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An All-Star takes a step—SNAP! An equally valued teammate comes down from a dunk attempt—KaPOW! No, we were not watching an episode of the 1960’s Batman featuring Adam West; we were watching the NBA finals. The backlash from both of these catastrophic injuries has been “Who do we blame?” and “Where should we point the finger?” Accordingly, some of the first “suspects” identified by the traditional media and the social media “experts” were team medical staff. The Twitter Mob was out for blood and desperately looking for scapegoats. “Who authorized this? How could they do this to him? When are they going to fire these guys?”

However, if you followed the news article trail, just the month before, the members of the team performance and medical staff were lauded for a new “flavor-of-the-month” sport science term known as “load management.” So, which is it? Are they heroes or goats? People need to make a choice and move on. In the immortal words of Jeff Spicoli, Sean Penn’s character in Fast Times at Ridgemont High, “Make up your mind dude. Is he gonna shit or is he gonna kill us?”

The one thing that is certain is that we may never know who, if anyone, was at fault for what transpired in the 2019 Finals. What we do know is there may be long-term repercussions for how professional athletes—particularly the highest earners—proceed with their overall health and preparation moving forward. Accidents do happen and team staff may have less control over decision-making than we might ever know.

There may be long-term repercussions for how professional athletes—particularly the highest earners—proceed with their overall health and preparation moving forward, says @DerekMHansen. Share on X

However, the growing perception, whether true or not, is that professional athletes need to advocate for themselves and take matters into their own hands. We must also acknowledge the fact that the player agents are even more motivated to maximize the longevity of their star players, as it has implications for not only their bank accounts, but also their reputation as the caring “Jerry McGuire”-like patriarch/mentor for their clients. So, what does that mean for the “management” of athletes moving forward?

Historically, there has been growth in the use of personal trainers by athletes ever since Michael Jordan revealed that he used a private trainer for off-season workouts. Heck, I could even go back to the days of Lew Alcindor working with Bruce Lee on martial arts during his off-season period, although nobody would argue that they were doing functional or sport-specific training in Bruce’s backyard. But since then, other superstars have followed suit and have credited “my guy” with much of their success and longevity in the sports world.

In some cases, the year-round use of private trainers has created significant friction within organizations, as we have seen with Tom Brady and the New England Patriots. Regardless, the perception that “my guy” has a significantly greater interest in the welfare of the player than the team’s staff may be growing. And let me be perfectly clear—even though I use the term “guy” throughout this article, it could apply to female specialists (surgeons, physical therapists, strength coaches, and nutritionists) as well, in both the private sector and within a performance team’s staff. This is not a gender-specific issue.

I do think it is important to look at the pros and cons of both situations: private sector care versus team-based care. There is no single right answer for everybody, and we would need to conduct a case-by-case evaluation to truly do this topic justice. Since I’m not being paid for such an intensive exercise, we will at least identify the key issues around external versus internal interventions that others can rant about on their own social media accounts.

It’s Not Just About Rogue Personal Trainers Anymore

A private personal trainer doing exotic workouts in scenic settings is no longer enough for the modern pro superstar. While this is still a big deal for the uninformed Instagram audience (insert sand-based speed ladder drills with 60-pound weight vest here), the uber-serious professional athletes will have a team of experts supporting their careers. This can include, but not be limited to, at least a number of the following:

• Orthopedic surgeon
• Sports medicine physician
• Physiotherapist
• Chiropractor
• Massage therapist
• Strength and conditioning coach
• Personal fitness trainer
• Speed and agility coach
• Recovery/load management coordinator
• Yoga instructor or stretching specialist
• Sports nutrition professional
• Personal chef/cook
• Sport psychologist and/or motivational coach
• Spiritual advisor
• Social media manager (to show everyone you have your own team behind you)

I’m certain that this list is incomplete, although I don’t know who else could add value. Of course, we can add in ultimate fighting coach, Pilates instructor, smoothie maker, and a whole lot of other specific “professionals” who think they are the key to the success of the athlete—natural selection aside—but you get the idea. This is not to say that professional sport teams do not employ some of these positions, at least on a contract basis, to give the impression that they are meeting the needs of their athletes.

However, sharing one Pilates guru with the entire team just isn’t going to cut it in today’s toxic environment of egocentricity, narcissism, insecurity, and anxiousness. And let’s be honest, a number of professional teams sometimes bring in these “specialists” to simply comply with the desires, fetishes, and personal requests made by the higher-paid athletes on the team. Keeping the “talent” happy may be the most important “performance” intervention team staff could provide in this day and age of thin-skinned superstars with a “what have you done for me lately” attitude.

The Influence of Social Media

I often ask close friends in the “business” if they think there are more catastrophic, season-ending injuries than there were in the past. Accurate injury statistics are not so easy to come by these days, with “fantasy” websites often providing better information than any official league resource. Thus, it is very hard to compare injury stats with those documented 30 years ago.

I don’t recall ever seeing two major stars from the same team go down with season-ending injuries in the NBA Finals, significantly influencing the outcome. One friend claimed that social media puts everything front and center in our attention these days, so you never miss a highlight or spectacular injury. Thus, perhaps it only appears that there are a larger number of catastrophic injuries today simply because we get to see them replayed over and over again as animated GIFs on our personal devices.

Perhaps it only appears that there are a larger number of catastrophic injuries today simply because we see them replayed over and over as animated GIFs on our personal devices, says @DerekMHansen. Share on X

The other side of social media is that private sector professionals used by many athletes often have a significant social media presence, showcasing their facilities and their sensational exercises every chance they get. Use of the hashtags #NFL, #NBA, #NHL, #MLB, and #MVP is imperative on the part of private sector operators to give the impression of expertise, efficacy, and credibility. Professional team staff do not have this same luxury of public self-promotion as pro sport organizations often restrict or prohibit content from being shared regarding work with players, for obvious reasons. However, this keeps team staff in the social media “shadows” and may even work against their perceived credibility by their very own players.

When private sector trainers post dozens of videos and images on a daily basis on their virtual resume, this is most often the information upon which professional athletes base their training and rehabilitation decisions. And this type of social media marketing is not limited to personal trainers. Medical professionals are jumping into the fray and providing their thoughts on injuries, surgical procedures, and rehabilitation approaches. As such, it may be prudent for pro team staff to have their own “side” business where they can promote their expertise on social media outside of the shadow of their employer. However, this would have to be negotiated with and approved by their employers, with no guarantees the teams would allow this to happen, seeing that they have already lost their grip on players’ extracurricular activities.

The impact of social media will not go away any time soon and will likely be even more influential moving forward. Players are attached to their phones and it is their “window” to the world outside of their team activities. If they have a negative experience or interaction with staff on their team and they then see an Instagram influencer giving out advice on training and rehabilitation in a sensational manner, you can bet the combination of those two experiences will make an impression. If you couple that with a teammate or friend from another team singing the praises of their private sector guru, now you have a recipe for mistrust and possible dissent.

Although social media and the internet itself provide greater access to a larger amount of information and opinions, the window-shopping effect takes hold and the next guru is always better than the previous one, with no consistency or commitment ever achieved. It reminds me of a middle-aged buddy of mine who says that internet dating is great, but never seems to be in a relationship longer than six weeks because the perception is, “I can always do better!”

The True Responsibilities of Team Employees and ‘Fake News’

While it is often easy to blame team staff for problems accumulated by the players, things are not always as they seem. It is often said that medical professionals are in a “conflict of interest” in the case of clearing an athlete to play, as the team pays for a doctor’s livelihood and players need to do what they are paid to do. Common sense would tell us that anything that preserves the health of the player would be in the best interests of both the player and the team. Injured players do not contribute to winning records in either the short-term or long-term. So, what is the problem?

There is a significant amount of secrecy and, to some degree, deceit that goes into managing and reporting injuries in professional sports. On the one hand, teams like to collect information on every comment and request made by players relating to health and potential injury.

There is a significant amount of secrecy and, to some degree, deceit that goes into managing and reporting injuries in professional sports, says @DerekMHansen. Share on X

I had one player I had trained in the past who attended a training camp with an NFL team. After each practice session, he would ice down his knee, as he had a previous ACL reconstruction and simply wanted to manage any inflammation that may have accumulated from the reps in practice. One of his teammates commented, “Hey, I wouldn’t do that if you don’t really need to. They keep track of everything. If you are asking for ice all the time after practice, they can use that against you!” It was a rude awakening to the perception among players, whether valid or not, that team staff aren’t always on their side. The players may have misinterpreted this attention to detail and due diligence exercised by team staff as a way to weed out the weak.

On the other hand, some teams do not want significant information on injuries reaching the public domain, to avoid having that information used against them. You will see some injuries in professional ice hockey listed as “upper body” or “lower body” injuries with no specifics whatsoever provided. In addition, a very informative website documenting NHL injuries called “NHL Injury Viz” clearly states that:

“There will be inconsistency between my numbers and ‘official’ team man-games lost (MGL) figures due to teams’ different reporting standards.”

In the NFL, many players are now listed as “questionable” or “doubtful” after the NFL eliminated the “probable” designation in 2016 heading into games. But the number of players listed as “questionable” who end up playing can vary significantly between teams, with one team having as many as 90% of “questionables” ending up active, while another team may have only 25% actually playing in the upcoming game. As a 2018 San Diego Tribune article by Dr. David Chao on the subject noted:

“The system inherently allows for vagueness. Besides the body part, the injury designation is all the team needs to say. A team does not need to say right or left knee, nor identify the exact structure (i.e., MCL), just generically say ‘knee.’ Add to this nebulous injury report how teams differ in their listings and you have what can be a confusing picture.”

These disparities can be seen in a table published in Dr. Chao’s article showing the percentage of “questionable” and “doubtful” players who actually were designated as “active” for game day.

 

While this vagueness probably creates more stress and anxiety for Fantasy Football participants, it does make you wonder how teams manage injuries and classify athlete readiness leading into game day. It could also create a degree of mistrust on the part of the players, particularly when they move from one team to another and experience a completely different approach to injury classification and management. These issues and statistics may also come up when an athlete and their agent are trying to find a new home and negotiate a fair contract.

It is clear that some teams use the grey area to keep their opponents in the dark, as could be said of Tom Brady’s injury history statistics. While Tom Brady has been identified as “probable” (prior to 2016) or “questionable” with almost 200 ailments listed on the injury report throughout his career, he has only missed a handful of games due to his torn ACL in 2008 (entire season following season opener) and his Deflate-Gate suspension back in 2016 (four games in total). Otherwise, you can bet that he’ll be on the field for kick-off regardless of what the injury report has indicated.

It is important to note that the lack of transparency in professional sports injury reporting may also be perceived by players, and the players’ union, as a loophole for forcing players back onto the field when there may be some question as to their actual readiness following an injury. As we know, most players want to get back onto the field or court as soon as possible to support their teammates and contribute to a win, despite their condition and the possibility of reinjury. However, it is extremely unethical for teams to use this rationale for approval of an early return-to-play decision. Such an approach makes about as much sense as giving in to a 10-year-old’s request for a cellphone with unlimited data and text messaging and full access to social media, from a mental health point of view.

If there are no clear standards of reporting for all teams and we continue down the road of teams making their own rules around documentation and classification of injuries in what is deemed in the “best interest” of their organization, there will continue to be an air of mistrust around the entire process, whether you are a player or a Las Vegas bookie. In an environment where many decisions are based on fear of loss, paranoia and irrational behavior cannot be far behind.

How Do We Improve the Situation?

“The road to hell is paved with good intentions,” so let’s be careful with what we propose moving forward. It is clear to me that communication, both internal and external, must improve and become more transparent as part of any professional team’s strategy in dealing with injuries and return-to-play decisions. Watching some teams handle an injury prognosis or debrief is like watching a politician explain his motives in a press conference after selfies of his groin have been circulated all over the internet. It is very hard to fool the public these days, when it is clear that everyone is trying to minimize liability, deflect blame, and further their interests wherever possible. And having your general manager sobbing during a press conference, saying there is nobody to blame, and then taking the blame is probably not the best way to convey to the general public that you had everything under control.

Communication, both internal and external, must improve and become more transparent as part of any professional team’s strategy in dealing with injuries and return-to-play decisions. Share on X

We want to hear the presentation of facts and a clear process around those facts in a professional manner. Emotion need not be part of this process. If this type of information is not presented to the media and the public, speculation will follow, and most of that speculation will not be positive.

