work. Without going too deeply into it, Christian advocates matching an athlete’s neurological profile to the training program they perform.

From observation and personal experience as a teacher, I decided that my athlete best reflected the 2A type. Thibaudeau has said, “With a type 2A everything works, but nothing works for a long time.” Variety did seem to be our best friend during our work together. Doing things in two-week blocks was just enough time for him to realize improvements while staying motivated by variety.

I prefer to include items that push athletes close to—or at—motor skill failure periodically as a challenge and also provide a subtle ego stroke for the athlete. An athlete who feels good is more open to trying progressively harder things and is more motivated to push through even when they’re not initially successful.

Here are some of the items I programmed for my athlete in addition to my typical doses of dribbles and wicket runs.

Board Acceleration to Overhead

This is a great way to work on lower body mechanics without the arms. The board (hurdle top), or in this case a broomstick, serves as a great tactile cue to keep the spine long during acceleration. It also encourages athletes to feel themselves rising in a rhythm. With every step during acceleration, the shin angle changes until the shins are vertical during max velocity.

I often have athletes who keep the same torso position on multiple steps and create an illusion of staying low but end up really off balance. Others are fully upright by the fourth step but keep their neck bent to create an illusion of driving forward.

This exercise makes it easier for them to avoid early vertical shins and flat foot contacts. It also lets me see if they’re transitioning appropriately from their start to upright running. Indeed, I liked the improvements I saw with my athlete and found it was a useful drill to help both acceleration and maximum velocity.

Video 3. Removing the upper body or challenging the athlete with and without arms requires experience. If an athlete has technical problems, adding challenges or changing the dynamics may or may not work for them, so be vigilant.

Skip and Switch Flys

To set up a peaceful entry into the fly reps from the start, my athlete often used a skip and switch fly. The skip is a good way to force an athlete to bring good posture into the rep. As speed is built and maintained, the skip lead-in combined with the rhythmic transition and leg switch adds another challenge. The more powerful the skip, the easier it is to switch the thighs into a fast sprint because of the increased vertical displacement. I cue an athlete to think about making a well-timed step over a wicket hurdle and continuing with a seamless transition from the skip. Although we usually did not time these, a timing system could be worked into the practice.

Video 4. Skipping can look good, but may not transfer unless the athlete is aware of what is happening in time and space. An athlete who fails to get their knees up is not necessarily weak or deficient in hip flexor strength, they could have a coordination issue.

Downhill Buildups

There have been studies on the effects of combined downhill and uphill sprinting and how effective they are on top speed, and I devoted two weeks of training to the downhill portion. It’s a valuable teaching tool for handling high-speed travel rather than any peaking or stride length trick.

Obviously, the over-speed aspect of these runs could positively influence step length since the ground is coming at the athlete faster and in a different way. Chris Korfist has talked about plyo-soidal training and how changing surfaces can challenge the lower limbs to become stiffer and perhaps allow the athlete to bust through plateaus.

I continued to use the “eyes in front, on the hunt” cue as well as “fast as possible, smooth as possible.” I encouraged my athlete to start in a rhythm and build up fast while staying in control. To get the point across, I pantomimed a basketball on my finger then progressively spun it faster and faster until there was nothing left to do but maintain the control. The sound and cadence of the build-up were important so that the last ten meters were near peak, controllable velocity. After doing a few reps, he was ready for the ground and running fast on the track.

Video 5. Strange environments often wake up athletes or strain them psychologically, perfect for those that need to execute on-demand. Be creative, as athletes need to get out of their comfort zone.

Standing Triple Jump

The standing triple jump (STJ) addressed a huge need for this athlete. In our first week together, his standing triple measured at 18′-8.” By the end, his best was still only around 20′-7,” and we can attribute some of his improvement to learning the movement and becoming more proficient through repetition.

We slowly built a tolerance to controlling downward velocities in addition to scaling to more difficult reactive strength index jumps, such as drop jumps. Indeed, one study found that drop jumps were more closely linked to VMAX performance, and “such forward cyclic horizontal jumps would develop effective specific strength in the extensor muscles of the legs for the drive phase of the sprint stride.”

While horizontal jumps don't correlate much with maximum velocity running, the shin angles achieved at the jump's start could help with a block start. Share on X

So while horizontal jumps might not correlate heavily with maximum velocity running, it does seem that the shin angles achieved at the start of the jump could help with a block start. Carl Valle has said, “I see a strong relationship between this test and early acceleration because the takeoffs from both the dual leg jump and the bounds afterward include forefoot projections of the ankle complex and deep knee angles in general.”

When we first started using the STJ, this athlete had a lot of trouble pushing off both feet and would step out like he would in his two-point start. By the end of our work together, he was marginally better at using both legs. In the second of two pictures above, his arms are timed to contribute more to the jump. Perhaps improvements in timing here can have a more global effect on his sprinting.

I did not overuse this test, and I laid ground rules that he had to land and stick the landing in a squat. I cued him to imagine “jumping into the ski boots on a snowboard” when landing safely on the foot tripod. Moving forward in his training, I prescribed more mobility, general strength, and hip extension work. His lack of violence and hip extension at the start seems to correlate strongly to his acceleration phase, where we initially had a more difficult time moving the needle.

Video 6. Jumping or plyometrics are more than just power. Those that struggle to control the timing or range often show similar issues at full speed.

Rhythmic Rise Drill

This a stationary drill, and to be honest, I don’t love pure arm drills. Many other drills let athletes experiment dynamically and self-organize with cheek to hip arm action. However, I would say this is more of a torso drill than an arm drill.

I told my athlete to assume a starting posture similar to a block start with a parallel stance. Once in the athletic posture, he slowly extended while rising in a rhythm. For every arm swing, the torso rises. I cued him to keep a long spine and not to rush the rise nor maintain the same torso position during the arm swings.

This is definitely a case of a concept in isolation rather than an authentic application, but it gave him a reference point. He would often get ready for an acceleration rep by rehearsing this drill. Toward the end of our work, I started seeing a slightly stronger post-up position during the start with a more powerful arm drive.

Video 7. The athletes you train may just need rudimentary drills to get an understanding of what they need to do if they are new to a concept. Don’t be afraid to regress to make progress.

Learning to Learn

One of the first things I want to do with all of my athletes is to improve their general athleticism, which includes skipping, hopping, and moving well generally in all planes. My best sprinters are usually my best general movers. With developing athletes, I find it best to sprint often while progressively pushing them closer and closer to failure with their motor skill exercises, as needed.

My best sprinters are usually my best general movers, says @grahamsprints. Share on X

Whether on the track or in the weight room, I want to make the athletes as receptive to cues as possible. The more movement that the athlete is exposed to, the more options both of us have when attempting to fix something. It’s very easy to cue someone into a state of conscious confusion when they have not experienced the most rudimentary of tasks due to their low training age.

The foundation of acceleration and the concept of pushing starts with basic drills, such as the isometric post-up drill or a skip for distance. Teaching the athlete awareness of the ground’s interaction with the foot and how to use the big toe joint to let the shin drop and act as a lever to project forward doesn’t always happen at full speed. Some submaximal rehearsal seems to go a long way with my athletes, especially when paired in a complex with maximal work.

Submaximal rehearsal goes a long way with teaching acceleration, especially when paired in a complex with maximal work, says @grahamsprints. Share on X

Likewise, for maximum velocity mechanics, there are plenty of drills that help my athletes run better. I’m not saying these items are a magic wand you can wave and instantly have a team of all-state performers. Yet, if good posture has proven to be important during sprinting, then it should become a habit because habits are hard to break. Skipping, bounding, dribbling, and even jumping jacks are all opportunities to get better. If your best athlete can run 10.5, this strategy may be unnecessary for them.

By all accounts, my athlete has made tremendous progress in this area. It was fun to see him become more confident and use the general drills as a motivator and learning experience.

Video 8. Drills can be a way for athletes to become a better learner or a sponge. Limiting drills as corrections to inefficiencies is a bad idea.

Case Study Update

After all of this work for eight weeks, we saw some improvements. His 10m average velocity went from 20.15mph to 20.53mph, and he looked much better doing it. Moreover, this speed was up from 19.28mph at the end of track season (about 15 weeks).

During this time, his rep consistency was the most impressive improvement. When we first started training, hitting 20mph was a possibility on a good day, and by the end it was a definite on every rep.

Looking at an updated kinogram, I could easily see why. Although at touchdown he’s not exactly hitting the vaunted position of four knees together, his head and pelvis are more neutral and relaxed. His arms do look better and have more of the parallel positioning sought in this phase. It probably won’t be until he attains significantly higher velocities that these positions will change.

We cannot expect or force developing athletes to hit the positions that Usain Bolt has. For now, this athlete’s ability to run faster with better posture without being overly conscious of it is a huge step as he develops the neuromuscular coordination necessary to run fast. In the past, it proved easy to accidentally cue and shift this athlete into too much of a conscious mode of thinking while sprinting.

Video 9. Various approach runs can help take an athlete from one stage to another. Working on cone drills works if you know when to allow a set of errors to clean up while others are in hibernation.

In addition to his maximum velocity, he also improved his 40-yard time. He began with a starting time of 5.23, and by the end of the eight weeks, he ran a 4.96. Both measurements were taken with the Freelap timing system. We can attribute some of this improvement to his maximum velocity improvement—when an athlete is getting faster, they’re also getting to top speed more aggressively and in a better position to run fast.