Creating a Forum for Discussion

If there are issues with trust around the internal workings and decision-making by professional team staff, the best way to address these issues is with a direct approach. If a team’s top player is not happy with the way things are going with team staff, burying your head in the sand and hoping the problem disappears is not a wise course of action. Opening up discussions around any identified issues will at least initiate a process whereby the team can determine if a player’s concerns are reasonable and may warrant some discretionary measures. As mentioned previously, keeping the top players happy will go a long way toward minimizing distractions and encouraging team harmony.

However, the process may also determine that a player is being unreasonable and making egregious demands that would be detrimental to the player’s performance and health, and may also damage team cohesiveness. The team can then make a decision when it comes to future contract negotiations, trade options, and the overall strength of the relationship moving forward. But at least the process can be documented, and the team can be viewed as having acted in good faith. In many ways, the team can develop a reputation for providing a fair and objective process for managing decision-making around personnel, as well as disarming conflicts in an organized and rational fashion.

Egos are often a problem in every professional sports realm. Show me a top professional sports athlete, head coach, performance director, head athletic trainer, or head strength coach who doesn’t exhibit a higher level of narcissism than the average person, and I’ll show you some wonderful vacation spots in Chernobyl. This is not to say that there are not good people in these positions, but it does highlight the prevalence of stronger personalities in high positions in pro sports. Couple this with the egos of the top professional athletes who, for the most part, have had their way through most of the youth and adult sporting careers, and you have a recipe for dysfunctional relationships.

When people don’t talk, the silence can be deadly, and paranoia can take hold very quickly. Couple this with access to Twitter and Instagram, and the wrong message could be conveyed almost instantaneously. Thus, letting down your guard once in a while and having a calm, face-to-face talk can go a long way toward dispelling rumors and rebuilding relationships.

Identifying Consistent and Proper Training as a Solution

Honestly, if everyone was doing what they needed to do in the off-season—ensuring that the correct volume and sequence of training was done when no other practice requirements were interfering with building, healing, and recovering—we wouldn’t be in as many of these injury conundrums as we now see on a regular basis. I know, it’s easier said than done. You can blame team staff all you want, but if the athletes are not taking care of business in the off-season and accumulating a reserve of strength, speed, and general fitness, they will start in a hole every pre-season and never be able to climb out of it.

Many players’ approach to off-season training and pre-season physical preparation is akin to the Payday Loan business model, where financially illiterate individuals spend their paychecks well before the money has been earned, and then find themselves in significant debt, paying exorbitant interest rates with little chance of ever finding themselves ahead of the game. Every year, if players do not accumulate a broad enough training foundation in the off-season (i.e., they incur an annual training deficit), they will gradually find themselves in more and more training debt over their careers. Declaring pro sport career bankruptcy may take the form of not being re-signed and being forced into retirement, or it could take the form of catastrophic injury that all but retires the athlete prematurely. Either way, your account is closed for good.

If players don’t accumulate a broad enough training foundation in the off-season, they will gradually find themselves in more and more training “debt” over their careers, says @DerekMHansen. Share on X

Because current collective bargaining agreements (CBAs) in North American pro sports limit team involvement in the off-season, addressing this issue from the team side can be very difficult. Training programs are sent out to players every off-season, but compliance is difficult to monitor and impossible to enforce. Attempting to “persuade” or “coerce” athletes to stay in shape with pre-season testing protocols and fitness evaluations is not an intelligent way to gain compliance, and can create animosity and, even worse, result in injuries at the worst possible time. It is also a great way to pre-exhaust athletes before the ramped-up insanity of training camp. Physical training must be attained through a collective and innovative approach that brings all of the critical stakeholders to the table.

Extending the Olive Branch in Both Directions

Given that there are many actors in the mix for this production, cooler heads must prevail. The recognition that common goals can be achieved through a unified approach must be made sooner than later. In the near future, I cannot envision a scenario where the various leagues and respective owners claw back control of off-season activities from the players’ unions. When ownership is trying get more money from extra games, expanded markets overseas, and the proliferation of live streaming games and other events online, the unions will only look to limit the time, energy, and perceived “risk” contributed by their membership moving forward. Thus, if team staff will not be given the time and control for physical preparation and evaluation in the off-season, the onus will ultimately fall on the private sector.

While we know that there are egregious and ineffective private sector “professionals” in the mix with many well-paid athletes, we have to acknowledge that there are many good people doing more than adequate work in the private realm. As such, teams must work harder to identify these individuals—whether they are doctors, physical therapists, strength coaches, nutritionists, or mental trainers—and build relationships. Likewise, if these private specialists have the attention and trust of the professional athlete, it is their responsibility to connect with team staff and provide updates, programming information, performance data, and any other information that will make the team’s job easier and more seamless from off-season to pre-season to in-season periods. When an athlete sees that both sides are communicating for the betterment of their health and performance throughout the year, trust will be strengthened and paranoia will hopefully be minimized. 

Working Together

As with any issues relating to health and human performance, there is no one satisfying answer to the problem of getting all of the necessary tasks completed internally and externally where professional athletes are concerned. In fact, professional team staff must tread as carefully as possible, more so than any time in history. They are under exceptionally more scrutiny than any private sector specialist because the cameras are off—well, mostly off—during the off-season period and statistics are not kept for weightlifting reps and loads, mileage run, and time shrouded in NormaTec sleeves. But injuries—and more importantly, wins and losses—are tracked closely during the season when health and performance are of utmost importance.

The private sector specialists are no longer off the hook, either. As their prominence increases and their profile is raised through both social and conventional media, they will have to answer to many questions from the team, the media, the fans, and, ultimately, the players themselves. As we all know, misery loves company, so all the better that both sides get cozy with each other as soon as possible as we head into a brave new world of elite do-it-yourself (DIY) performance and health.

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Regardless of level, a successful coach must possess the skills and knowledge to build trusting relationships, which in turn feed the powerful beast of motivation and effort in an athlete. This is a foundational step to the process, and the quicker a coach is able to do this, the more impactful they can be. The abilities a coach possesses, just like training programs, must be adaptable to the audience or athlete being worked with. There are surface-level differences—e.g., gender, age, sport, etc.—but even deeper-level diversity exists between attitude, life experience, and personality.

Major advances in technology in the last 30 years have created multigenerational gaps between baby boomers, millennials, and generations X, Y, and Z. Being able to adapt to and impact other generations and age groups that you can or cannot relate to has become an important part of the soft skills and emotional intelligence of being an effective coach. It cannot be ignored, and if you are not thinking like this, you are behind.

As coaches, we need to constantly work to expand our bandwidth of operation in the stressful and demanding environment of athletics. We want athletes we work with to be more physically and emotionally resilient and adaptable and we should work to do the same on our end.

Now more than ever, the ability to reframe our approach and address the psychological state is a vital piece of the process of connection, presence, and building a strong, trusting relationship. Physical outputs are obviously important to performance, but if athlete readiness is a psycho-physiological measure, then we need to respect our ability to impact the psychological state of the athlete on a day-to-day level, especially when we are working with them directly. We want not only the training prescription but also the interaction itself to be productive and impactful.

How the Information Age Forges Better Relationships

Just as our approach and interaction must adapt to the athlete, our implementation and effective use of technology needs to have a specific time and place. Velocity-based training (VBT) can be a very productive and impactful piece of the puzzle, but if used haphazardly, it can backfire and not serve as a potential catalyst to providing valuable feedback for both the athlete and coach.

VBT is a potential avenue for working toward a harmonious and productive relationship with the athlete, especially the younger generations, explains @Cody_Roberts. Share on X

Let this serve as my disclaimer: VBT is not the answer. Rather, it is a potential avenue for working toward a harmonious and productive relationship with athletes, especially the younger generations and their insatiable hunger for immediate information and reward based on their efforts. Remember, we are ultimately looking to strengthen the coach-athlete relationship, and VBT can serve as an appetizer to the meal of motivation and effort needed to boost psychological readiness and breathe life into a stale and mundane training program.

The Building Blocks of Velocity-Based Training

VBT is a hormetic piece to the training process: When dosed appropriately it can be effective, but too much of a good thing definitely becomes a bad thing. VBT in no way serves as a replacement for learning proper technique and exercise execution or for the vital verbal instruction and feedback necessary from a coach. It is important to remember not to get distracted by the technology. As my colleague Ashley Renteria says, “Tech over tech!” Meaning, technique over technology. With the external feedback and focus that VBT allows, it is all too common for the internal focus of the respective movement pattern or exercise to take a back seat.

Video 1. The Push App functions as a way to record velocity and transmit planned workouts to the athlete. Every repetition is recorded, including peak and mean velocity, force, or power.

With that additional disclaimer out of the way, let’s shine a light on the positives and opportunities provided by VBT. The prospect of augmented feedback motivates and gives external feedback and focus that improves performance and provides the opportunity for long-term motor learning. This adds a multidimensional layer to the coach’s verbal feedback, showcasing the internal focus and effort with the external result. This not only increases the intent of a respective action (squat, clean, press), but has been shown to promote greater neuromuscular adaptation as well. Inspect what you expect; therefore, measuring the variable you want to attack allows for improvement of it over time with proper training.

Inspect what you expect—measuring the variable you want to attack allows for improvement of it over time with proper training, says @Cody_Roberts. Share on X

Additionally, this feedback creates a competitive environment, not only within the athlete themselves—rep by rep, set by set, or session to session—but also between athletes. Striving to be the best and move the bar the fastest puts the focus not so much on the weight loaded on the bar, but on the speed at which the bar moves. With most sports thriving in a speed/power realm, the majority of training should reflect that.

Remember, our ultimate goal is training transfer, and we are trying to develop abilities that transfer rather than focusing on loads lifted and 1RMs. We know force is a product of mass and acceleration, so by shifting away from increasing the mass in order to increase force and operating where sport-specific speed and power truly live, we focus on the acceleration of an individual or object. That’s what ultimately influences power development, as we know power = force x velocity.

Motor learning, as it relates to power production, comes from how fast, how hard, and through what range of motion an action occurs. This leads to improved neuromuscular adaptations and supports the concept of Dynamic Correspondence, where transfer occurs when training looks and feels like the desired outcome. This is ultimately specificity, and it supports the SAID principle with Specific Adaptations to Imposed Demands.

If we are truly purposeful in our prescription, we must continue to ask ourselves: What is the training effect we are after? We are always looking to impose a stress or exercise that helps to form a new ability, habit, or output—consistently. From a philosophical standpoint, there should never be a period of time in which we exclude the focus of acceleration in an explosive manner; looking to enhance an athlete’s speed and quickness from a standstill should always be at least a thread in the rope of a training block.

Looking to enhance an athlete’s speed and quickness from a standstill should always be at least a thread in the rope of a training block, says @Cody_Roberts. Share on X

Keep in mind the objective at hand. If an athlete’s success depends on their ability to move their own body weight, that must be trained. Spending too much time with heavy/slow strength training promotes slow acceleration, which is not wrong, but it may not be transferable or as specific. Surf the curve of force outputs, with time spent using heavy loads and accelerating rapidly with low or relative loads. This can lead to increases in velocity and, in turn, power outputs, increasing the ability to produce force in a shorter amount of time.

Velocity for Biofeedback in Training

The feedback from a VBT device is beneficial for the athlete in both the short- and long-term, and equally helpful for the coach in a number of areas. In the short term, it can be a way to manage the load and fatigue of the athlete, assessing readiness and respecting the day-to-day undulation of the athlete’s psycho-physiological state. With a proper gauge of athlete readiness, the coach can properly dose volume and intensity without forcing either loads (weight on the bar) or volume (sets and reps) that an athlete is not prepared for. On the opposite end, they can “optimize” the loads used or volumes performed. When a coach forces training loads that the athlete is not prepared for, the cost of adaptation is high and associated risks of injury or maladaptation follow.

The most reliable information is multifactorial, so when we combine subjective readiness scores with other objective measures such as bar velocity, we can develop a clearer picture than if we just focused attention on one metric. If an athlete provides a perception of recovery and readiness, we pair that with a vertical jump measurement following the warm-up and then look at relative load-velocity relationships that occur in a back squat. This gives us a more reliable picture of the athlete’s psycho-physiological state.

The most reliable information is multifactorial, says @Cody_Roberts. Share on X

If perception of readiness and recovery is down, but physical performance is up, it could simply be psychological strain or a monotonous feeling toward the training process—something that urges the soft skills of encouragement and conversation to occur. But the combination of the layers of information helps coaches draw conclusions that can lead them to adjust or modify the training load to promote positive adaptation. That may mean reducing the number of sets, reps (volume), or weight (intensity) used.