We need to consistently develop both maximum velocity and acceleration at the high school level, says @grahamsprints. Share on X

There has been some debate recently about the need for acceleration development in developing athletes. We need to consistently develop both maximum velocity and acceleration at the high school level.

Over the course of the sessions, it appeared he had a subtle change in the violence and displacement of hips, but to be honest, there’s still lots of potential for growth here. Moving forward, he needs to work consistently, watch videos, and celebrate his improvements, no matter how small.

Video 10. Young athletes need fresh acceleration runs and repetition. So long as an athlete is going fast and is making progress, don’t sweat specific angles and positions of higher performers.

Options Are Good

As I’ve said, coaching is not a one size fits all endeavor, as many roads lead to Rome. Best practices are just that—best practices until something breaks down and doesn’t work. Coaching high school athletes often requires us to be well-versed in simplifying concepts. Sometimes the most powerful things we can do are to keep our athletes confident and repeating things until they become better. The specificity principle holds true when it comes to speed. To get better at something, you have to do that thing.

Slowing things down for the athlete in the form of similar tasks or general drills can allow for adequate rehearsal of maximal concepts in a submaximal setting. I recommend these be placed as close as possible to the specific sprint tasks of the day where they can bring maximum subconscious intent.

Above all, it’s important to be patient with athletes as they develop. You can’t force your athletes to hit world-class sprinting positions just because you know it’s correct. Professional athletes give us a glimpse into what the best in the world do, but at 11 to 12m per second, movement is a different breed. It’s foolish to believe you can always speak things into existence. Sprinting, like anything in athletic development, is a process—and a very individual one at that. Whether you say more or less, always meet the athlete where they are.

Since you’re here…
…we have a small favor to ask. More people are reading SimpliFaster than ever, and each week we bring you compelling content from coaches, sport scientists, and physiotherapists who are devoted to building better athletes. Please take a moment to share the articles on social media, engage the authors with questions and comments below, and link to articles when appropriate if you have a blog or participate on forums of related topics. — SF

By Derek Hansen

While coaches often spend a great deal of time and effort deconstructing and making sense of research, theory, and movement biomechanics, they often don’t have good information on how to plan and implement a basic speed session, let alone plan for a week, month, or year. They may have a few drills they like to use, along with some general ideas on the total volume of work. But they’re less prepared to integrate each element in an organized way that gets the most out of their athletes.

Unfortunately, efficacious sprint programming is not taught in a university exercise science program or—on the other side of the spectrum—YouTube videos. Even coaching certification courses offer generic examples for program planning. Rarely do coaching instructors spend hours and hours looking at every possible scenario, combination, and permutation of circumstances and identify appropriate progressions.

And, let’s be honest, many coaches fall back on what they did as an athlete. They don’t actually plan for the individuals under their charge. They simply regurgitate workouts and cross their fingers hoping that natural selection or dumb luck will make them successful. And this process perpetuates the disorganization and randomness of training.

I had the fortune of learning under some masterful coaches like Charlie Francis and Al Vermeil—wise individuals who had well-thought-out reasons for every rep they prescribed and every minute of recovery that separated individual runs. While it’s difficult to document the mastery of coaching in one article, we can describe some basic premises around planning an individual sprint training session for coaches.

In our Running Mechanics Professional courses, which I’ve been delivering over the past year, we spend a great deal of time outlining this process. The comprehensive courses explore running mechanics, sprint training, return-to-play protocols, and integration of running programming for various sports and are directed at coaches, strength and conditioning specialists, and physical therapists.

For those who have not had the luxury of attending these sessions, this post summarizes some of the key issues for implementing sprint workouts.

Identifying Your Audience

Just like a good stand-up comedian, you have to know your audience and plan your routine for the best responses. Your jokes may be a hit in one city, but if they start missing the mark on a college campus, you have to adjust and improvise on the spot to avoid being heckled into irrelevancy.

As a coach, you rarely work with just one athlete over an extended period of time. Hence, your coaching instruction must be adaptable to fit with varying group sizes and athlete types. Every athlete needs your attention. And it’s your choice on how to allocate that attention in terms of when, what, how much, and how frequently.

If you spread yourself too thin over every athlete in your group, no one person will get enough attention for appropriate feedback and prescriptive advice to allow for significant and sustainable results. If you focus too much on one or two athletes, everyone else will suffer from a lack of coaching. Knowing how to manage the individuals in your group is imperative for sustained success.

Group Size

One-on-one sessions. If you’re working with just one athlete, you can take much more time to explain technical details, field feedback from the athlete, and use rep-to-rep video review to document progress and solidify prescriptions. The downside is that it becomes very easy to fill the silence with too much information and grow fond of the sound of your own voice.

In these situations, it’s extremely valuable to give the athlete space between sets and reps to digest the work they’re doing and the cues offered to them. While there is a desire to maximize the “density” of the interaction in one-on-one scenarios, focusing on one quality or message usually goes a long way to realizing success over an accumulation of individual sessions. Periodic one-on-one sessions with athletes within your group can be very valuable to highlight technical issues or build a stronger connection with a specific athlete who may need a little more focused attention.

Periodic one-on-one sessions with athletes highlight technical issues and build a stronger connection with specific athletes, says @DerekMHansen. Share on X

With team sport athletes, I’ve had success conducting “maintenance” or “refinement” sessions once per week in a one-on-one format—both during the in-season and off-season periods—to both maintain and build qualities. In today’s age of raging specialization, there is neither the time nor energy to hold more than one 60-minute session per week without blowing the minds of the load management gurus in the industry.

It is, however, just enough volume and frequency to accomplish some goals that carry over into the competition realm and minimize injury caused by inefficient movement and poor coordination at higher speeds. Knowing how much and how hard is the key to hitting the sweet spot for these athletes without putting them over the top.

Small group 2-4. Small group sessions with enough athletes to make the time socially stimulating and extremely productive can be had with a handful of participants. These numbers allow for appropriate recovery periods while one athlete per rep is being completed. Feedback is provided in much smaller doses than in the one-on-one sessions but still ensures enough constructive information for athletes to maintain steady progress. Athletes get the opportunity to watch each other’s repetitions and gain some insight into cues and lessons that may also apply to them.

Medium group 4-10. Moderately sized groups—often what I found myself dealing with as a track and field sprint coach—still can offer a great deal of value and high-density coaching if set up correctly. These arrangements can work well in a track and field setting because athletes have a good understanding of the dynamics involved and have developed a degree of independence and self-sufficiency during a training session.

Team sport athletes, in my experience, tend to expect instruction on what to do all the time: where to stand, when to start, when to listen, and when to be quiet. The coach puts much more effort into multi-tasking with different flights of athletes performing their repetitions than in the smaller group arrangements. Athletes can do starts all at once or subdivided into groups.

Video review might occur as a group with everyone looking at their own repetition, and the coach making comments only when they need to correct specific errors. But individualization becomes more difficult, as time is a factor and athletes need to complete repetitions in rapid succession.

Large group 11 or more. These sessions typically involve an entire team performing the work en masse with coaches only offering corrections when individuals make egregious errors. Drills, workout goals, and technical recommendations tend to be more basic and simplified in implementation to ensure everyone understands what the coach expects of them.

Although video analysis is much more difficult, it can be done by assistant coaches or interns and reviewed at a later date. We don’t advise showing athletes individual video clips during the session because this can be distracting and disruptive and ruin the flow of the workout.

Having the entire group perform technical drills or repetitions can be difficult for a coach because there are so many bodies to monitor. Creating waves or rows of 3-4 athletes per repetition is easier to manage and allows athletes to recover adequately before their next attempt. Waves also make it easier to monitor run times, whether you’re using a handheld stopwatch or an electric timing system. The one-on-one and small group scenarios obviously lend themselves to easier performance monitoring by timing during daily workouts that have not been set up as milestone testing sessions.

In any case, it’s necessary to lower your expectations of how much you can accomplish with larger groups to minimize coaching burnout and prevent you from losing your voice. Scaling your efforts reduces your stress and makes it easier for athletes to process the work you’ve prescribed. Goal setting introductions before the workout and debrief sessions following training help educate the athletes on the items they performed well and the areas that need work, without interrupting the rhythm and flow of the session while it’s happening.

Group size is only one major variable relating to planning and implementing your sessions. Once you scale your coaching delivery, you can focus on other key areas of instruction. Some significant factors that can influence how you carry out your sprint sessions may include:

Sport

• Court sports involve shorter sprint distances than field sports.
• Larger athletes (football, basketball, rugby) may only require or tolerate shorter distance sprints.
• Surface types that athletes are accustomed to may dictate your choice of training surface.
• Athletes that compete on or in other mediums (ice hockey, cycling, swimming) may benefit from sprinting on a hard surface.

Age

• Younger athletes may require more general fitness training than developed, mature athletes.
• Older, veteran athletes require or tolerate much less overall high-intensity volume than younger developed or developing athletes.
• Younger athletes may lose focus much quicker than more mature athletes, thus requiring shorter bouts of technical instruction.

Training Age

• Athletes with a younger training age may require more technical instruction despite their chronological age.
• Athletes with an older training age may require relatively low volumes of speed work to maintain or improve speed qualities.

Training History

• Strength athletes need instruction on how to relax, think of technique over effort, and take advantage of their elastic qualities.
• Endurance athletes need to be taught that quality over quantity can have significant benefits.

Injuries 

• A training population with a more significant injury history may require a more gradual progression and lower overall volume initially.
• Athletes with a history of soft-tissue injuries from running in their sport may not have accumulated enough sprinting volume in the off-season to sustain their movement requirements for their sport.