Even more immediate, coaches can use VBT to look at velocity within a set to help manage stress and potentially improve the outcome, regulating training loads. With maximal intent, the initial repetitions of a set will be the fastest, but as fatigue sets in, the velocity will decrease within a set. This lets us be more strategic with how close we work to failure, as we know the minimal velocity thresholds that a specific exercise allows (e.g., a squat is roughly 0.24-0.34 m/s).

Ending a set after a specific percentage of velocity loss has proven to be an effective way to help autoregulate training volume and support the training objective. Depending on the focus of the training session or block (volume or intensity), a greater velocity loss (e.g., 40%) would allow for higher repetitions in a set during a focus on higher volumes. Arguably more impactful, during an intensity-focused session or block, we can support the quality-over-quantity mantra and operate at a smaller velocity loss (e.g., 20%). This will help control the volume, promote faster velocity, and lead to the specific neuromuscular adaptations mentioned earlier, resulting in greater power outputs.

An additional way that a coach can use this velocity loss concept is as an opportunity to teach and define rate of perceived exertion (RPE), so that an athlete understands what a six out 10 looks and feels like, versus an eight or nine out of 10. A technique like this allows us to utilize VBT technology to our advantage and positively influence the relationship, as well as the training process, of the athlete.

We can obtain further performance monitoring through the use of predicting 1RM without having to truly experience a 1RM load. This is a space and process that can be all too taxing or even dangerous, and the ability to work in a relative 50-75% load provides a reliable and usable measure to showcase readiness, progress, and performance. The heavier the load, the more accurate the measure, but it is all relative to the athlete and situation. Providing an objective measure with moderate loads can be a productive activity, helping to check the ego of the weight-chasers who measure their success on the “How much ya bench?” mentality.

The VBT Market – Constantly Evolving

The two VBT technology options I have experienced at this point are linear position transducers (GymAware) and accelerometers (PUSH band). In certain circumstances, each tool provides a valid and reliable measure, based on exercise and setup. Ultimately, the more user-friendly experience has come with the PUSH band, especially with the abilities to attach it to the bar directly, toggle between exercises, and not interfere with loading/unloading the barbell.

GymAware may be the more accurate of the two, as it works directly from the tether that operates within the transformer to detect movement and provide a velocity measure. You’d likely expect this physical connection and action to be the more reliable measure, but I’ve also found that the tether gets in the way, slows the process down, and has a tendency to fray and break. Whether you’re looking to obtain the mean velocity for a static exercise like the squat, bench, deadlift, or prone row, or peak velocity from an Olympic-style lift (e.g., clean, snatch, or jerk), GymAware provides the most accurate metrics.

The PUSH band, however, provides velocity via an accelerometer and operates through algorithms devised for each exercise. Some are more accurate and usable than others—most notably the squat, as the bar does not impact the athlete, floor, or bench, causing disturbance or noise with the feedback. Peak velocity has been an unreliable measure for Olympic or ballistic lifts (e.g., jump squats), so I’ve avoided those altogether for the time being. My hope is that the algorithms will improve, and the reliability of the measurements will match the PUSH band’s ease of use. Time will tell in that regard, but seamless operation for training allows the PUSH band to be assistive to the workout itself, providing some level of feedback, regardless of validity, that aids in the motivation and focus mentioned earlier. It also monitors rest periods, as the athlete digitally records each rep and set.

In a holistic effort to quantify training load, session RPE combined with the actual volume load lifted can be helpful metrics for effective athlete monitoring strategies, says @Cody_Roberts. Share on X

Both systems allow the collection of data to be referenced electronically through an online portal. This is what truly enables things to be productive for coaches and athletes—monitoring and tracking performance over time. The paperless world we live in looks to endanger the pen-and-paper training journal by capturing the daily results rep by rep, as the athletes of today operate with a touchscreen and application, entering weights and interacting with technology.

This is why the disclaimer related to coaching and interaction is so important. The ability to collect load and velocity data helps to further quantify the training in the weight room; an area that is too often arbitrarily quantified or neglected in the appreciation of stressors the athlete is exposed to. In a holistic effort to quantify training load, session RPE combined with the actual volume load lifted can be helpful metrics for effective athlete monitoring strategies.

Closing Thoughts and a Final Note on the Program Builder

The PUSH portal has an additional use as a program or workout builder. This makes it more like the interaction and potential comfort that the athlete experiences with using a smartphone or tablet application. If the world is paperless, are the days of Excel spreadsheet workout cards endangered as well? Is this the generational gap rearing its head again to challenge us to change, evolve, and improve our effectiveness with the new age athlete?

Creating workouts with Excel is all I’ve known. It allows so much freedom and it’s easy to use: A masterpiece of the vision I have for a block of training including sets, reps, exercises, notes, etc., all beautifully arranged on one sheet and mapped out for the next four weeks. This has served as a communication platform between coach and athlete, guiding the athlete in what they should do when they enter the room. It allows for tracking of information, notes, learning, and better understanding of how this week leads into next week, and showcases the progress of the training block.

Needless to say, I’ve been incredibly resistant to the change and transition to an electronic program builder. However, with the adoption of the PUSH band, it seems like an opportunity to continue to improve the effectiveness and operation of the training process.

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 (S&C) coaches are commonly responsible for programming mobility exercises for their athletes, with the goal to either improve movement quality or reduce injury risk. If you ask a room full of coaches to list the mobility exercises they regularly program, you’ll no doubt receive an endless list of movements along with countless variations. Ask the same group of coaches to list tests they employ that accurately and reliably identify deficits or changes in an athlete’s mobility, and the list will generally be significantly shorter. This is likely the reason so many athletes are prescribed countless shoulder, thoracic, hip, and ankle mobility exercises as part of their routines—if you can’t assess something, better do the exercises to develop it, just in case.

S&C coaches should possess a basic skill set that allows them to reliably measure an athlete’s range of motion (ROM), which underpins fundamental movements, says @LouisHowe_SandC. Share on X

This leads to extended warm-ups and “filler” exercises being scattered throughout training programs with little return for improvements in performance. To avoid valuable training time being wasted performing needless mobility exercises, S&C coaches should possess a basic skill set that allows them to reliably measure an athlete’s range of motion (ROM), which underpins fundamental movements.

The goal of this two-part series will be to demonstrate ROM assessments that require no specialized equipment, but produce data that is reliable and valid, in order to direct the training process. Part 1 will focus on lower extremity assessments, while Part 2 will cover tests for the upper extremities.

Why Should Coaches Perform ROM Assessments?

Mobility underpins our ability to perform exercises through a full ROM, allowing us to adhere to our technical model for any given movement. This is an important consideration, as the ability to safely load an exercise through full ROM may support greater development in muscle hypertrophy¹ and maximal strength². However, when an anatomical region lacks ROM, movement quality will be compromised, and the consequence may be compensatory movements that have the potential to increase injury risk.

The squat is an example of this for a lower extremity exercise. During the high bar back squat, up to approximately 40 degrees of ankle dorsiflexion ROM is needed in order to allow an athlete to maintain a relatively upright torso while breaking parallel³(although this value depends on anthropometric dimensions and the strategy the athlete adopts). In instances where an athlete possesses significantly less ankle dorsiflexion ROM, reduced depth⁴, greater knee valgus⁵, increased forward trunk lean⁶, and excessive spinal flexion⁷may occur as a compensation to achieve squat depth.

An example for the upper extremity is an athlete struggling to extend their thoracic spine, where overhead pressing may be compromised. Thoracic spine extension, a capacity that is becoming significantly compromised in today’s technology-driven society⁸, is fundamental to an athlete’s ability to perform the overhead press.

Generally speaking, athletes likely need approximately 15 degrees of thoracic spine extension⁹to facilitate scapulothoracic motion (although this value likely depends on the athlete’s start position). When an athlete demonstrates poor thoracic spine extension, shoulder ROM will be compromised¹⁰, leading to trouble with locking out. A compensation may be to sway the pelvis forward and hyperextend the lower segments of the lumbar spine, to orient the barbell over the shoulder joint and finish the movement. As a consequence, this may negatively alter the load-bearing strategy of the spine.

Performing ROM Assessments

Assessing ROM requires S&C coaches to have a skillset that allows us to collect objective data that can highlight if an athlete lacks mobility in any anatomical region. Traditionally, ROM assessments have required us to have access to, and experience in, using specialized equipment (e.g., inclinometers and goniometers), along with excellent palpatory skills that many S&C coaches do not possess. However, the accessibility of smartphones offers S&C coaches the opportunity to bypass this obstacle.

Smartphones equipped with gyroscopes are able to determine the orientation of the phone in space and allow for the measurement of angles using free applications. As a result, innovative research has shown smartphones can accurately and reliably measure joint angles during various ROM assessments if used in a similar fashion to inclinometers.^11,12,13

Innovative research has shown smartphones can accurately and reliably measure joint angles during various ROM assessments if used in a similar fashion to inclinometers, says @LouisHowe_SandC. Share on X

Within this article, I’ll focus on commonly used ROM assessments, demonstrating how to perform and collect objective data for the following ROM assessments:

• Supine active hip flexion test
• Thomas test
• Modified Thomas test
• Supine active hip abduction test
• Active hip rotation test (internal and external)
• Active knee extension test
• Modified weight-bearing lunge test

Using a Smartphone to Perform ROM Assessments

Before we discuss techniques, it’s important we cover some ground rules for using smartphones to measure ROM in order to standardize our procedures:

1. Prior to testing, remove your phone case, which may potentially alter the contour of the phone.
2. Calibrate the phone against either a vertical (e.g., wall) or horizontal (e.g., table) reference point, depending on the test. It is important that the surface you’re using is, in fact, level (this can be checked with a spirit level). Not all free applications allow you to zero the smartphone, which should be a consideration when selecting an application to perform ROM assessments.
3. There isn’t much evidence for this, but I’d suggest (at least until there is evidence that says otherwise) that coaches be cautious about using different phone models interchangeably. Measuring the inclination of a bony landmark with an iPhone SE may produce different results than using a more recent and larger model.
4. Again, there is little evidence for this, but I would caution against using different applications interchangeably.

Palpating Bony Landmarks

For most S&C coaches, identifying anatomical landmarks can be a difficult skill to master and this may limit their ability to perform ROM assessments. However, it is important to locate some landmarks in order for us to optimize our phone placement and take reliable measures. For all of the assessments shown here, I’ve kept the number of landmarks for coaches to identify at a minimum. Below is an image of all relevant anatomical regions that we need to locate for the lower extremity assessments.

To give coaches a reference for what may be normal, I’ve provided some values for performance variables that can help decision-making. This is always a very superficial process, so please treat any normative values provided in this next section with caution. The importance of the values derived from ROM assessments should be determined on an individual basis.

Supine Active Hip Flexion Test

This test allows us to establish hip flexion ROM. During the squat, the hip may flex anywhere from 110-125 degrees.¹⁴This test will produce a value that is relative to the anterior thigh being vertical—meaning that values will be much lower than those seen during squatting (see video 1). I generally just use this value to identify change, although in my experience, athletes with greater than 20 degrees possess more than enough hip flexion to perform deep squats.

Starting position: Athlete lies in a supine position with the legs extended.

Movement: Athlete maximally flexes at the hip while simultaneously flexing at the knee.

Measurement: Prior to performing the test, locate the base (top) of the patella. Draw a line 5 centimeters above the base of the patella that runs in a transverse direction (see figure 1). At maximum flexion, align the top of the phone with this line (set in portrait and calibrated to a vertical reference).

Video 1 shows how to assess hip flexion ROM.

Video 1. Flexibility of the hip is often seen as only “interesting” in some coaching and therapy circles, but if combined with other data sets, it could be revealing.

Thomas Test

This version of the Thomas test is used to identify restriction of the uniarticular hip flexor muscles (i.e., iliacus, psoas major, and tensor fascia lata) and passive structures of the anterior hip (i.e., joint capsule and extracapsular ligaments). In my experience, restriction in hip extension is actually relatively rare for the athletic population. When most athletes present with restriction in hip extension, it is most commonly due to a lack of extensibility for the biarticular hip flexors. I always cue athletes to “pull” the test leg down so it’s not just passive stiffness against the weight of the leg I’m assessing. For this test, sufficient hip extension is represented as the thigh being parallel to the floor.