Goals and Objectives

Once you know the nature and size of your training audience, it’s easier to formulate goals and objectives for the sessions. Every session can have both general and specific goals, varying from athlete to athlete and group to group. Some goals are philosophical while others are purely and specifically mechanical.

In all cases, having explicit goals and objectives that lead to tangible results is critical for every coach and performance professional. Goals such as team-building and mental toughness only distract you from achieving significant physiological and technical gains through deliberate practice and careful execution of movement skills.

Technical Focus

Every sprint and speed coach has a technical model in mind for how they want an athlete to look during different phases of a sprint. We can characterize this as a general template or model for sprint mechanics that all athletes under their charge are aware of when entering a training season.

Once a coach understands the strengths and weaknesses of the athletes involved in the sessions, more specific technical prescriptions may be required from session to session to realize improvements in execution. Every coach should have an idea of what needs to be improved from session to session with all their athletes so they will progress over the long run.

Some common areas of technique refinement to highlight in a session are start mechanics, arm carriage, head position, step over height, and general relaxation as it relates to effort. Coaches often rotate their emphasis over several training sessions so as not to grind the athletes with the same feedback repeatedly.

Distances Covered

The individual distances covered in a sprint workout are determined by many factors, including sport, event, time of year, facility constraints, weather, athlete size, and the coach’s training approach.

Shorter distances may be associated with an emphasis on explosive starts or working with heavy linemen in American football. Longer sprint distances may be required specifically for 400-meter sprinters in track and field. Intermediate sprint distances may be appropriate for team sport athletes who must perform upright sprinting at high speeds several times throughout a game or match.

It's better not to combine a broad array of distances in the same session with your athletes, particularly with larger groups, says @DerekMHansen. Share on X

In most cases, it’s not advisable to combine a broad array of distances with athletes, particularly with larger groups. If you decide to work on starts and shorter accelerations, the bulk of the session should involve repetitions in that range of distance. In a maximum velocity session, which should be a separate session, you can precede maximum velocity sprinting with some shorter accelerations—but not so much that energy is drained early in the workout. This would negatively impact the session’s main objective.

Track and field athletes may be more focused and experienced to handle a broader range of distances within one session. These training sessions tend to be longer in duration, though, and require longer recovery periods than may be possible with team sport athletes. It’s very easy to want to accomplish many goals within one session. However, simplifying your efforts, setting the “bar” an appropriate height, and identifying achievable results are always more productive in the end.

Multi-Directional Activities

“Fake-sport-specialization” has led to a trend toward making all locomotion activities multi-directional and agility-laden. Apparently, straight lines or even slightly curved arcs do not exist in high-level sports—as though the shortest distance between two points remains elusive.

Simply watching a sporting activity, particularly at the higher levels, will yield some movement truths. Multi-direction work is certainly required to prepare an athlete for many sports, but at volumes that are far lower than what is done currently by many sport coaches, strength and conditioning professionals, and even do-it-yourself parents.

Let's not forget that much of the sport-specific work gets done in the sporting practice sessions, says @DerekMHansen. #SprintTraining Share on X

Hence, coaches must be organized and deliberate in their prescription and implementation of multi-directional work. Let us not forget that much of the sport-specific work gets done in the sporting practice sessions, and too much of a good thing can yield nagging overuse injuries.

Planning

One of the most valuable means of determining the length of a training session is examining the constraints over which you have no control. You may only have a facility for 60 minutes, your athletes have classes to attend, or a sporting body only allows a certain amount of training time for your team. Much of our training is determined by conventions that have nothing to do with optimal training methods. For thousands of years, the days of the week have dictated microcycles, not physiological parameters or accurately determined circadian rhythms.

Once you have determined your time allotment for a given session, you begin to examine the amount of time required for equipment setup, warm-ups, individual repetitions, and the recovery times needed for maximal effort and adaptation. Time and recovery determine the work, not some magical physiological formula or coaching intuition. Understanding that leaving some work on the table is not only necessary but also keeps a coach from overdoing it in most cases.

The job of the typical track and field coach is a little more flexible when planning loads. The track facility is rarely booked by numerous sports and groups that share time and fight over start and finish times. Even good track coaches, however, typically impose minimum and maximum times on the track to ensure their athletes have energy and motivation to fight another day. Understanding that athletes have a finite capacity for many tasks and qualities will yield better performances and more durable athletes.

Many coaches struggle over ordering the types of work in their sessions. Some are still wildly mesmerized by ridiculous concepts such as muscle confusion and planned variability, rarely understanding the necessity for repetition, redundancy, accumulation of quality, and well-thought-out work. As Bruce Lee stated, “I do not fear the man who has learned 10,000 different kicks, but more the man who has mastered one kick 10,000 times.”

In general, it’s always advisable to carry out the more energy demanding and complex tasks earlier in the session. Starts require more energy to set the body explosively into motion and also involve significant technical requirements. While one can argue that maximum velocity sprinting is more demanding from both a central and peripheral perspective, it involves more of a “flow-state” with cyclical execution and lower brain involvement.

A short-to-long approach to a #SprintSession yields positive results and also presents a logical progression to the athletes, says @DerekMHansen. Share on X

Starts can create greater anxiety and overall muscle tension—particularly with the anticipation of each repetition—and are best to address at the outset of the workout before tackling the longer efforts. Hence, a short-to-long approach to an overall workout session can yield positive results. It also presents a logical progression to the athlete as the distances build over time and we add more segments to the individual runs. Working in the reverse order is less intuitive and can also negatively impact technical execution.

Ancillary training activities like plyometrics, throws, and weightlifting work better after sprint training, says @DerekMHansen. #SprintTraining Share on X

It’s also advisable to follow your sprint work with ancillary training activities such as plyometrics, throws, and weightlifting. These noncyclical activities work better after the athletes complete the cyclical, high-speed work. Sometimes, coaches include medicine ball throws and plyometrics—in very manageable doses—before sprint training to try to facilitate a higher level of activation for starts or accelerations. The key is to use these modalities sparingly so as not to steal energy—both physical and psychological—from the main goal: speed!

Warm-Up

The training and competition warm-up protocols used by today’s coaches and athletes are some of the most overthought and under-evaluated aspects of physical preparation. Once again, we hear terms such as movement variability, activation and potentiation, functional, and sports-specific used in an ad nauseam fashion to justify ill-conceived approaches.

The whole point of the warm-up is to prepare athletes for the reality and intensity of what will take place in training and competition. If you expect athletes to accelerate and run fast in training, you had better include a progression of work that covers these qualities.

In its simplest form, a warm-up should include activities that physically increase heat and circulation throughout the entire body. The warm-up also must progressively simulate the activities and intensities the athletes will experience in training and competition. I’ve always said that the easiest way to warm up is to use a short-to-long sprint approach that gradually dials up intensity while moving from shorter sprints to longer sprints. Acceleration involves muscles that play a lesser role in upright sprinting, and vice versa.

A short-to-long warm-up gradually introduces all of the required muscles & increases velocity & overall muscle recruitment as part of the progression. Share on X

A short-to-long approach gradually introduces all of the required muscles and increases velocity and overall muscle recruitment as part of the progression. Drills can emphasize posture, limb movements, and specific qualities (hip range of motion, elastic ground contacts, rapid arm movements, etc.), but we don’t need to use them extensively. We can also intersperse flexibility and range-of-motion exercises throughout the process, often as a check of muscle status and general readiness.

With a large group of athletes, often a highly structured warm-up approach limiting degrees of freedom works best. Determine how much time you can dedicate to the warm-up and then fill in the blanks. With smaller groups of high-performance athletes, you may want to give a bit more independence over how they prepare to take into consideration their individual preferences.

With younger athletes, you’ll have to overstructure the warm-up to make sure they hit all of the key movements and intensities. In all cases, having a plan, identifying objectives, and sticking to a timeline must be part of the approach to ensure you don’t waste time and your athletes are ready to go.

Therapeutic Interventions

While it may not be within the scope of your work to carry out physical therapy techniques on your athletes, it’s always good to know what is possible so you can seek out a practitioner to help you with your athletes. Talking-the-talk may be vital in getting someone else to walk-the-walk for you.

Although most therapeutic interventions take place away from the training venue, many operations now have integrated facilities where athletes can train and receive treatment for injuries under the same roof. Other programs have physical therapy staff on-site during training sessions. Regardless, it’s good to discuss with your team of professionals how to work with athletes during a training session. Having athletes spontaneously and randomly drop out of repetitions to get “tuned up” can be risky if not done properly.

It’s very important to provide an assessment period at the beginning of the session to address issues and communicate information. Access to therapeutic professionals at training sessions is a luxury, and we must treat them as such to avoid the “distraction effect” from hijacking the main purpose of the session: training!

Application of Drills

All coaches use drills in their training progressions to break down larger, more complicated skills. Often, however, the drills become business-as-usual, and both athletes and coaches forget the primary reason the drills were introduced. Apathy takes hold of the exercises, and technique degrades very quickly. Drills also get thrown into a warm-up routine where focus is in short supply and movements become sloppy. While drills can be valuable and certainly have their place in a training session, coaches must be very careful with their application. Drills should be used strategically, precisely, and consistently over time to accrue the true and full benefits.

Drills come after the general warm-up to reinforce proper movement patterns and activate the muscles required for the tasks ahead, says @DerekMHansen. Share on X

Drills are helpful in the early portions of a training session—following a general warm-up routine—to reinforce proper movement patterns and activate the muscles required for the tasks ahead. Many drills involve specific strengthening characteristics that assist with the proper execution of full movements in sports.

While terms such as activation and potentiation are often used to prepare an athlete for maximal efforts in training and competition, drills also serve this purpose. When moved to the end of a training session, drills can reinforce the movement patterns practiced in the primary training session. Coaches must be careful to monitor technique and fatigue closely to avoid reinforcing poor movement patterns.

Monitoring and Evaluation

Subjective

Qualities that are difficult to measure by objective means often play a significant role in the coaching process. Detecting muscle tension, relaxation, movement efficiency, or perception of pain and effort should all be discussed with the athlete, albeit in small doses and only when warranted. We can then correlate these subjective measures with the objective data collected from session to session.

Even video review interventions can involve a conversation around the question, “How did you feel on this repetition, and does it look as though you thought it would?” Often, athletes have very poor perception and awareness of what they’re trying to affect in a sprint effort and what they demonstrate on video. While your job is not to make your athlete feel embarrassed or uncomfortable about their performances, you should work with them to affect their best biomechanical efforts and resulting outputs. This is certainly the goal of the coaching process.

Objective

Run times. Data collection for monitoring, feedback, and overall tracking of progress are critical in any performance domain. There are many ways to collect athlete efforts over various distances, and most track and field coaches use a conventional stopwatch. The stopwatch is portable, relatively inexpensive, and very convenient, but its accuracy is highly variable, depending on who is conducting the timing.

The stopwatch—particularly in the hands of those collecting 40-yard dash times—often enhances or diminishes a performance depending on the motives of the timer. Some experienced coaches have found the stopwatch quite useful for tracking progress daily, particularly over longer sprint distances where minute deviations in start and stop reflexes don’t make a difference.

Valid and consistent timing results over short sprint distances (less than 200 meters) require electronic timing says @DerekMHansen. #SprintTraining Share on X

Those of us who need valid and consistent timing results over shorter sprint distances (i.e., less than 200 meters) require some form of electronic timing. Accurate times can be had to the hundredth of a second by infrared beam systems, radio frequency chips, and high-speed video applications and cameras. The choice of direction depends on the budget, personal preference, athlete group size, frequency of use, and manual labor resources available to the coach.

While the scope of this article does not cover the intricacies of electronic and fully automatic timing systems, numerous options are available and have been discussed and reviewed online. Any serious performance professional should look at implementing at least one of these systems to verify athlete improvements accurately.

Ground contact times. Ground contact time data has become more and more relevant to performance evaluations, as research has shown that shorter, more forceful contacts correlate with faster running. Although it’s not as easy or economical to collect as sprint times, ground contact data can be caught using a variety of methods.

Anyone with a modern smartphone should have the capability to collect high-definition video at 120 frames per second, which offers accurate times up to a hundredth of a second. While some coaches and analysts resort to manually counting frames of video to calculate ground contact durations, you can import video footage into video analysis applications that do the work for you. Dartfish Express, for example, allows you to tag the initial contact frame and the moment at toe-off to calculate the duration of ground contact for the stance phase during a sprint.

Those who have access to in-ground force-plate technology can also scrape ground contact data. But this can be much more expensive, time costly, much less portable, and generally more complex to set up and implement with a large group of athletes. In-shoe force transducer technology may soon allow us to collect this type of information for groups of athletes at a reasonable price point. In the interim, video footage may serve as the most practical option.

Limb angles. The video analysis applications discussed above often can measure postural and limb angles. It’s imperative to compare apples to apples and not oranges in this case. You must take time and care to capture video from the same distances, angles, and, preferably, the same device. Different cameras, lenses, and smartphones have varying fields of view, depths of field, and even a degree of distortion at the outer edges of the frame. Keeping this in mind, exercise due diligence and create standard operating procedures around your video collection practices.

Velocities. Some video analysis applications can measure velocities, but short of having an expensive instantaneous velocity laser device on hand, it may not be that important to track this information if you can capture interval times over 5 and 10 meters using more conventional electronic timers. You can obtain average velocities using split times, and these may be enough to determine notable increases or decreases in velocity at various stages of a sprint effort.

Stride frequency and stride length. While many world-class biomechanical analyses involve measures of stride frequency and stride length, it may not be as imperative to capture exceptionally accurate data on these qualities, at least not regularly. Counting strides over a given 20-meter window—achieved with a flying start—is an easier way to estimate average stride length and frequency at maximum velocity. In most cases, it’s not advisable to let the athletes know you’re trying to capture this data, as they may alter their normal mechanics to try achieve a better score and corrupt the data. Even worse, they may hurt themselves.

Closing Thoughts

Clearly, we could discuss this topic over tens of thousands of words in multiple volumes and a companion video series. I want to get coaches thinking about the key considerations when planning their sessions. During many years competing as an athlete, coaching athletes, and now educating coaches and rehabilitation professionals, I’ve seen and heard many things.

Much of the information has been good, but much has been illogical and egregious. While it’s easy to point the finger from afar and judge coaches for their actions—even questioning their motives and character—it may be more appropriate to produce resources to guide coaches and make them think about their philosophy and procedures. As my good friend Mark Uyeyama often states, “Most people don’t even know what they don’t know.”

Not many people have had the opportunities I’ve had to learn from some pretty special coaches and human beings. Some of it was sheer luck, but it also involved seeking out the best and learning firsthand the techniques they used to produce champions. It allowed me to get into their heads and truly understand why they did what they did at any given time.

I followed this with a good deal of trial-and-error to experiment with their formulations and philosophies. And while much of what they told me worked, I was forced to come up with some new concepts and techniques on my own. Necessity is the mother of invention, and putting yourself in a situation where you have to deliver often yields positive outcomes and growth. So take this article with a grain of salt, put it in the back of your mind, and get out there and coach to the best of your ability.

I look forward to hearing about your successes and failures; we’ll continue to grow together. For more information on the Running Mechanics Professional courses on this subject and many more other areas related to performance and rehabilitation, please visit Running Mechanics Professional.

Since you’re here…
…we have a small favor to ask. More people are reading SimpliFaster than ever, and each week we bring you compelling content from coaches, sport scientists, and physiotherapists who are devoted to building better athletes. Please take a moment to share the articles on social media, engage the authors with questions and comments below, and link to articles when appropriate if you have a blog or participate on forums of related topics. — SF

The echo chamber of social media has created a hyper-sensitive environment in the world of athletics. More than ever, it is important to have every “t” crossed and every “i” dotted. It will only take one major incident to test your strength and conditioning program. Are you prepared for an investigation? A lawsuit? To be completely honest, I was not.

After an Incident – Are You Protected?

Many years ago, a spring conditioning session with a volleyball team provided me with a scary situation that is now always in the back of my mind when I condition teams. We were in the middle of the off-season, doing some on-court shuttles that the head coach had requested. They were not unreasonably hard, but they were indeed challenging. We had been doing them for several weeks, progressing volume slowly. Everybody was making the requisite times without incident.

On this day, after the second rep, one of the athletes dropped straight to the ground. She was breathing, but unconscious. She was one of the better-conditioned athletes and had never had a problem in the past. I knew immediately that I had to make the call that no coach ever wants to make: 9-1-1. She was unconscious for what seemed like an hour; in reality, it was closer to 3–4 minutes. The EMTs brought her immediately to the ER. After an overnight stay in the local hospital, the incident was blamed on a combination of low blood pressure, menstruation, and a less-than-adequate diet. Fortunately, the athlete quickly made a full recovery.

That incident sticks out in my mind. For the most part, there wasn’t much that we could have done to prevent it. We followed the emergency action plan successfully, and the student-athlete was ultimately fine. But what if she hadn’t been?

There are many variables in the lives of our athletes that are completely out of our control. If they don’t manage these variables—such as hydration, sleep, diet, medications, etc.—correctly, we could potentially create a harmful, and even dangerous, stimulus for the athlete. I don’t intend to have any more ambulance visits as part of our workouts, but we all need to be prepared in case it happens. My workout written on an Excel sheet was the only documentation I had.

In July 2019, the NCAA Sport Science Institute released a document outlining recommended policies and procedures. On page 8 of that document, it states: “All training and conditioning sessions should be documented. In addition, all training and conditioning sessions should…be reproducible upon request and be shared with the primary athletics health care providers (team physician and athletic trainer) before the session in which they are to be used.” I realized very quickly that I needed a system to not only document our training sessions, but also easily communicate with coaches, athletic training staff, and administrators.

I realized very quickly that I needed a system to not only document our training sessions, but also easily communicate with coaches, athletic training staff, and administrators. Share on X

Working at a low-resource university, we have a small staff with very limited time. I knew that there had to be a better way than using Excel. Sure, saving PDFs or paper copies of our training sessions was an option, but I needed to step outside my comfort zone. It’s a challenge to reproduce old workouts on Excel if you are constantly changing a floating 1RM or theoretical max. My old method of sharing workouts with a cloud drive was never as simple and easy as I would have hoped.

Upgrading from Excel to Athlete Management Software

I selected CoachMePlus for many different reasons. I liked the ability to create, share, and archive workouts, gather information with the athlete questionnaires, and integrate with the Bluetooth scale and hydration information (our school is in the desert).

I decided to start small, using the software with a small portion of our teams first. I have been a lifelong Excel user, and this first step was quite a big one. Entering the athletes into the system was quite easy and, after the video tutorials, very intuitive. There is a period of setup, but I found it was similar to using Excel at the beginning of every year. I started with the basic setup with each athlete. I really like that the software includes plenty of options for customization.