When most athletes present with restriction in hip extension, it’s most commonly due to a lack of extensibility for the biarticular hip flexors, says @LouisHowe_SandC. Share on X

Starting position: Athlete lies in a supine position with both hips and knees maximally flexed so that the pelvis is posteriorly rotated and the lumbar spine is flat against the ground.

Movement: Athlete maximally extends the test leg in an attempt to make contact between the back of the thigh and the ground. Importantly, coaches should monitor the position of the non-test leg, making sure the hip remains maximally flexed throughout the test.

Measurement: Prior to performing the test, locate the base (top) of the patella. Draw a line 5 centimeters above the base of the patella that runs in a transverse direction (see figure 1). At maximum hip extension, align the top of the phone with this line (phone set in landscape and calibrated to a horizontal reference).

Video 2 shows how to assess hip extension ROM.

Video 2. When testing the hip, make sure you don’t reduce risk or function to maximal range or strength, but think coordination as well. Table or floor testing has poor correlation with some real movements, but when scores are out of normative range, it could be a clue to an existing problem.

Modified Thomas Test

The modified Thomas test (this variation is sometimes called the Kendall test) allows coaches to identify a lack of extensibility in the rectus femoris muscle—a biarticular muscle that both flexes the hip and extends the knee. When an athlete struggles to maintain an upright trunk or neutral spine alignment during a lunge pattern, the common culprit is the rectus femoris muscle. As this test measures tibia angle relative to vertical, full ROM would be an athlete achieving an angle of 0 degrees.

When an athlete struggles to maintain an upright trunk or neutral spine alignment during a lunge pattern, the common culprit is the rectus femoris muscle, says @LouisHowe_SandC. Share on X

Starting position: Athlete lies in a supine position on a plinth or high bench (important that the foot can clear the floor), so that the knees hang over the table/bench by a few inches. The start position for this test is the finish position for the Thomas test: The knee of the test leg is extended, and the back of the thigh contacts the table/bench, while the non-test leg is maximally flexed at the hip to posteriorly rotate the pelvis.

Movement: Athlete is cued to maximally flex the knee on the test leg. Again, coaches should monitor the non-test leg to make sure the hip remains maximally flexed throughout the test.

Measurement: Prior to performing the test, locate the tibial tuberosity (see figure 1). At maximum knee flexion, align the phone with this anterior border of the tibia just below the tibial tuberosity (phone set in portrait and calibrated to a vertical reference).

Video 3 shows how to assess the biarticular rectus femoris extensibility.

Video 3. Modified Thomas tests are still very useful for coaches and therapists to see changes from a training program, but don’t expect big changes overnight. One variable helps paint a picture, but can never be a magic bullet for analysis purposes.

Active Hip Rotation Test (Internal and External)

To test hip rotation, athletes can be in either a seated or supine position. The decision is yours, and you should base it on the demands imposed on the athlete. For example, if you want to know why an athlete keeps spinning their feet out during the descent phase of the squat, checking while they’re in a seated position with the hip flexed is more relevant.

Normative values for hip internal and external rotation are 35 degrees and 45 degrees, respectively.¹⁵However, these values will be heavily influenced by the bony architecture of the acetabulum and femur¹⁵. Therefore, coaches should show caution when interpreting these results.

Starting position: With the athlete either lying supine or seated on a plinth or high bench, position the knees so they are a few inches over the table/bench and flexed to 90 degrees. The athlete moves the non-test leg off the edge of the table/bench without rotating the pelvis.

Movement: Athlete is cued to maximally internally (foot away from the midline) or externally (foot towards the midline) rotate the hip while maintaining alignment of the pelvis and knee.

Measurement: Prior to performing the test, draw a line 10 centimeters above the tip of the lateral malleolus (the bottom of the ankle bone on the outside of the lower leg). At maximum rotation (either direction), align the bottom of the phone with this line (phone set in portrait and calibrated to a vertical reference).

Video 4 shows how to assess hip rotation ROM.

Video 4. Hip rotation assessments are great when they are active, as there is more to them than isometric strength. Combining strength and mobility is a great way to see how an athlete uses their range of motion in isolation.

Supine Hip Abduction Test

In my experience, hip abduction ROM is hugely underrated as a potential cause for limited squat depth. During the squat, the hip flexes while simultaneously abducting to approximately 30-40 degrees (the knee moving away from the midline of the body).³The cues “sit into the hole,” “knees out,” or “spread the floor” facilitate getting the hip into an abducted position. This is important to optimize squat mechanics.

Athletes with long torsos relative to their femurs will require less ankle dorsiflexion ROM to achieve any given trunk angle during the squat. We obviously can’t alter their femur length structurally, but we can functionally. If we cue our athletes to abduct their hips (get the knees out), the athletes will reduce their femur length in the anterior-posterior direction while maintaining their torso length. This results in a functional shortening of the femur relative to the torso in the sagittal plane and, therefore, reduces ankle ROM demands during squatting.¹⁶

We can’t alter an athlete’s femur length structurally, but we can functionally, says @LouisHowe_SandC. Share on X

As a side note, this is why the functional movement screen deep squat biases athletes with excellent ankle dorsiflexion ROM. By forcing the athletes to have their feet pointed straight ahead, athletes must demonstrate exceptional levels of ankle ROM.¹⁷Even just a small amount of toe-out, which increases hip abduction, can improve overhead squat performance.¹⁸

For this assessment, the value produced is relative to vertical, so values greater than 40 degrees are likely sufficient for most activities.

Starting position: Athlete lies in a supine position with the legs extended. The test leg is flexed at the hip and knee to 90 degrees.

Movement: The athlete maximally abducts at the hip (moves the knee away from the midline of the pelvis) while the coach stabilizes the pelvis, preventing rotation from occurring.

Measurement: At the point of maximal hip abduction, place the phone on the medial surface at approximately mid-thigh (phone set in portrait and calibrated to a vertical reference).

Video 5 shows how to assess hip abduction ROM.

Video 5. You can do another hip evaluation supine, if guided properly. You may need to escalate athletes who have pain to sports medicine staff if they are visually uncomfortable while performing the movement.

Active Knee Extension Test

The active knee extension test assesses the length of the biarticular hamstring muscles. This is particularly relevant for most hip hinging exercises, such as the Romanian deadlift. Athletes who demonstrate minimal hip flexion before losing their neutral spine alignment during Romanian deadlifts (or any hinging exercise where the knee is relatively extended) should be checked for hamstring extensibility using the active knee extension test. This test provides values relative to vertical, with normal for the active knee extension considered to be less than 20 degrees.¹⁹

You should check athletes who show minimal hip flexion before losing their neutral spine alignment during Romanian deadlifts for hamstring extensibility using the active knee extension test. Share on X

Starting position: Athlete lies in a supine position with the legs extended. The test leg is flexed to 90 degrees at the hip and knee, while the foot is maintained in a neutral position.

Movement: The athlete maximally extends the knee while maintaining hip and foot alignment.

Measurement: At the point of maximal knee extension, place the phone on the anterior border of the tibia below the tibial tuberosity (phone set in portrait and calibrated to a vertical reference).

Video 6 shows how to assess hamstring extensibility.

Video 6. Extension qualities are both subjective and objective if done correctly. You must make extra effort to ensure the athlete does not compensate.

Modified Weight-Bearing Lunge Test

Ankle dorsiflexion ROM can impact squat mechanics.^4,6,8,17To measure ankle dorsiflexion ROM, weight-bearing methods are more functionally relevant to closed-chain exercises than non-weight-bearing methods. This is commonly shown in research where weight-bearing lunge test performance correlates with movement quality during squatting and landing tasks, and non-weight-bearing techniques do not.⁴

Video 7 below demonstrates how to measure ankle dorsiflexion ROM using the modified weight-bearing lunge test. For this assessment, a value of 0 degrees represents the tibia being upright and the ankle in a neutral alignment. As activities like the deep squat require approximately 40 degrees of ankle dorsiflexion ROM¹⁴, you can use this value to determine a deficit. However, I generally want my athletes to achieve 45 degrees for this test, as this allows me some leeway for the error associated with this assessment.

Starting position: Athlete sets up in a half-kneeling position, with the front foot half a foot length ahead of the back knee. They position the front leg so the knee is located directly over the toes to encourage a neutral alignment of the foot. The pelvis faces forward and the trunk is positioned relatively upright. The athlete may hold onto a stable object (e.g., the wall) to help maintain balance.

Movement: The athlete reaches the front knee as far forward as possible, while cued to maintain pelvic alignment and keep the heel down. Coaches must be sure that the athlete does not pronate at the foot (represented as a collapse of the medial longitudinal arch during the movement) to prevent the midtarsal joint contributing to the assessment outcome.

Measurement: At the point of maximal ankle dorsiflexion prior to heel lift, place the phone on the anterior border of the tibia below the tibial tuberosity (phone set in portrait and calibrated to a vertical reference).

Video 7 shows how to assess ankle dorsiflexion ROM.

Video 7. Modifications to the conventional lunge are a sound option for those with attention to detail. You can test athletes quickly and effectively with this variation. 

What to Do Next?

Now that we’ve covered how to perform ROM assessments using a smartphone, all that’s left is for you, as a coach, to practice the techniques shown and develop expertise. In my experience, a few hours of practice are all you need to reach the reliability values commonly reported in the literature. On that note, I highly recommend you start to establish your own reliability values now in order to perform this test repeatedly.

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

References

1. McMahon, G. E., Morse, C. I., Burden, A., Winwood, K., & Onambélé, G. L. “Impact of range of motion during ecologically valid resistance training protocols on muscle size, subcutaneous fat, and strength.” The Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research. 2014; 28(1): 245-255.

2. Pinto, R. S., Gomes, N., Radaelli, R., Botton, C. E., Brown, L. E., & Bottaro, M. “Effect of range of motion on muscle strength and thickness.” The Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research. 2012; 26(8): 2140-2145.

3. Swinton, P. A., Lloyd, R., Keogh, J. W., Agouris, I., & Stewart, A. D. “A biomechanical comparison of the traditional squat, powerlifting squat, and box squat.” The Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research. 2012; 26(7): 1805-1816.

4. Dill, K. E., Begalle, R. L., Frank, B. S., Zinder, S. M., & Padua, D. A. “Altered knee and ankle kinematics during squatting in those with limited weight-bearing–lunge ankle-dorsiflexion range of motion.” Journal of Athletic Training. 2014; 49(6): 723-732.

5. Macrumors, E., Bell, D. R., Boling, M., Lewek, M., & Padua, D. “Effect of limiting ankle-dorsiflexion range of motion on lower extremity kinematics and muscle-activation patterns during a squat.” Journal of Sport Rehabilitation. 2012; 21(2): 144-150.

6. Fuglsang, E. I., Telling, A. S., & Sørensen, H. “Effect of ankle mobility and segment ratios on trunk lean in the barbell back squat.” The Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research. 2017; 31(11): 3024-3033.

7. List, R., Gülay, T., Stoop, M., & Lorenzetti, S. “Kinematics of the trunk and the lower extremities during restricted and unrestricted squats.” The Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research. 2013; 27(6): 1529-1538.

8. Heneghan, N. R., Baker, G., Thomas, K., Falla, D., & Rushton, A. “What is the effect of prolonged sitting and physical activity on thoracic spine mobility? An observational study of young adults in a UK university setting.” BMJ open. 2018; 8(5): e019371.

9. McKean, M. R., & Burkett, B. J. “Overhead shoulder press–In-front of the head or behind the head?” Journal of Sport and Health Science. 2015; 4(3): 250-257.

10. Barrett, E., O’Keeffe, M., O’Sullivan, K., Lewis, J., & McCreesh, K. “Is thoracic spine posture associated with shoulder pain, range of motion and function? A systematic review.” Manual Therapy. 2016;26:38-46.

11. Bucke, J., Spencer, S., Fawcett, L., Sonvico, L., Rushton, A., & Heneghan, N. R. “Validity of the digital inclinometer and iphone when measuring thoracic spine rotation.”Journal of Athletic Training. 2017; 52(9): 820-825.

12. Charlton, P. C., Mentiplay, B. F., Pua, Y. H., & Clark, R. A. “Reliability and concurrent validity of a Smartphone, bubble inclinometer and motion analysis system for measurement of hip joint range of motion.” Journal of Science and Medicine in Sport. 2015; 18(3): 262-267.

13. Vohralik, S. L., Bowen, A. R., Burns, J., Hiller, C. E., & Nightingale, E. J. “Reliability and validity of a smartphone app to measure joint range”. American Journal of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation. 2015; 94(4): 325-330.