When I entered our athletes into the system, I also entered our athletic trainers and administrators so they would have access to each of our athlete’s workouts. This allows them to review the workout prior to training. This transparency is becoming more and more important in today’s athletic environment. Provided you give them plenty of time, this puts the responsibility in the hands of the administrators and trainers to voice any disapproval ahead of time. Since many of our medical examinations happen just prior to training sessions, the more information each party has ahead of time, the more it helps us make rational and logical decisions regarding training session modifications.

The more information each party has ahead of time, the more it helps us make rational and logical decisions regarding training session modifications. Share on X

The builder section of the software allows you to create exercises, circuits, and programs. My first step was to establish my own personal exercise library. When I had looked at first generations of strength and conditioning software, this was a rigid process consisting of a few dozen generic exercises. Each coach has their own nuanced set of exercises and terminology. The builder allowed me to include my own terminology with my own loading parameters. I used my own exercises with my own progressions and the ability to add notes.

For technology to work at the university level, it needs to be flexible and user-friendly. I was pleased to find that CoachMePlus was both. It was not only easy to program lifts in the weight room, but also sprint drills, plyometrics, and conditioning sessions. Parameters such as % of 1RM, load in pounds or kilograms, distance, time, etc. are variables that users can select when creating a new exercise. This flexibility is extremely important to me as a strength coach. The ability to attach your own videos to the exercises is especially useful for incoming athlete workouts and break workouts.

Putting the workout together was very straightforward and quite easy. Even better was the fact that it was simple to customize. Whether due to an injury or an athlete with a different training timeline, changing the exercise, sets, or reps was super easy. It is a quick modification for these changes.

If you have an athlete coming off a period of inactivity, such as with a major injury, you can easily customize remedial programs. Excel was woefully inefficient for this task. In the past, I made modifications on the fly or scratched them on the workout cards themselves. Again, in today’s athletic environment, this will put the coach and the athletic department at risk. Having this information available to your medical staff can further open communication silos.

The software lets you easily customize remedial programs for athletes coming off a period of inactivity, such as with a major injury. Excel is woefully inefficient for this. Share on X

Time is very limited in our environment. The ability to create and save warm-ups, recovery workouts, and conditioning sessions can be a real time-saver. You can tailor copy-and-paste workouts by day and by athlete if needed.

Documentation Adds a Layer of Protection

At CSU Bakersfield, we have basketball players coming from a variety of places. Many come from junior colleges, but others are four-year transfers or fresh out of high school. As a result, the incoming players arrive on our campus at different points of the year. I am a big believer in progression. You don’t teach a toddler to read by throwing a Tolstoy novel on their lap, and you don’t get a 7-foot basketball player to clean from the ground by trying it on day 1.

In the past, I had to write and keep up multiple, different Excel sheets until the new athletes were able to perform the returner’s workout. I will not progress an athlete who has not demonstrated a level of proficiency on an exercise. At one point several years ago, I had to keep four different Excel sheets for basketball alone. With 16 sports, you can imagine the amount of time I spent at the computer! My Excel workbooks were a mess, and I never really archived them properly.

This summer, I was able to take our new athletes through progressions without having to write entirely new workouts. For example, I had my returners do power snatches from block above knee (five sets of three reps), while several of my new athletes did muscle snatches from the power position (three sets of five reps). I was easily able to customize the program without starting from scratch. This saves time and documents the progression, just in case an issue comes up. The ability to program and document small nuances, such as player A pulling off a 4-inch block while player B pulls off an 8-inch block, becomes quite manageable. Our athletes start at different places and progress at different rates.

The workouts are then documented and archived, which is extremely important if you are ever going to survive an investigation. Every coach has the potential to be put under the microscope. This is one of the best ways to document your work and protect yourself and your athletic department. The best part is there are no file boxes of used paper workouts or endless PDFs saved through scans. Although I still print all our workout cards, at the end of the week they go into the recycle bin.

Your athletic training staff probably uses an electronic medical records system that documents much of their work. S&C coaches should adopt a software system that allows them to do the same. Share on X

Your athletic training staff probably uses an electronic medical records system that documents and catalogs much of their work. Strength and conditioning coaches should really think about adopting a software system that allows them to document and archive. There is no reason that you need to spend tons of man-hours keeping track of documentation. With all the advances in technology today, you owe it to yourself to streamline the process.

Tailored Questionnaires Lead to Better Communication

The daily wellness questionnaire provides yet another layer of protection through communication. Athletes can communicate RPE, sleep quality, soreness, and pain. This can help coaches and athletic training staff red-flag certain athletes. If you see high RPEs and high soreness levels for consecutive days, you may have to make an adjustment in your programming.

This is especially useful when working with new athletes. Many of our new athletes are being asked to work harder than they ever have, in combination with the fact that they are adjusting to life in a new location and on their own for the first time. I saw much higher soreness and RPE values for our new athletes even though their initial intensities were quite low.

If you have specific questions that are unique to your setting, you can include them on your questionnaire. The athletes access this questionnaire by app on their phone or tablet.

I am fortunate to have a good medical staff around me. We work well together: We have well-defined roles and communicate well with one another. That being said, we really could have used this app several years ago.

Back then, we had a basketball player who struggled with toe pain. It developed right before his final year of eligibility. Turns out one of the sesamoid bones of his big toe had turned necrotic. It was basically dead. The options were for him to have surgery to remove the bone and miss his final year or to try to play through it. He was a tough kid and opted for the second choice. We had to carefully manage his workload to keep the bone from breaking apart. Our staff did a great job of managing the load and, ultimately, he had a successful senior year.

A piece of technology such as this could be a great asset in monitoring soreness and pain. Not only to avoid further damage to the toe, but to avoid secondary injury as a result of a compensation. Athletes often don’t really start developing pain and soreness until several hours after a competition or practice. So, just because athletes leave your facility without significant pain and soreness, it doesn’t mean that it won’t develop later that day. Having the ability to communicate and document is a great asset in these situations.

A Multitude of Game-Changing Capabilities

The capabilities of the CoachMePlus software are vast. I have only begun to scratch the surface of how it can improve a program, but I think its greatest contribution is its ability to communicate and document our programming.

University administrators aren’t always well-equipped to evaluate a strength and conditioning coach. I once sat down with an administrator who admitted she was not quite sure how to evaluate my position. Ultimately, she decided to reach out to all my head coaches for feedback. I think this was a good move. We are support staff, and it’s important that the head coach feels good about their strength coach.

The ability of a coach to coach, communicate, and organize is fairly straightforward; however, these are all subjective measures. It would be nice if part of the evaluation process included performance metrics. CoachMePlus offers an easy snapshot of the improvement of key longitudinal measurements. The ability of a strength coach to visually demonstrate the value they create in their position is a game changer.

CoachMePlus allows a strength coach to visually demonstrate the value they create in their position. This is a game changer. Share on X

Don’t wait until the next big catastrophe in athletics. Protect yourself, your staff, and your athletes. We all know how important documentation is, but we struggle to keep up with our busy schedules at times. CoachMePlus offers your program a solution for what is sure to be an ongoing issue in the world of athletics.

Since you’re here…
…we have a small favor to ask. More people are reading SimpliFaster than ever, and each week we bring you compelling content from coaches, sport scientists, and physiotherapists who are devoted to building better athletes. Please take a moment to share the articles on social media, engage the authors with questions and comments below, and link to articles when appropriate if you have a blog or participate on forums of related topics. — SF

By Mark Hoover

“The gods love to toy with people who use absolutes.”—Josephine Angelini

This quote sums up exactly my sentiment about most things in life, but particularly about the field of sports performance and especially when it comes to working at the high school level. I write a lot about the “growth mindset” and how important I believe it is to attack life from an “I don’t know what I don’t know” perspective. If you believe in that concept, especially as strongly as I do, it becomes unthinkable to place much of what we do in the category of absolute.

One buzzword phrase that has caught my attention recently is game-day lifting. While it’s obviously not a very scientific way of polling, according to what I’ve been reading in the “Twitter-verse,” most coaches are on board with at least some form of weight training on competition days. A smaller but often vocal group seem to be dyed in the wool anti-game-day lifting proponents. They are absolutely sure it’s detrimental to performance later in the day. While I could dive into a rant about how this is a set mindset and is much more detrimental to the athletes those particular coaches work with, I won’t because I’ve already done my rant article for the year.

I could also write a comprehensive article about the pros and cons, but Coach Bob Alejo wrote a fabulous one, which I used as a reference when programming what we do on game days. Instead, I’ll focus on the anti-absolutes that influence how we plan and implement our game-day lifting at York Comprehensive High School (YCHS). I’ll discuss what variables go into our decision-making process and how combinations of these are reflected in our approach. I will also outline our general programming and review why we do what we do and when. Although I focus on football, the concepts hold true for all our school sports.

Using an Evidence-Based Approach

At YCHS, part of the mission statement for our sports performance program is “use an evidence-based approach.” Webster defines evidence as “an outward sign” or “one who bears witness.” It doesn’t say anything about “must come from extensive research and written in a journal.” So while I am not anti-research, we are not tied to that as the only way to use an evidence-based approach.

One of my favorite parts of the book The System is the author’s discussion about why American strength coaches initially found it so hard to communicate with the Eastern Block coaches. Paraphrasing, the author said the Eastern coaches used the term coach’s eye repeatedly. When asked a question by the American coaches, instead of quoting research, they replied “use your coach’s eye.” In the East, sports scientists and coaches worked as a symbiotic unit. Unlike in the West where those relationships were often at odds. So the Eastern Block coaches used research as a base to jump from, but ultimately the evidential proof came from actual real-time outcomes as judged by seasoned professionals.