14. Todoroff, M. “Dynamic Deep Squat: Lower-Body Kinematics and Considerations Regarding Squat Technique, Load Position, and Heel Height.” Strength and Conditioning Journal. 2017; 39(1): 71-80.

15. Neumann, D. A. (2002). Kinesiology of the musculoskeletalsystem. St. Louis: Mosby.

16. Demers, E., Pendenza, J., Radevich, V., & Preuss, R. “The Effect of Stance Width and Anthropometrics on Joint Range of Motion in the Lower Extremities during a Back Squat.” International Journal of Exercise Science. 2018; 11(1): 764.

17. Rabin, A., & Kozol, Z. “Utility of the overhead squat and forward arm squat in screening for limited ankle dorsiflexion.” The Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research. 2017; 31(5): 1251-1258.

18. McMillian, D. J., Rynders, Z. G., & Trudeau, T. R. “Modifying the Functional Movement Screen deep squat test: the effect of foot and arm positional variations.” The Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research. 2016; 30(4): 973-979.

19. Hansberger, B. L., Loutsch, R., Hancock, C., Bonser, R., Zeigel, A., & Baker, R. T. “Evaluating the relationship between clinical assessments of apparent hamstring tightness: a correlational analysis.” International Journal of Sports Physical Therapy. 2019; 14(2): 253.

In the modern training environment, the neck is gaining prominence driven by the increased awareness for injury reduction, specifically concussion reduction, which is of paramount importance for full contact and collision sports. There’s growing evidence that neck-strengthening interventions show a possible reduction in traumatic brain injury (TBI) and concussion, and that neck thickness is a mitigating factor.

Often cited is the now famous Collins et al.(2014) study where the researchers noted that “every one pound increase in neck strength leads to a decrease in five percent chance of sustaining a concussion.” This has led to a mix of novel neck training solutions which are increasingly more objective. Neck training itself is and has been highly subjective, but according to Carl Valle in his post about prioritizing neck training for athletes, “Neck-strengthening exercises, even crude ones, can make a difference in the incidence and severity of concussions.”

So is it worth pursuing? The answer increasingly points to yes. However, the main challenge with neck strength is monitoring change and improvement. I’ve often found athletes or coaches don’t remain consistent with neck strength because it doesn’t have the same appeal as movements that give impactful, visceral feedback like adding 10kg to a squat PB or hitting a new bench max, so it’s often lumped into the “nice to have but not necessary” category of exercises.

I’m not going to belabor the points about neck anatomy and function, because Carl’s post does an excellent job. The key point on neck anatomy is Carl’s statement: “The joint system of the neck isn’t just the cervical region—we must use the nuchal ligament and even the jaw, shoulder, and clavicle.”

MMA, Golf, and Motorsport

Part of the problem with necks, and subsequently testing and training them, is described in Honda et al.(2018): “There is no agreed-upon scale as to what constitutes as strong, moderate, and weak neck strength. For example, football players will likely have stronger necks than soccer players, yet in their respective studies, they were broken down into strong, moderate, and weak necks.” A lack of agreement as to what constitutes a strong or weak neck is problematic.

I’ve been endeavoring to use neck strengthening in some fashion for many years. Currently, I’m implementing neck strengthening for three very different sports contexts in my day-to-day practice. The first is the concussion and TBI risk I perceive in mixed martial arts (MMA). The MMA athlete’s use of the head and subsequently the neck to apply pressure and post in grappling means strength is also important.

This is totally different than the second major sport I’m involved with—golf. Golf neck injury incidence is higher than I anticipated. Obviously, it’s not a contact injury, but it does account for 20% of injuries with no significant gender difference. Presently, at the European Tour Performance Institute, we’re starting to dig into neck injury from golf and looking at a means of testing so we can objectify interventions.

The neck is a common overuse injury site in golf, with repeat rotation of the T-spine and C-spine in different directions, says @WSWayland. Share on X

The neck is a common overuse injury site in golf, with repeat rotation of the T-spine and C-spine in different directions. It stands to reason that with long practice days and poor levels of robustness, this a potential injury hot spot. As of 2019, some very high-profile golf athletes have had to take time out due to neck injuries.

“Unfortunately due to a neck strain that I’ve had for a few weeks, I’m forced to withdraw from the API. I’ve been receiving treatment, but it hasn’t improved enough to play. My lower back is fine, and I have no long-term concerns, and I hope to be ready for The Players.”—Tiger Woods

Both MMA and golf athletes are chasing neck strength improvements, but for different reasons—one is a desire to reduce concussive risk and potential TBI, and the other is for training and playing volume tolerance.

My third area of interest is how the neck functions in motorsport, which is different than MMA and golf. The motorsport athlete (obvious collision risk aside) has to have a strong neck both to handle g-forces and to stabilize the vestibular system—in particular minimizing disturbance to the vestibulo-ocular reflex. And the key to this is stabilizing the eyes during tremors caused by machine vibration, which is particularly common in F1 where stiff suspensions allow for greater control and stability but cause a lot of vibration.

Though unappreciated by many, both motorcycle athletes and racing car drivers have complicated visual strategies to anticipate corners and to decide when to engage in an exit strategy using visual markers. For example, poor visual acuity of just a 0.5-second delay can mean a difference of 15.5m travel if the rider travels 70mph. A stable head means fewer mistakes.

MMA, golf, and motorsport are very different sports that need meaningful outcomes achieved by sensible neck training interventions, says @WSWayland. Share on X

These are very different sports that need outcomes achieved by a sensible neck training intervention—much like all these athletes would undertake a strength program if they wanted to improve a raw measure like IMTP. In other words, they would undertake a similar intervention to improve scores in a measure of raw neck strength, which would hopefully transfer to meaningful sporting outcomes. As neck strength matures, we can start using sport-specific positioning.

Lofi Solutions, Luggage Scales, and Finding a “Pure” Neck Test

F1 strength coach and physio Patrick Harding took a pragmatic step, taking the Collins study’s use of luggage scales and applying it meaningfully to a population that values neck strength—F1 drivers. These athletes have a very strong case for applying neck strength given the sheer amount of g-force they need to tolerate and to mitigate concussion risk in a possible accident.

Effectively, a neck harness and a luggage scale are all we need to perform a simple neck strength test with lateral- and extension-resisted positions, which seem to be the easiest to execute (pictured below, and used in the Collins study).

While implementing different positions, I found that these two positions time and again offered the best values versus compromising position. I learned from many years of grappling that where the head goes, the body must follow. So, despite trying a few novel positions like standing and kneeling, as soon as ample resistance was applied, the athlete often found it difficult to maintain balance. I did find, however, that getting the athlete to sit next to a bench, which acts as a T-spine brace, gave us better scores because it minimized sitting balance as a limiting factor.

After deciding upon my testing protocol, I ran a few concurrent neck training interventions and saw 5-6kg increases in lateral neck strength in as little as four weeks. Extension saw smaller gains of 3kg. Most athletes are usually very strong in extension, especially grappling sport athletes where resisted extension happens regularly.

Patrick also used the scales to gauge resistance in training as well as testing. We can gauge how hard an athlete pulls on a neck harness during repetitive movements in order to apply the right amount of progressive force when they’re performing them manually.

I experimented with rotation- and flexion-based neck testing but found results inconsistent because the precise angles were harder to determine. It’s also difficult to tell the degree to which athletes anchors themselves and use their core muscles to try to game the outcomes. These tests are somewhat simplistic and don’t have the fidelity that we desire from a meaningful testing procedure.

Upgrade Your Testing with Load Cells

Luggage scales are cheap and are mechanical or digital but come in an array of build qualities, often have small load tolerances, and can be inaccurate and poorly constructed. The numbers obtained from luggage scales come from the tester who eyeballs the highest values as force is applied. Luggage scales also don’t record data.

In short, we can do better, especially with current load cell technology. Scientific grade load cells have increasingly dropped in price. Once the reserve of academic institutions, these devices are increasingly making weight room appearances, much like force platforms.

We've created a reliable #NeckTestingProtocol using a scientific grade load cell and software to use on the PGA European Tour, says @WSWayland. Share on X

Using the Ergotest 300kg force sensor with the MuscleLab software, we’ve devised our own neck testing protocol to use on the PGA European Tour. Initial trials show it has a high degree of test-retest reliability, and we’ll be conducting trials to quantify this along with its ability to predict neck injuries in golfers over the next year or so.

We developed the test, placing the athlete in the position pictured in the image below, to improve positional stability and to isolate the neck. We tried more “functional” positions (standing, kneeling, etc.), but found the athletes were thrown off balance and weren’t able to achieve a consistent score.

To carry out the test, we attached the force sensor to a suspension trainer to create a handle and then clipped it onto a neck training cap. We placed the cap on the athlete, who sits in the position shown above. The athlete is instructed to brace and not let their neck move during the test. The coach gradually applies force to the athlete for ~5 seconds into lateral flexion. We tried using rotation, but it was difficult to standardize. The test ends when the athlete loses their neutral head position (i.e., they start to fail and slip into lateral flexion).

The MusceLab software runs in the background during the test. Once the software is stopped, the peak force value immediately displays on the screen. We take three maximal tests in lateral left and then right side flexion and record the highest of the values on each side. We then measure peak force for general neck strength and can compare values to quantify any possible asymmetries.

This approach also allows us to record force data over time as opposed to the single point peak we used with a crude luggage scale measure. The tests used are exactly the same as those performed with the luggage scale. The software also allows us to gather RFD, which is not particularly salient to maximum neck strength testing but is a useful capacity to have.

The versatility of a simple load cell will help us test for trunk strength as well as other potential tests, says @WSWayland. Share on X

Another novelty is the ability to compare the luggage scale to the load cell. The luggage scale didn’t perform too horrendously, but precision is the aim of the game when it comes to measuring productive intervention. Going forward, the versatility of a simple load cell will help us test for trunk strength as well as other potential to-be-thought-of tests.

Using load cells or luggage scales, we can look at neck symmetry and effort sustainability by comparing each side using holds or quasi isometrics with chin to chest and head to trap style repetitions and look for a drop-off in effort or output. I’ve been operating on Patrick’s suggestion that probably no more than 5-10% asymmetry is desirable.

Interventions

Neck training interventions need not be complicated. The simplest start is manual exercises with a coach or partner providing resistance. Then move up to banded, loaded, and novel devices specific to neck training.

Basic neck training starts with the simple task of determining whether an athlete can find a neutral head position and work on head repositioning to do so. What constitutes neutral can be determined by the coach as an athlete’s position is often a dynamic, context-based endeavor. Neutral is often agreed to be a vertical stacked cervical spine with the chin slightly packed.

Positioning

For gravity to no gravity neck training, the athlete simply lifts the head from a rested position to an active position. This is the ground floor on the neck training spectra and can be performed in a sustained isometric fashion or by doing repetitions. Have the athlete lay on the floor or a bench and lift their head only a few millimeters to sustain a light contraction. They’re not drawing the chin to chest; they’re elevating the head slightly.

Video 1. This video shows how to position an athlete on a bench for the first step in neck training.

Manual Drills

Partner-resisted manual drills take us from the simple position drills to partner-resisted positioning drills. Here we can introduce flexion, extension, and lateral movements with simple partner applied manual resistance. The only problem with this approach is the lack of objectivity as it can be difficult to gauge the efforts of the athlete and the person applying the manual pressure.

Video 2. Athletes demonstrate partner kneeling manual isometric neck training.

Long duration isometrics can be performed seated, standing, and using bodyweight to encourage head stabilization. Bodyweight work like this acts as an excellent partner drill; encouraging trust and teamwork to achieve your goal is always a bonus.

Video 3. Athletes partner together to perform long duration isometric neck training.

Banded

Banded neck work is a straightforward adaption allowing for a low tech and travelable solution for neck strength. It lets athletes include the variations mentioned above, including gravity plus resistance to no gravity, banded plus perturbations, quasi iso lateral, and banded plus high tension irradiations.

Bands allow us to anchor from just about anywhere and challenge the neck in a variety of angles and tensions. It’s also safer and more practical than the traditional neck harness nodding dog work we often do. Adjustments come as simply as walking away from the anchor point or upgrading to a stronger band or bungee cord.

Video 4. Neck training with bands allows us to anchor from just about anywhere and challenge the neck in a variety of angles and tensions.

The versatility of bands lets us apply positions specific to a sport. Outwardly simple, it means the driver can brace in a fashion that is sport-specific under similar constraints.