That struck me as a very growth-minded approach. Because of that, I rely much more on our data collection and outcomes from the athletes I have in front of me than the ones the sports scientist or doctoral students studied and eventually wrote about. Coaching and the coach’s eye is a large part of our evidence.

Recently, I posted a 24-second video on Twitter of one of our football game-day lifts. I was shocked at the response. At the time of this writing, it’s been 36 hours, and I’m at over 600 likes. I also had one coach who replied that by doing what I was doing, our players would be fatigued and give our opponents an advantage. When I scoffed at the idea, this person replied “show me how I am wrong.” He pointed out that he had read over 40 articles to come up with his point of view. My direct answer to that challenge was simple, “I watched our players PLAY tonight with the same energy level they trained with this morning. They were not fatigued and played very fast.”

What drives change in our program? Data collected from our athletes & what my coach’s eye tells me is effective, says @YorkStrength17. #GameDayLifting Share on X

Now, many variables that led me to this conclusion (which I will discuss), but in the most simplistic terms possible: my coach’s eye told me we had done the right thing that day. It won’t be a research article or an opinion of a person with more letters behind their name than mine that will induce most changes to our program. It will be the data I collect from our athletes and what my coach’s eye tells me is effective. The minute I see that our athletes are sluggish or sore and it causes a drop in their ability to perform, we’ll adjust to make it the best it can be.

Variable One: Program Needs vs. Brain Candy

Two of the very first—and most macro—variables that go into our decisions about game-day programming are: What are the needs of the program and the wants of the head coach? Our job as high school strength coaches is not to set the culture for each sport. Our job is to support the culture of the overall athletic program and the individual teams within it. Clearly we must own our universe inside our facility, but ultimately the sport coach sets the tone for program culture.

I’m now in my second football season at YCHS (although I’ve had three off-seasons here), and the two years have been vastly different from the standpoints of culture, wants, and needs. In 2018, our head coach did not emphasize game-day lifts. Our football class was during the last block of the day, primarily so film and practice time could be earlier in the day. I was given Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday for 30-35 minutes with our players. Friday, I had basically zero contact until our pre-game activation stretch and movement period following the pre-game meal.

This season we have a new head coach. One of his only requests for me was that we lift hard on Friday. He has an amazing win-loss record with multiple state championship game appearances with this philosophy. His goal was to establish a culture of no excuses for not working hard. He also had our class moved to the start of the day. I was given 45-50 minutes (if needed) 3-4 days a week with Thursday being the only day I’m not with the players. Our culture changed, and it is now my job to support that change. Coach wants us working hard on game day? It’s time to make the plan.

Coach wants us working hard on game day? It's my job to support the culture change and make the plan, says @YorkStrength17. #GameDayLifting Share on X

A second major difference from a program-needs perspective is the training age of our athletes. In 2018, the vast majority of our varsity contributors were juniors and seniors who had reached at least Block 3 in our layering program. By the time an athlete graduates to Block 3, their strength levels are approaching levels that we’re comfortable with. They’ve also become very proficient in technique and bar speed. By the time they graduate to Block 4, most of our athletes are no longer working off a 1RM but instead are using lower intensities with velocity based training.

Most of our guys were strong enough. This allowed me to get what we needed to be done in the weight room by training twice a week and using the third day as our mobility and recovery day. From a programming standpoint, our volume was kept very low, but we pushed intensity in those two days. By the time the bye week before the first round of the playoffs rolled around, we were hitting a couple warm-up sets and then a single at our pre-season 1RM in both trap bar deadlift and flat bench press and 91% on back squats.

Jump ahead to this season. We have a total of nine seniors on our roster. Most of our contributors are underclassmen. Well, once again, there are no absolutes. While most of our juniors last year had graduated to Block 3, this year was different. Our JV players were not in the class last season. They were scheduled to lift after school. The week before Labor Day was the last time they lifted as a team (football decision). I didn’t see them in mass until January when our second semester began!

So now most of our varsity roster is a full five months behind the previous year. Using the same training methods would not be the best practice for this particular group. Our team is in the development phase. In Coach Alejo’s game day article, he pointed out:

“With younger, typically less experienced lifters, there’s a greater margin for error when attempting this type of training. In other words, less can go wrong; they are more resilient to volume-based error and injury. So much so that you can program the intent of the game-day lift to add to the development. Perhaps, for example, small gains in hypertrophy and, of course, strength and power, which would not be your typical in-season program goal. Fatigue is unlikely given a common sense approach to the training.”

We needed to get three good lifts in with these guys. Friday would be our day. Our program needs analysis told me that our game-day programming needed to reflect this.

Variable Two: Year-Round Programming and Development

One huge advantage we have at YCHS is that we have a football class for our players both semesters. Essentially, I can be with them 180 times during the school year for 90 minutes per day. We also train six and a half of the eight weeks during the summer before the first official day of practice (three more days a week of lifting plus a fourth dedicated to speed and quickness), which brings me up to 206 days with them. Add in the three weeks between the start of camp and the first day of school, and I have access to our football athletes 224 days a year.

This allows me to program a true year-round calendar not just for lifting volume and intensity but also periodization of our conditioning, speed, quickness, and jumping. We wave our volume and use a monthly count of reps for our six major movements to increase volume by no more than 10% per four-week cycle.

As we get into spring, practice volume drops and then picks back up until we begin a decline at the end of July, which continues through the end of the season. Then after a 3-4 week work capacity cycle that runs us through the holidays, our athletes graduate a level (most of the time) and begin the process over with a little bit higher volume total goal as they age. This continues until they graduate.

By the time our athletes are lifting on game day, they've moved well past the point of anatomical adaptation, says @YorkStrength17. #GameDayLifting Share on X

By the time we’re asking our athletes to lift on game day (when they reach the varsity level in football; we do things slightly different with other sports), they’ve moved well past the point of anatomical adaptation. They’re used to a higher level of volume and working hard and fast-paced. This is imperative in this process; our whole goal is to improve long-term performance.

However, we don’t want to put a younger athlete in a situation where they may get sore or stiff from a lift. Once again, this is where experience and the coach’s eye come in. If I’ve not seen our volleyball players for two weeks and we have a game, we adjust our programming to compensate. Once they are in the flow, we begin to adjust again. When programming for multiple sports as we do, we need to be very flexible and understand the culture and fluidity of every individual situation.

Variable Three: Timing Nutrition and Reality

Another advantage was our switch from classes at the end of the day to the start of the day. I have our football guys from about 8:50 am to 10 am on game day. That’s almost 10 hours before game time. This gives me lots of time to not only lift but also get our mobility and recovery work done.

On Friday, our football players warm up and then get a 25- to 30-minute lift in. We spend the last 15 minutes of class doing meditation and recovery breathing. For many, this turns into a nice catnap. Following this, our players receive a bagged lunch and milk to eat before they change and go off to class. This is an enormous positive variable and one big reason we feel comfortable doing what we do with them in the weight room. Counting lunch and the pre-game meal, our kids have three full meals between lifting and competition. We also give them a second meditation and recovery breathing session for 30-35 minutes after the pre-game meal and before we do any warm-up or activations pre-game.

Our players are fully recovered and not fatigued when we step on the field at 7:30 pm, says @YorkStrength17. #GameDayLifting Share on X

Although I started this post preaching no absolutes, I can say with certainty that our players are fully recovered and not fatigued when we step on the field at 7:30 pm (despite the claims of my Twitter adversary and his absolute doctrines). Our non-football athletes don’t have the same timing and often don’t have the same nutritional advantages. They also don’t have as much time for recovery protocols on game days. That’s the variable for them that causes a variation in programming for me as the strength coach. Each team is programmed differently based on these variables. Once again, no absolutes.

Variable Four: Coach’s Eye and Athlete Feedback

This is possibly the most vital and also the most difficult. Not only do I watch how our athletes move, but I also talk to them. My athletes have no problem letting me know how they feel. We’ve built trust, and they know I will adjust for them individually as needed. There are no absolutes while lifting on game day. I may have 90% of the team lifting while the other 10% do a modified program or even recovery and mobility, depending on the needs of each player.

#GameDayLifting has no absolutes. 90% of the team may lift while the other 10% do a modified program or recovery & mobility, says @YorkStrength17. Share on X

I also have them fill out monitoring forms where they color in the areas of the body that are sore or fatigued. They can write any issue on the sheet, and we also use it to monitor sleep. When we tumble and warm up, I watch bar speed and how they move. If they seem fatigued, we have a conversation.

On Friday nights, I’m with them from 6:40 pm to the end of the game. During the game, I don’t have any real duties, so I’m able to watch our guys play. It’s my time to view them as a team and informally assess how they look. I’ve not seen anything yet that indicates we need to make any adjustments. The second I do, we’ll figure out what tweaks we need and will make them.

To go back to my Twitter debate with the other coach, he said his study proved that fatigue was a near-absolute. My study of our team proved there were no absolutes. I watched our players, I stretched our players, and I talked to our players, and they presented no residual fatigue. That’s not to say that another coach may find a different result. I can only speak for my “study,” which is very fluid and adjustable.