Video 5. The versatility of bands lets us apply positions specific to a sport, as illustrated in this video by Jeff Richter.

When testing the neck in sport-specific positions, we need to look for ways to create stability to allow the neck to be trained. Part of the problem with neck strength training is that achieving qualitative gains can be tricky since very high force production for the neck requires enormous peripheral stability.

One way to create stability is through irradiation by implementing grip as a stability modifier. Anyone who has ever clenched a fist in anger quickly feels the irradiation move up the arm and into the T-spine and shoulder structure. Gripping then further allows the neck to achieve greater force potential.

I’ve experimented with a six-point kneeling position test as a simple means for MMA and Superbike (and potentially rugby) because it allows the athlete to brace the neck in quasi sport-specific position. Using a low-set barbell allows the athlete to brace to grip, which sets the shoulder while they brace laterally during the test.

Video 6. This six-point kneeling position test works tremendously well for low angle collision sports.

Power and Rate of Force Development

A simple set-up using a metronome app allows us to practice quasi iso explosive movements. The intent is to brace rapidly on the beat for reps and to relax on the next subsequent beat. Athletes can perform this in prominent resisted sport positions. It’s important because neck bracing is often not a sustained position but a rapid contract and relax affair that often involves an amount of anticipation.

Video 7. We can practice quasi iso explosive movements using a metronome app to replicate the rapid contract and relax aspects of neck bracing.

Future Considerations

Once we learn more about what constitutes a strong neck, we can begin to plan for the task at hand objectively. It seems that what we know right now is very limited. A further consideration might be a vestibular challenge: the apparent increase in challenge to neck strength when we add visual challenges and tasks. I’ve suspected this for some time and have conferred with Indy Car Strength Coach Jeff Richter about it.

With objective measures that load cells give us, we can begin investigating whether this is true. We see this relationship in neck pain with decreased ocular motor control scores. There may be a need for combined neck and vision training in post-injury athletes to restore some semblance of normal function. This would be a big part of return-to-play procedures and integration into neck training.

Make Neck Interventions Work for You

Neck training is partly a battle of consciousness-raising and appreciating the difference between neck training for injury prevention, rehab, and performance enhancement as well as identifying the needs of the athlete and their sport neck performance requirements. When we transition from basic drills, we need to integrate neck training strategies that reflect the demands of the sport.

When we transition from basic drills, we need to integrate #NeckTraining strategies that reflect the demands of the sport, says @WSWayland. Share on X

For example, intensive manual drills might not be the best fit for a motorsport athlete when we may need to consider neck training plus eye movement drills. Conversely, this might not be the best approach when trying to help an MMA fighter resist head control and deal with concussive blows. As with our approaches in all other aspects of preparation, we need to implement a “general to specific” paradigm.

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

Daniel Coughlan lectures at the University of Essex, within the School of Sport, Rehabilitation and Exercise Sciences, where he also leads the university’s Sports Performance Research Group. He is the Head of Strength and Conditioning for the European Tour, and the Sports Science and Medicine Lead for England Golf. In these roles, he uses a wide range of approaches to support an athlete’s performance, and works collaboratively with a diverse blend of professionals.

The Grind. Long hours. Poor sleep. Stress. The Struggle. Perseverance. Working toward a common goal. Losing the forest for the trees. Coming out on the other side. These are all the ways a sports performance coach can describe a college hockey season. That’s not to say it’s not worth the challenge, success, growth, enjoyment, and satisfaction. These are ways to describe the same experience. Either way you cut it, a season in high-level athletics is long—essentially year-round at this point. Because of this, the end of season review is crucial to our development process. It allows us to reflect on our past successes and failures, better understand the path we took versus the path we thought we took, and helps us reorient moving forward.

To Improve the Future, Learn from the Past

The end of season review is both formal and informal for me. From a formal perspective, I begin the retrospective process by looking at our varied streams of sports science data. I want to look at metrics over time in order to see whether there are any major trends. Are there any pressing questions from the season that we might now be able to answer? How did our readiness scores correlate with performance? What about our physical KPIs? Did our players objectively improve over the year? And did that translate to what really matters—performance on the ice?

Of course, this ratio will never be 1:1. Just because players are getting faster in training doesn’t mean the team will automatically win more games. There is obviously much more to team success than a simple checklist of physical inputs. However, moving the needle in the direction of improved physical KPI’s is our job as performance coaches, so we need to know if we are accomplishing this.

Analyzing #KPIs over the past year helps see where we truly are and where we need to go, says @DMcConnell29. Share on X

The process takes some time and does not necessarily follow a linear course. Initial questions lead to new questions. Retrospection sometimes creates clarity and other times creates confusion. In either case, taking the time to reflect both formally and informally is inherently beneficial. By analyzing what occurred over the past year without the hustle and bustle of the in-season day-to-day routine, we begin to paint a picture of where we truly are and where we need to go. But, as I said, the season is long, and some mental downtime needs to be a part of this journey as well.

End of Year Continuing Education Helps Recharge

Time off after a long season is crucial, both for mental health and to allow everything that happened during the year to sink in. However, I wholeheartedly believe that if you don’t actively try to get better, you will get worse. Our field is progressing rapidly, and burying your head in the sand and refusing to learn is a recipe for getting passed up.

The early off-season is the perfect time not only to reanalyze what went well and what did not during the year, but also to plan out and engage in continuing education opportunities. I’m an avid reader, so nothing from that perspective changes much for me during this period. I do, however, tend to catch up on some non-sports performance reading at this time. I find my mind to be a little burned out after a long regular season and (hopefully) an eventful playoff. At the same time, I’ve noticed that a little time away from training, the rink, and my typical day-to-day routine of reading research, blogs, and other performance related material sets me up to have a clear mind and a renewed excitement about the upcoming time period.

It’s not much different than what I want our players to do at the end of the season. I give them a little less than two weeks completely off. I don’t want to see them in the gym or the rink. They need to get away, both physically and mentally. I want them to be regular college kids for a few days.

Once we get back to training, we start pretty lightly. I call our first phase back reconditioning because the purpose is to address many of the chronic overuse issues that arise during a long hockey season. And for me, it’s important to recondition mentally before digging back into the heavy lifting of sport science analyzation.

How to Analyze the Past Season from an S&C and Performance Perspective

There are many relevant reasons to use sport science. Establishing KPI baselines and trends over time might be one of the most important in a high-performance environment. The reality of any boots on the ground, in the trenches coach, or practitioner is that it’s very hard not to lose the forest for the trees. It’s all well and good to have your annual plan laid out in detail, but we all know that when you get to work, even the best-laid plans often go off the rails.

The day-to-day chaos that is high-level sport means that you often make adjustments on the fly, using coaching instinct along with data to make the best decision possible in the moment. Keeping track of every adjustment along the way is probably impossible.

Leaning back on your data to paint a picture of the year is an important first step in starting the annual process all over, says @DMcConnell29. Share on X

The ability to look back after the season and take a 30,000-foot view is crucial to understanding what went well and what we could have handled better. Being able to lean back on your data and paint a picture of the year is an important first step in starting the annual process all over again.

Once I’m mentally in a place to dig in and review the previous season, I like to use a combination of tools. I lean heavily on the athlete management system CoachMePlus (CMP) and the various dashboards and reports that it offers. CMP is my go-to hub for all of my data collection throughout the season, and the review process is no different. I also like the ability CMP gives me to easily export data so I can throw it into Tableau for easy, in the moment visualizations and tinkering.

I find that playing with my data in various ways lets me think through different scenarios and possible connections that I don’t always have time for during the season’s hustle and bustle. If I come across something that I’d like to dig into a little deeper from a statistical point of view, I can pull data from CMP to throw into JASP. Either way, this process helps me refine my process inside CMP for the next season, stripping away data or visuals that are no longer helpful and building new ones as my program changes over time.

How to Make Adjustments Based on What You Found and Liked

Our biggest takeaways from this past season came from our force plate data. This was the first season we had access to Hawkin Dynamics force plates, and I’m still getting my feet under me, so to speak. That being said, looking at the relationships between various metrics and our performance KPIs has been interesting. I was able to “bucket” our players into several different groups during the season based on a combination of force plate data, velocity and power data, as well as “coach’s eye.” This allowed us to train with slightly different points of emphasis within the team setting, giving each athlete what they needed to continue to progress, regardless of where they were at the time.

We used our force plate data to plan different points of training emphasis for each athlete within the team setting, says @DMcConnell29. Share on X

I highly value the psychology behind team training but recognize that there can be slightly different priorities within a group. From a practical perspective, for example, I had a force group, an eccentric group, and an RFD group. Bucketing our team into these subsections based on their movement profiles allowed me to keep the continuity of the group in check while addressing each subset’s biggest needs.

Video 1. Consistent testing of a vertical jump over the course of a year will show more than just peak height. Using the Hawkin Dynamics software, coaches can mine key details that ensure each athlete’s strength training and training load are cohesive with the development plan.

In practice, this simply meant that we tailored the primary lower body exercises for the day to each group. The force group might have performed heavy clean pulls and lower velocity (higher load) rear foot elevated split squats while the eccentric group performed vest-loaded box drops and kBox split squats, and the RFD group performed hang snatches and band resisted RFE’s at a higher velocity.

By looking back at our velocity and force plate data, we were able to tailor the primary training stimulus around our athletes’ most pressing needs while still respecting and cultivating the all-important culture that drives the development mindset within our group.

Finding ways to use data to connect the dots for everyone on staff is where #sportscience and #performance training need to move, says @DMcConnell29. Share on X

I was also able to articulate and create visuals around player strengths and weaknesses for our staff that helped drive conversations around what the coaches saw on the ice, what I saw during training, and what else we could do to improve the end product. This is really where sport science and performance training need to move—if the sport coaches aren’t involved or interested, it doesn’t matter. A big takeaway for me this year was finding ways to use data to connect the dots for everyone on staff.

How to Plan to Monitor and Track the Changes

Moving forward with our force plate data, we’ll be tracking several key metrics that we’ve identified as influential and informative for our performance KPIs as well as a way to audit our training program. With countermovement jumps, we’ll look at average relative propulsive force as well as average relative braking force. These will give us an indicator of our force output as well as our eccentric ability relative to bodyweight over time in a dynamic movement scenario.

With squat jumps, we’ll look at average relative propulsive force and propulsive RFD. These metrics will allow us to compare propulsive force from CMJ to squat jump as well as track any changes in the rate at which athletes can produce force. With our isometric RFE, we will be looking at peak force, time to peak force, relative peak force, as well as force at 150ms and 250ms. This will allow us to monitor changes in maximal force output as well as how quickly the athlete can produce this force without needing to test traditional 1RM’s during the season.

We’ll also begin assessing speed on the ice. This sounds like basic common sense, and it is. We’ve done it sporadically in the past but will hopefully implement goal to blue line timing once or twice per week, just as we do off-ice sprint timing once or twice per week. The off-ice results have been so good, we must move onto the ice at this point.

I'll continue making in-roads to quantify and then better understand things that are usually relegated to coaching instinct, says @DMcConnell29. Share on X

The addition of Catapult this season will expand our player monitoring and tracking program and give us another layer of on-ice performance metrics to go along with our standard game-based analytics. Hockey continues to be a very “gut feel” sport as viewed by most coaches and management. Since I’m a hockey player and have the sport science skill set that I do, however, I plan on continuing to make in-roads to quantifying and then better understanding the things that are usually relegated to coaching instinct.

Your Expectations and Planning Ahead

Now that I’ve had time away to clear my head and some time back in the gym to dig into our data, I plan on refining some of our processes. Using CMP, for example, we’ve collected sRPE from our players daily for several seasons. The original idea was to compare these scores with our physiological training load scores from our heart rate system. If we saw any large discrepancies between the subjective and the objective data, we would consider that a red flag. The discrepancies also helped me inform and educate our coaching staff on the relative intensities of the practices they were running. It was eye-opening early on to ask them what level of intensity they thought the practice was and compare that to what the team reported.

Over time, we’ve dialed in our prescription so that our coaches are more aware of the actual physiological demand of their drills and practices. We didn’t see many significant differences between the sRPE scores and the training load, so we’re getting rid of the sRPE questionnaire. The fewer things I can ask our players to do daily, the more focus and attention they’ll pay to the things that remain. sRPE became redundant for us, so we stripped it away.