Showcasing Programming

I won’t spend much time on this topic. The in-season program we use this year will likely become an article of its own. Our general game-day program, though, looks like this:

8:50-9:00 Mobility and Athletic Development Warm-up

9:00-9:40 Lifting

• 1A Elevated Trap Bar Power Shrugs (timed 1 second per rep)
• 1B Jammers (using gymnastic rings and bars as homemade jammers)
• 2A Bench Press
• 2B Unilateral Bent Over Rows
• 2C Scap Retractions
• 3A Neck
• 3B Band Pull Aparts

9:40-9:55 Recovery Breathing (no lights, laying down, meditation music)

9:55-10:14 Get food, shower, and change

Intensity for Tier 1 is pretty simple. I preload the bars for the team, and we group by trap bar deadlift max: groups with guys over 450 use 140 pounds, 350 use 120 pounds, and under 350 use 100 pounds. We time them with the goal of one second per rep. Every time we drop volume, we add 5 pounds per group.

For the bench press, we work up to 70% for 6 reps, 80% for 5 reps, 85% for 4 reps, 88% for the rest with a bar speed focus. We program our pulls to be +2 above the volume of the bench press for the day. As you can see, the volume starts moderately low and moves to very low by the post-season; it has an inverse relationship with intensity moving through the season.

No Absolutes: Just Play the Cards that Are Dealt

The theme of this article is that there are few absolutes in our profession. There are only variables that need to be adjusted to produce the desired adaptations. Again, I focused on football, but the ideas apply to all our sports at YCHS. I have been and will continue to plug these variables for each program to help keep our athletes strong and healthy.

Game-day lifting could absolutely become detrimental to performance if we do not stay focused. A cookie-cutter program in which one size fits all is just a bad idea. The variables I presented here are not only not the only ones I see (just the ones I had room to write about) but also will not be the same as you may have. Would we do something different if we had them on Saturday? Very likely we would. How about only after school? Yes, there is no way we would do the same if we trained four hours or less before the game. Must you train on game day? Nope, not at all. Why? Because maybe your situation prevents you from doing so.

Bottom line is you do you. Just make sure it’s the most efficient and effective process you can do for your kids. Last but not least, please do not listen or put stock in people preaching that the way they believe is right is the only right. It’s probably pretty absolute that’s not the case. Have a growth mindset. Chase knowledge but always see it through the perspective of the variables of your situation and strive to present your athletes with whatever practices get the closest to meeting them where they are at, not where your opinion says they should be.

Since you’re here…
…we have a small favor to ask. More people are reading SimpliFaster than ever, and each week we bring you compelling content from coaches, sport scientists, and physiotherapists who are devoted to building better athletes. Please take a moment to share the articles on social media, engage the authors with questions and comments below, and link to articles when appropriate if you have a blog or participate on forums of related topics. — SF

Strength and conditioning coaches at every level face challenges. While many of these challenges are similar across the board, from the professional ranks all the way down to high school and middle school, there are also challenges many of us do not share. Collective bargaining agreements in pro sports and strict “hours” rules in the NCAA can limit a strength coach’s contact time with athletes, while a high school strength coach may have 30–40 beginner level athletes training at one time, year-round.

Every strength and conditioning coach has a different reality that shapes their views on training and organization. I believe we can all agree that small group training and working one-on-one with athletes is a different animal than working with 30+ athletes in a strictly limited amount of time and space. The latter requires a strict adherence to basic training exercises and progressions. I get it. Basics can be boring. Repeated efforts at low-level progressions on the basics is boring. But, I ask, what is the goal?

This article will highlight many of the real day-to-day challenges faced in a high school weight room. As previously stated, everyone’s reality is different, and some of these challenges may resonate while others may not.

Are You Not Entertained?

Teenagers need to be engaged. One of the biggest challenges in the high school setting is keeping kids engaged in the training program. Creating “buy-in” takes many shapes. Take the baseball-only kid who has been told by everyone that bench pressing is bad. I could bore him with all my fancy information on how that is misguided and how there is no scientific proof that bench pressing will destroy his shoulder. Or I can create buy-in and let him do push-up variations and dumbbell bench presses. The kid instantly feels comfortable and is more likely to listen going forward.

In many sports where weight training has not been traditionally accepted, you run into kids who are only in the weight room because someone told them to be there. There is no intent on their part to physically improve, and they are merely following the herd. The sports where this is prevalent are also the sports where the head coach is usually out of sight, and where strength training is more of a suggestion than a requirement. These are the teams that cause the most frustration, so they usually get pushed down the scheduling pecking order. Athletes in these sports attend inconsistently at best. Because of that, their training program is very vanilla and has to remain basic.

While carnival tricks and unrealistic exercise variations are becoming popular, strength training should never be about entertainment, says @built_by_craig. Share on X

Carnival tricks and unrealistic exercise variations are becoming popular and seem to draw a lot of attention. I suppose those would easily create more buy-in for me. But strength training should never be about entertainment. Time is limited, and high school athletes don’t train six days per week. If coaches run out of things to do, then it’s necessary for them to reexamine their training process. It is universally accepted that athletes need to sprint, jump, throw, push, pull, squat, and hinge. Basic training options are endless if you focus on those areas.

Exercise Performance Over Sport Performance

You can make an argument that strength training at the high school level is less about performance and transfer to sport and more about doing exercises correctly. Required physical education at the grade school level is dying out. Free play is becoming a thing of the past. Consequently, movement efficiency suffers, postural imbalances manifest, and overall general athleticism diminishes.

It is imperative to have a qualified strength and conditioning coach in the school teaching correct movement. Look at a child’s posture while they sit for 45 minutes at a time in class for 7+ hours per day. It’s a recipe for dysfunction. Add in the proliferation of the year-round club and travel ball scene, and you have little time for organized strength training.

We have many three-sport athletes in our school. Kids are perpetually “in season” year-round. A cross country runner who also plays basketball is at a disadvantage if weight training ceases the last three weeks of the cross country season. Use it or lose it—that athlete falls way down the physical capacity spectrum and actually begins to lose strength. Then they are asked to go from zero to 100 once basketball starts. Is it really a surprise that kids in that scenario pull up lame the first week of practice?

Bouncing from season to season requires a unified strength program across every sport in your school. Our training programs are nearly identical across all sports. This allows a smooth transition from one in-season plan to the next.

Social media is ripe with some neat exercise variations that make for a great selfie opportunity. I always ask, “How did you get to that (progression)?” and “How do you do that with 40 kids (practicality)?” Rarely, if ever, do we see actual athletes performing these variations in training. We talk about low force outputs when training in unstable positions or on unstable surfaces. If you are training to improve stability, then that’s great. But when strength is the goal, I prefer to pick exercises that allow the most weight to be lifted safely.

While variation may be a strategy to keep kids engaged, it can get out of hand. We are not trying to win the exercise variety Olympics. We may never progress past basic exercises like a front squat. If you have an athlete-centered program, then I believe your program allows enough flexibility to accommodate all stages of advancement.

While variation may be a strategy to keep kids engaged, it can get out of hand. We are not trying to win the exercise variety Olympics, says @built_by_craig. Share on X

Some of my kids will train in an eight-week concentrated in-season block and then disappear for the rest of the year. Then—surprise!—they show up again for that eight-week in-season block. Their program remains the most basic of basics. That is a problem that needs to be fixed, but it happens quite often.

Be Like Dave Ramsey

When programming, I prefer to think like Dave Ramsey. His concept of the debt snowball—pouring resources into your smallest debt first—is to me an ideal way to approach training high school kids. After you pay off the smallest debt, you move your resources to the next debt and then the next, until you’re debt-free. This snowball effect allows you to increase variability in your training program because you knocked out your low-level debts first.

Pick your most basic debts (exercises) first, pour your resources (coaching/teaching) into mastering them, and then move your resources (progressions) to the next. Bodyweight Squat–>Goblet Squat–>Front Squat. Seems simple. Mastering an exercise like the bodyweight squat increases momentum into your next progression, and these can begin to stack upon each other.

Every Day Is an Evaluation

Screening every athlete in our program is not feasible. We discover orthopedic issues and real medical conditions through an athlete pre-participation physical. Bona fide movement screens, however, are not currently part of our program. Because of this, we have to make assumptions. These are not “grab-bag” assumptions. They are educated assumptions based on years of working with young athletes.

Need a quick “movement screen” that you can do in 20 seconds? Have your kids jog to one end of the gym and back. Be observant. What is the worst thing that can happen if you wrongly assume a kid should goblet squat instead of back squat first? This is a serious question.

Most, if not all, of the following should come as no surprise to most practitioners in the field. In general terms, most of the athletes I encounter possess the following:

• Low relative strength.
• Low work capacity.
• Pronounced knee valgus.
• Limited thoracic spine mobility.
• Limited low back/hamstring flexibility.
• Increased ankle eversion.
• Overloaded sport-specific skills.
• Anxiety about training.
• Poor communication skills.
• Poor nutrition and sleep habits.

Recognizing that these are common issues regardless of sport helps lay the foundation for all of our training programs. It is critical with the high school-age demographic that you place emphasis on improving exercise form. What is more important for a 14-year-old female soccer player who falls into all or most of the above? If athletes can improve in all of these areas, there is a good probability that sporting performance will improve as well.

A quick word on testing. Strength exercises are the easiest and most feasible testing means for me to employ. I can have coaches in the room to help. It’s simple. You either pressed the weight or you did not. I do not have a laser timing system and I have ONE Vertec. Accuracy with hand-timed sprints varies wildly when you have a number of coaches trying to help, so currently I do not test speed and agility. I would like to, but validity and reliability would come into question.