I’ve also streamlined our integration of sport science technology into our training process and reworked the placement of our sprints and jumps within the training day. We’ve moved to more of a modified French Contrast set up, where we combine heavy sleds, bodyweight broad jumps, resisted broad jumps, and 10 or Flying 10 sprints into our A Series with great success. And we’ve built our jumps into our B Series, using both our jump mats and our force plates in a contrast fashion along with our RFE split squats. These small changes have sped up our training by eliminating bottlenecks and allowed us to integrate our sport science tools seamlessly into our process.

I plan on integrating our ISO RFE assessment more often to begin assessing how the training program affects peak force output as well as RFD and will look closely to see how well these numbers correlate with our performance KPIs. It will take another season’s worth of trial and error most likely, but my experience thus far has me excited about the possibilities. If the assessment works out the way I think it will, we’ll have a great way to assess qualities that are difficult to analyze in-season. It will also continue to help shape the individualization of our development plan for each player while maintaining the integrity of our team training model that I believe is hugely beneficial to our team and organizational culture.

Know What to Change and What to Keep

Overall, the process and procedure for taking us from the end of season review to the planning period involve some time away, some time catching up, and some time reviewing our data. CoachMePlus is an integral tool in this process, allowing us to quickly and easily visualize our data, generate reports, export data for agile interpretation, and reassess what we need and what we don’t need moving forward. This period is crucial personally and for our team, as we’re all able to relax and refresh, coming back to the training process excited, informed, and ready to improve.

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

I began working at Traverse City Central in 2001. For my first seven years, I taught science, special ed, and home economics. All strength and conditioning was done before and after school. There were limited facilities and no organized strength and conditioning. Our “weight room” was an old rifle range that was less than 1,500 square feet in size. Our facilities were embarrassing, and we received very little funding from our district. One day, I decided to stop complaining and do something about it.

Our facilities were embarrassing & we received very little funding from our district. I decided to stop complaining and do something about it. We created a plan, says @TrojanStrength. Share on X

We created a plan of attack to write reasonable grant requests and purchase the best equipment we could afford in phases. Our first phase was two two-sided Hammer Strength combo racks and four platforms. When our study body and staff saw what we were trying to do, it helped our fundraising initiative achieve our final goal. Once you get small phases completed, it is easier for everyone to visualize what could be.

If you told me 11 years ago that we would be training in our current facility, I wouldn’t have believed you. However, when you relentlessly go after fundraising and grants, it is possible to build the facility you currently can’t imagine but your student-athletes deserve.

Prior to fundraising and writing grants, our facility was run-down, and our student body was reluctant to take part in our strength and conditioning program. Many of our students chose to train in private sector facilities without any supervision or guidance. Our female athletes avoided strength training and often cited the condition of our facility as a major reason why.

Usage has increased exponentially since we moved into our new facility. In 2007, we had one “weights” class of 20, where students did whatever they wanted. In 2019, we offer a year-round unified training program that holds classes from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m., Monday through Friday. In addition, we now offer open training to all students who don’t have the Strength and Conditioning class for 1.5 hours after school.

Build a Path to a Better Facility

In 2008, I switched from teaching science to full-time PE. We had a new AD and a supportive interim principal who provided us with a 5,600-square foot box and challenged me to write grants if I wanted new equipment. They introduced me to the district administrator in charge of grants. I spent a couple of hours with her so I could understand the process. I highly recommend reaching out to administrators in your district to find out if you have someone with this expertise.

 

In addition, I talked to anybody who would listen and gave tours of our current facility to demonstrate need. These tours turned into $30,000 over a three-year period. I found there were community members that wanted to help when they saw the current state of our facility.

I highly recommend reaching out to administrators in your district to find out if you have someone with grant writing expertise, says @TrojanStrength. Share on X

We are located in northern Michigan. We have limited fitness resources for our students to train in and our winters are long and cold. In order for our athletes to train year-round, we need facilities that allow for not only strength training, but also speed and agility. I have visited several high school facilities throughout the country and wondered why our students couldn’t have the same resources. I have friends who work in Southern states and I am amazed at the commitment to excellence that their schools have in facilities and quality coaching.

Fundraising Opportunities You Should Know About

I have to admit that I hate fundraising. My students hate fundraising, too. Yet the funding we have received over the past 18 years has been inadequate to give our students the facilities they deserve. Fundraising has been crucial to our department acquiring grants. My students have taken ownership over the last 11 years and have participated in a variety of fundraisers to help me acquire seed money. This has netted us $2,000-$6,000 each year through a variety of fundraisers.

We have sold cookies, Subway cards, and mugs through various fundraising organizations. They have been successful, but you pay up to 50% of your profit to the organization running the fundraiser. This past year, I had a co-worker approach me about a fundraiser that was 100% profit minus printing costs. He arranged with a local group of restaurants to allow us to sell buy-one-get-one free entree coupon sheets with 10 coupons on them during their slow season of November through April. Our staff sold through social media and our kids sold to family and friends. The fundraiser brought in $6,000.

I believe our students are willing to participate in our fundraisers because 100% of the money goes to purchasing equipment that helps them. Whenever we raise enough money to purchase equipment, our students act like it’s Christmas.

Video 1. Simple chest passes are underrated for upper body power assessment. Testing with the Ballistic Ball is scientifically valid and practical for all levels, not just elite athletes.

We have had to purchase EVERYTHING through fundraising and grants. The $5,000 our district provided only paid for a small portion of our first phase. If we had not raised money through grants and fundraising, we would not have been able to purchase our current equipment. Our initial grants and fundraisers have allowed us to purchase:

• 8 two-sided Hammer Strength HD elite racks
• 8 Hammer Strength platforms
• Rubber- and polyurethane-coated bumper plates for racks and platforms
• 8 Intek Triple Pin Bars for Olympic lifts
• 16 Intek bars for racks
• 10 10-kg bars
• 1 5-kg bar
• 8 trap bars
• 1 10-piece set of Life Fitness Selectorized equipment 

The Importance of Seed Money

While talking to multiple sources involved with grants, I kept hearing the same thing: Organizations like you need to have around 40% seed money for us to consider you for a grant.

I used the Life Fitness/ Hammer Strength Room Planner to come up with a vision of what we wanted to create for our students. We organized a fundraiser and our students raised $7,000 toward the equipment. Our AD and principal had all athletic teams contribute $200 and the principal contributed $5,000, increasing our seed money to a total of $15,000.

People are more interested in what I propose when they can see what we currently have and then look at a visual model of what we are trying to create, says @TrojanStrength. Share on X

I am always extremely nervous whenever I talk to someone about grants and fundraising because I don’t know how receptive they will be to what I propose. After doing this for several years, I have discovered that the more I talk about it and share my vision of what we want to create, the more people are willing to help. There are community members with resources who are willing to help if it fits with their mission. I have found that people are more interested in what I propose when they can see what we currently have and then look at a visual model of what we are trying to create.

Local Grants Are Indispensable

We have had most of our success with local grants. We would not have the facilities we have today without support from our local organizations. I recommend reaching out to any local businesses and industries in your area. Some examples of local organizations that have given us grants are: Traverse City Track Club, Oleson Foundation, Biederman Foundation, Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa Indians, Lagina Foundation, and Falconer Foundation Student Grant.

I collected every grant I could find and created a folder of potential funding sources. I committed to writing one grant a day for a month during my lunch and prep period, and used successful grants that my Hammer Strength rep gave me as a blueprint to follow. I told my story and shared the vision of what we wanted to create for our students. My grant budgets reflected the 40% seed money recommended by those inside the organization.

After three months of waiting, we received notification of our first grant. We took that first grant and applied for another grant. That $5,000 grant quickly turned into $15,000. I kept repeating this process until we had raised over $70,000 in the first year. Our grants have ranged from $1,500 to $23,000. This, combined with fundraising every year, added up over a 10-year period.

One of our grants was a student grant. I printed off an application for all of my students and told them if we didn’t have something they wanted, to write a grant for it. The organization received 35 grant applications from my students and visited our school to tell the students they would provide $13,000 to help us continue improving our facility.

This has been an ongoing process for the last 11 years. We were committed to buying the highest quality equipment we could afford, so we completed our facility in phases. Now, we are able to purchase extra things to help our students.

Improving our facility has been an ongoing process for 11 years. We committed to buying the highest quality equipment we could afford, so we completed our facility in phases. Share on X

One of these extra things is technology. Most of the technology we have purchased is used to track our student-athletes’ progress to see if the training we do is having the impact we want.

We have purchased GymAware for velocity-based training and tracking relative power output. Recently, we purchased the MuscleLab Contact Grid to track vertical jumps and the reactive strength index, but we are just scratching the surface with what it can do. We are learning how to use the grid to teach our athletes to better contact the ground with various plyometric drills. Both pieces of equipment have made me a better coach because they give me concrete feedback on what our lifts and jumps should look like when we train for power.

Video 2. Eccentric overload means the negative work is higher than the concentric work. With harnesses, athletes can safely use their entire body to create momentum and then apply technique to absorb primarily with their legs.

I am always looking for ways to improve performance and reduce injury that fit with what we do. After reading about flywheels, we decided to purchase the kBox for eccentric overload and injury prevention. I was so impressed with the results we were getting with it that I decided to look into the VersaPulley for our rotational athletes. I felt like our rotational athletes needed something beyond just medicine balls. Flywheel training is different than traditional free weights, but does not replace them for us. They are another tool in our toolbox that we use to fill holes in our program.

Video 3. The VersaPulley is one option we use to get rotational power, and many of the movements are a total body pattern. Athletes should use both horizontal and vertical flywheels.

We purchased a Brower Laser Timer for accurate timing of student improvement in sprint performance. I think athletes knowing that what we do is helping them improve is important for buy-in. We track 10-yard, 40-yard, and flying 10s throughout the year with the system.

The winter in northern Michigan can make it difficult for our track and field programs to train. The Traverse City Track Club is a nonprofit that has a grant program to support activities associated with running. Since 2007, it has provided us with money to purchase Woodway Curve treadmills and five commercial Precor treadmills. These allow our athletes to train inside when the weather outside is not appropriate. The Curve treadmills have been an excellent tool for our sprinters with limited indoor space.

Video 4. During cold weather months, treadmills are sometimes necessary as space is at a premium. Investing in a few treadmills can allow athletes to run when snow is on the ground.

Write Thank-You Notes

A friend inside one of the foundations told me they are rarely thanked for the money they donate. I make sure to write a thank-you note to every organization that awarded us a grant, so they know how grateful we are for their gift. I believe this has helped us receive grants from the same organizations on multiple occasions.

Be sure to write thank-you notes to every organization that awards you a grant, so they know how grateful you are for their gift, recommends @TrojanStrength. Share on X

Developing relationships with individuals within the philanthropic organizations has also assisted us in working with them to fund projects we are trying to complete. Several grants we have received occurred after conversations we had where I explained to them what we were trying to do. Both times, a member of the organization asked me to fill out the paperwork and we received significant grants.

Don’t Forget a Budget for Maintenance

At the time I started writing grants, our PE budget for six teachers was $500 for the entire department. Our equipment was not a quality brand and had not been maintained. After we received our new equipment, our athletic director instituted a maintenance fund that required $200 from each of our athletic teams. This money goes to keeping all of the equipment functioning and in excellent condition.

Most of our big equipment is now more than 11 years old and people always comment on what great shape it is in. The money goes to repairing and replacing everything from the naugahyde on benches to old bars and weights.  We also have preventive maintenance done biannually on our treadmills to prevent costly repairs later.

A Summer Programming Solution

Strength and conditioning coaches have undervalued themselves at all levels. I have worked at multiple universities as an unpaid intern, a slightly paid graduate assistant, and a full-time assistant working 80+ hours a week for less than minimum wage. I more than doubled my pay and received benefits for the first time in my life when I began working at my current school in 2001 (starting pay was $34,000).

In 2001, our school didn’t have any organized strength and conditioning. I was coaching football and filled the need for a strength and conditioning coach by offering to train for free anybody who showed up. At the time, that included three football players and one basketball player. The time commitment slowly grew as we began to get buy-in from multiple programs.

In 2017, our summer program had ballooned to 400-500 student-athletes and the time commitment had grown. I was struggling to pay the bills for my young family and had a decision to make. The hours I was spending in the weight room was making it impossible to get a decent-paying job in the summer. I was contemplating giving up what I loved and going to work for a friend doing manual labor.