Our strength testing battery varies from sport to sport. Our teams and athletes who train the most consistently are able to have more testing opportunities versus teams that only train in small concentrated blocks throughout the school year. Kids struggling with push-ups and chin-ups are not a high strength testing priority.

Linear Periodization Is Not Dead

Progressive overload works. Athletes need hundreds of repetitions, quite possibly more, to become competent enough to be trusted. For many, attendance is intermittent, which requires a very vanilla loading approach. The truth of the matter is that most high school athletes will not reach elite status in the weight room or in their chosen sport.

Of course, there are a handful every year across all of our sports who move on and play at a higher level. It just so happens that those are also the kids who have devoted ample time to physical improvement, in conjunction with their technical and tactical training, through organized weight training and conditioning. Consistently increasing (and decreasing) training load week to week, month to month, and year to year will yield the highest results. Think of it as a slow cook.

Too many people think we have to fit four years of training into the first six weeks of freshman year, says @built_by_craig. Share on X

I like to use percentages as a guide for our older kids who actually have established a 1RM. All first-year athletes are in our development program for months before we approach an appreciable load on our main movements. It’s a guessing game initially with those kids, but who cares? Show me proficiency with a 15-pound training bar. Then 20 pounds. Then 25 pounds, and so on. Too many people think we have to fit four years of training into the first six weeks of freshman year because “I play baseball” or “my club coach needs me ready for spring.” No offense, but I do not work for your club team.

Logistics Can Hurt

Facility limitations are a factor when designing programs and selecting exercise progressions. We are the only Catholic high school in our county. Our school day is 7:30 a.m.–2:30 p.m. We have kids who commute 30–40 minutes one way to get to our building every day. We currently do not offer a weight training or strength and conditioning class as part of our curriculum. That leaves for a tight window after school to get all of our first-year developmental kids, in-season sports, and off-season sports through their training programs.

After-school training sessions can be quite crowded because, if we ask a kid to wait two hours before they start training, there is a good chance that kid will just leave and go home. As a consequence, I have to try and get as many kids in at one time or risk losing them to go off and train elsewhere, usually unsupervised. Mom’s Orange Theory class does not count as training.

Safe and effective programming is critical, and it trumps anything that may be intrinsically rewarding to an athlete, says @built_by_craig. Share on X

Safe and effective programming is critical and trumps anything that may be intrinsically rewarding to an athlete. Before school is an option, but it is usually only reserved for teams with a strong attendance record and, quite frankly, a strong culture and commitment to the weight room. I am an advocate for sleep and recovery, but the reality of our situation requires some teams to have early morning training sessions. I have nothing but anecdotal evidence to support this, but thus far we have not created any Walking Dead zombies or witnessed a decrease in academic performance because of once-a-week early morning lifts.

We offer 16 sports and within many of those sports are separate freshman, junior varsity (JV), and varsity rosters. Of those 16, only five practice on our campus, so getting kids back and forth from practices to the building for training becomes a challenge. Some practices are a 20- to 30-minute drive from the main building. Asking parents to get their kid back to lifting at 6:30 p.m. for 30–45 minutes and then to commute 40 minutes home is a tough order.

I have had parents tell me point-blank that if their kid does not train right after school, then they won’t bring them back later. It’s a difficult situation with not many realistic solutions. Some coaches make it optional for the kid to return and lift after practice. Some kids do and some do not. Each sport is different. It’s not ideal, but it’s real.

We are fortunate to have two full-sized practice basketball/volleyball courts in addition to our main competition floor. This facility is great for large group warm-ups and speed and agility sessions. We can transition easily into the weight room from there. However, when lightning strikes, literally, the football team is moved inside to the practice gym and our warm-up and speed space is gone. The speed program takes a hit that day because of space.

On a one-off basis, you can live with it. You adapt. But there are too many reasons to list in this article why, on short notice, the training space can be eliminated, and we’re left with figuring out how to get 30 kids in and out before the next group. At times, the program becomes disjointed.

Compressed game schedules make in-season training very difficult. Our volleyball programs play 16 regular season games over the course of five weeks. Training time is reduced to once a week. The decision then has to be made to continue progressive weight training or focus on recovery.

Combine poor sleep and nutrition habits, and I am not sure that “recovery” sessions implemented by the strength coach are all that effective, especially when there is a practice immediately afterward. The argument can be made that the strength training will not be all that effective either. At least with the strength training, there is a stimulus present that can help drive some form of adaptation, even if it is not the most optimal.

Working with Coaches and Parents

While working at the college level, my interaction with parents was usually limited to recruiting visits, an occasional home game, and prolonged road trips when we were in the same place for a number of days for a game or tournament. We were dealing with young adults and, for the most part, parents did not try to speak and/or answer for their kids.

High school is different. At every school function there is interaction with parents. Our school hosts many fundraisers and social gatherings throughout the school year, and parents cannot wait to speak to me about their child, both good and bad. It is a delicate balancing act of being honest about kids with their parents without being disrespectful. I try to avoid most conversations about kids at these types of events to save myself the trouble of upsetting someone.

At this age, kids barely learn how to effectively communicate on their own behalf. Seriously, you just found out today that you are leaving after school for a 10-day family vacation? Some parents are great about advocating for their child to open the lines of communication, while other parents would rather handle it all themselves. As coaches, we also have to work with kids to develop their verbal communication skills. It goes beyond asking “how do you feel today?” I often tactfully answer parents’ emails and explain to them that their child needs to communicate directly with me.

The real challenge is helping parents to understand where their child is “right now” on the physical capacity spectrum. Unfortunately, that is a reality that is difficult for parents to grasp. If they have their minds already made up, no amount of information or advice you give them will sway their opinion. Tell a parent why their kid should take the club season off. The reaction will probably not be a positive one.

The “more is better” mindset is prevalent, and you end up with kids who show little to no improvement. The truth of the matter is that kids and parents will choose a club/travel team over a high school team nearly 100% of the time. We have kids miss varsity games to attend club team games, tournaments, and practices. It’s delicate, and since these are teenagers, their parents, rightfully, have the final say.

The truth of the matter is that kids and parents will choose a club/travel team over a high school team nearly 100% of the time, says @built_by_craig. Share on X

My experience working with high school sport coaches has been tremendous. They are glad to not have to worry about designing their own lifting and conditioning programs. A full-time strength coach is a luxury for any coach, as it takes an item off their plate that, truthfully, many of them are not comfortable with to start.

Education is a big piece of this, and it is definitely a challenge. In terms of training, coaches are like many consumers who read the latest fitness trends and equate that as being the same as an organized strength program. Old dogmas are prevalent and the “we did this when I played” mantra is alive and well. Apparently, all of our 500-pound squatters graduated before I got here.

Increased 1RMs are the easiest way for coaches to see improvement, so the difficulty is in showing how chasing numbers in the weight room does not necessarily transfer to sporting performance on the field. Sure, strength matters and we always want to improve it. It looks great during the lift-a-thon at the end of the summer. But improvements in range of motion and sprint ability are not sexy.

At the college level, it was pretty much “keep your coaches happy” or you’d either be reassigned or lose your job. It is not like that here. Our coaches are not coaching as their primary source of income, and there is definitely an increased level of respect for what I do from the coaches I work with. I work hard to keep them happy, and they are respectful of the job I do. I consider myself a resource for them and dialogue is easy.

A big difference is that, as the strength coach, I have to work with the good and the bad. A sport coach can take a bad player and set them on the bench or put them at the back of a drill and forget about them. In the weight room, I cannot hide players like that, and they deserve the same level of coaching I would give to an all-star.

Having administrative support is also critical to the success of the strength and conditioning program. Being a full-time strength coach at a school our size shows that our school administration and coaches are committed to kids first. My vision for the strength program aligns with our school mission. When in doubt, I can always go back to what our mission is as a school to re-center myself.

Don’t Worry – The Kids Are Alright

Working with teens is rewarding, fulfilling, and downright fun. It is also frustrating. All at the same time. Kids will skip. Kids will make poor decisions. Kids will lie. They will miss lifting for the most mundane of reasons. It has taken me a while to realize that doctor’s appointments, apparently, can only be made during one of the two scheduled training times kids have for the week. Oh, and that it is impossible to change the appointment time.

The reality of a quick four years of high school means that they do need some constants. Strength coaches can be a steady, constant presence in an otherwise chaotic and socially distorted world for teenagers. They need structure. They need steady. Kids need mentors. Kids are very malleable at this age, and we have to nurture the good and the bad. We all want to win. But what is winning if your kids have no respect for themselves or for others?

High school strength coaches can be a steady, constant presence in an otherwise chaotic and socially distorted world for teenagers, says @built_by_craig. Share on X

I believe our job is to provide an environment where they are set up to succeed and fail. A place for leadership development. A place for accountability. Without failure there is no growth.

The strength program should be no different than any other learning environment. We cannot complain about lack of leadership if we don’t do anything to teach kids how to lead. You would have to look far and wide to find a high school freshman who naturally displays what you want in leadership. We cannot complain about the lack of accountability if we don’t teach kids what that actually looks like. Working with young people is a huge responsibility, and it is on us to provide the tools and structure to help them succeed and surpass anything we could have imagined.

Since you’re here…
…we have a small favor to ask. More people are reading SimpliFaster than ever, and each week we bring you compelling content from coaches, sport scientists, and physiotherapists who are devoted to building better athletes. Please take a moment to share the articles on social media, engage the authors with questions and comments below, and link to articles when appropriate if you have a blog or participate on forums of related topics. — SF