While attending a conference in Minneapolis, I had dinner with a group of coaches from the National High School Strength and Conditioning Association. There was a lot of talk about compensation and how coaches were being paid. I was interested to hear that there was a wide range of stipends being paid to coaches from around the country. I was surprised to learn about stipends ranging from assistant to varsity coaching stipends for every season—fall, winter, spring, summer. This was not realistic in my district, but I hoped to get the equivalent for the summer hours I worked.

A good friend encouraged me to start my own business outside of my teaching responsibilities and register as an LLC. After talking with the coaches at the NHSSCA clinic, I found out several of them had already done this. I put it off for several months, but finally researched it online, discovered how easy it was, and then completed my application in less than an hour. I have spoken with several coaches around the country and helped walk them through the process. You shouldn’t hesitate to start the process if you are thinking about starting your own LLC. It is a lot easier than you would expect.

A good friend encouraged me to start my own business outside of teaching and register as an LLC. I discovered many coaches had already done this, and it’s not hard to do. Share on X

After setting up the LLC, EIN number, and business bank account, I talked to our athletic director. He was supportive of what I was trying to do and told me they couldn’t pay me what I deserve. After I had the go-ahead to move forward, I reached out to all of our coaches, explaining how I would run our summer program with pay structures based on time and number of days of training.

We created a pay structure for an unlimited number of athletes from any teams interested in training. If an athlete was not part of a team participating in the program, they could sign up for a multi-sport camp running the length of the summer. In addition, we added middle school camps where we emphasize fundamental movement skills, sprinting, and an introduction to basic strength training.

Video 5. Basic speed testing is essential for assessing the transfer of training. Conventional timing systems are great for getting splits and total times of sprints.

Our district has a Learning, Enrichment, and Athletic department (LEAP) that manages most of our extracurricular activities. I run my camps through this, and they pay my LLC. I pay a percentage of my profit back to the LEAP department so I can run my camps through the school. We also set aside additional money to be used as seed money and purchase new equipment. We were successful enough in year one to pay me the equivalent of a coach’s stipend and pay our athletic trainer a stipend to work with our athletes throughout the summer.

In year two, we had to add staff to accommodate the increased demand. We have two certified strength and conditioning coaches, one certified athletic trainer, three sport coaches, and one intern. More than 500 different athletes go through our facility each week. We have added teams and have 98 fifth-eighth graders signed up for our two-day camps. This is a significant increase in workload from my first summer in 2001, when I worked with four athletes. 

Don’t Complain, Get Active

Nobody likes a complainer. Get active, treat grant writing like a job, and find people with the skill sets you lack to help you. I don’t believe I am good at writing grants, but I am persistent. Make the organizations tell you no.

I spent my first eight years complaining before I wrote my first grant, mostly because I doubted it would make a difference. Thousands of students have been impacted because of our team of coaches, teachers, and grant writers. None of this would have happened without the generosity of our community.

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

One of the great challenges faced by high school strength and conditioning coaches is developing an effective protocol to develop student-athletes in our performance programs. Having an effective entrance plan with well-thought-out progressions goes a long way to efficiently move your athletes along the path to high performance within your programming.

I’m writing this article to offer insight into how we begin to develop our athletes to prepare for the climb from our Block Zero (Block 0) program to our Block 4-Elite level.

Background

When I first began working with athletes over 20 years ago, I had very little experience differentiating programming based on training age. I came into the field from the sport coach side. My experience was using the back squat, deadlift, bench press, and hang clean. I’m embarrassed to say that at that point, I basically used the same program for all my athletes.

A few years into my coaching career, I began to see that there was another, much safer and more effective way to program. Since then, I’ve continued to chase knowledge and pursue best practices for working with athletes with a young training age. It wasn’t until about ten years ago when I was tasked to work with 3^rd– to 8^th-grade athletes that I really began to fine-tune what we now do.

While the base of our program is set, I continue to tweak and seek ways to become more efficient in our progression and regression protocols. I have learned from so many great coaches, and it would be impossible to list all who have contributed. I hope you can use this article the way I have used so much of what I’ve learned over the years on this topic. I hope that you can take something you see here and find a way to use it to your advantage.

About the Block Zero Program

Much like everyone else, our Block 0 program at York Comprehensive High School (YCHS) is a basic movement program. We teach our athletes mobility, body awareness, jumping and landing mechanics, stability, and all the basic movement patterns they’ll use during their time in our program. Of course, Block Zero was a term that was developed by Coach Joe Kenn to describe his introductory program. It’s become a general term many use to label their intro program. Although you’ll find many different plans depending on the coach, most contain the same basic ideas and principles outlined in Coach Kenn’s plan.

At various times I’ve had more direct control over the Block 0 program than others. In my last position, I ran a sports performance camp year-round that was attended by most of our young football players. I also did a summer camp in our weight room, teaching the basics of the program. In my current position, I don’t have access to our athletes until the Spring of their 8th-grade year. However, we have strength and conditioning classes at our middle school, and we’ve coached the teachers on our program. Each year, our rising freshman get a little better at what we do. I urge you to be as involved as possible with the young athletes in your program. If you’re not doing this yet, you’ll see an immediate impact when you start.

Basic Movement Overview

Our Block 0 program has many small variations and progressions. The chart below shows a very basic outline of what we do at the very beginning of the program. This is a multi-year plan, so you only see the first steps.

During Block 0, the athletes will learn a general mastery of the following:

• rocking
• neck nods
• cross crawling
• crawling
• general movement skills
• deceleration
• basic sprinting techniques
• straight leg bounding
• bodyweight movements
• breathing
• mobility
• tumbling
• eccentric and isometric bodyweight
• basic jumps with landing focus
• medicine ball throws
• weighted pushing and carries 

Our goal is to have each athlete come to us with a basic mastery of each of the above movements and progressions. They’re also exposed to more slightly advanced movements as they get close to the Spring of their 8th-grade year. Of course, that won’t happen 100% of the time, and it never will. We just hope to have as many as possible as high performing as they can be when they come to us.

8th Grade Spring Semester: The Key Transition Period

As high school coaches, ideally we’ll be able to either participate directly or at the very least program for our athletes from as early an age as possible. At YCHS, I’m particularly blessed because our middle school has weightlifting classes for both male football players and a separate female class. Our football program also has weightlifting sessions in the summer at the middle school as part of the team’s summer practice schedule. It’s a great opportunity for our athletes to take part if they choose to do so.

Our administration also has allowed to me spend time during the school day to provide professional development for the staff and coaches as well as coaching the athletes at our middle school. During the professional development sessions, I lay out a general plan for the areas I’d like to see developed. This includes all areas of our Block 0 program, including sprinting and jumping/landing techniques. I hope that our middle school athletes can master the most basic techniques and have exposure to some next level movements.

At the very least, I hope our athletes will have a working knowledge of hinge and squat patterns. Of course, there will always be athletes who don’t end up in a class and come to us with a zero training age. It’s not uncommon to have freshmen and sophomores come in with the same issue. For these athletes, we go straight to the very beginning, though we obviously don’t have the time to spend multiple years mastering Block 0. Instead, they’ll move at a pace that will allow them to master the most basic techniques in the weight room. These older Block 0 athletes will still have to pass all our entrance standards to the various levels of weightlifting movements, jumping, and landing. Unfortunately, they lose some of the movement skills practice that comes with the multi-year Block 0 program.

Starting in the Spring semester of their 8th-grade year, they begin to participate in our after-school sessions. Most of these athletes are female because both 7th and 8th-grade football has a weightlifting class during school hours. Our middle school and high school athletes are together during this time, which can get pretty chaotic for me. I’ll have male and female Block 0 to Bock 4 athletes on a multitude of calendars based on sports season participation.

It’s important for the coach who has the most experience to work with the least experienced athletes, says @YorkStrength17. Share on X

If you plan to run your sessions this way, it’s imperative to have help. I usually have two to four sport coaches working with me during this time. While it’s tempting to work with our more advanced athletes and have the sport coaches focus on the younger group, we do the exact opposite at YCHS. I spend the vast majority of my after-school program with my 0 and level 1 athletes. The sport coaches will be with our 2-4 groups. If I teach our young athletes exactly how we want to do things, I believe they’ll experience success at our higher levels with less attention. It’s important for the coach who has the most experience to be with the least experienced athletes. The only exception to this rule is the week we test.

Jump and Land Athletically

When the 8^thgrade Block 0 group first comes to us, we want to get a general idea of where each athlete stands concerning what we hope they have mastered. I also want to understand each person’s overall level of athletic ability. We do this by watching them (with very little coaching cue) hop over five short agility hurdles. I tell them to jump and land, hold the landing for two seconds, and repeat.

We chose this test because it’s a great indicator of how much time they spent in our Block 0 program. Having an athlete jump and land also gives us a rough estimate of their athletic ability. Athletes who have a good level of experience will show a level of technique that a less experienced athlete won’t—particularly how they initiate and land.

We coach the “smash the egg” technique. I cue them that they have an egg on the back of their hamstring and when they jump, they need to “smash” the egg with their calves. We also approach landing with a very detail-oriented style: soft landings initially (with more stiff and explosive techniques coming later in the process) with toe to heel progression, feet shoulder width and forward, proper lower body flexion, and upper body bent forward close to 45 degrees. They hold for two seconds and repeat the effort over each mini hurdle.

This process is especially important for our female population. Knee injury is so prominent among female athletes that we, as strength coaches, have to help them not only strengthen but learn to move efficiently. And this is part of that process. I understand the argument that athletes in sport don’t often have the opportunity to land perfectly. But I also firmly believe that teaching the correct way to absorb force and stabilize while adding strength will help an athlete make the needed corrections in less than perfect landing situations.

Teaching how to absorb force & stabilize while adding strength helps self-correction in less than perfect landing situations, says @YorkStrength17. Share on X

Following this initial observation time, we go into a coaching period. We’ll review the correct techniques and explain our cues. Then we go through the drill a few more times, this time correcting and teaching the athlete to self-correct.

Constructing Power Position and Hinge Mechanics

The next step in our evaluation is hinge progression. We begin by reviewing the power position. I can’t recall where I heard this cue, but it’s my favorite: “You’re talking to a friend in class, and you sit on the edge of a desk to talk.” Next cue is superman or superwomen position, not by the sticking chest out or by pushing shoulders back but by “squeezing your big back muscles” up and squeezing hands together into a fist in front of you. This locks the athlete into a nice tight power position with their core and back. I have them hold and release this position to get a feel. I then have them hop three times and land without adjusting their feet but by getting that feel back. I’ve found that hopping and landing without thinking about foot placement often result in the athlete finding a natural power position.

Hopping and landing without thinking about foot placement helps athletes find a natural power position, says @YorkStrength17. Share on X

Step two is to partner up the athletes and have them stand back to back. We cue “power position” and then “push back with just your butt,” and they push against each other and reset, this time taking a step away. We repeat this process until they are far enough away from each other to complete a hinge movement. One cue that’s very helpful when teaching this concept (especially with basketball players) is having them imagine themselves with their back to a basket, ball in hand. Tell them the defender is playing tight and they need to create space to make their move without fouling. Often, they instinctively sink their hips and push the butt back into a really nice position.

Once we have that established, we’ll get out the PVC pipes. The athletes will get in the power position with the PVC pipe behind them running from overhead toward the floor aligned with the spine and glutes. The athlete’s top hand will be on the top of the PVC pipe with the elbow held at a 45-degree angle. The bottom hand will be behind their back, holding the PVC pipe in and against them. The athletes hinge in this position, making sure the PVC pipe stays connected with the upper back and top of their glutes as they bend. This movement teaches the movement pattern we’re looking for very efficiently.

The last step on the first day is the wall hinge drill, which is very similar to the partner drill. We also use the wall hinge drill as a regression movement for athletes, even at a higher training age. The athlete stands at the wall a few inches away in power position and pushes their butt back to touch the wall. They then step out and repeat. They’ll hold the position each time until I cue corrections. The number one thing I correct is the athlete lifting their toes and rocking back on their heels to get their glutes to the wall.

Introducing Barbell and Bodyweight Squatting Patterns

Once we’ve taught and reviewed the hinge, we move to the squat. Each of these teaching progressions could be an article in itself, so I’ll try to give the most streamlined version possible.

Step one is the eccentric air squat with a 3-second eccentric and isometric (pause) phase and a quick concentric phase. We cue the athlete to get into the power position with hands in front, take a breath through the nose (mouth closed) to expand stomach, squeeze the back (as taught earlier) and hands, push the hips back slightly, and slowly sit back on their heels. When they hit the bottom of the squat, they hold for 3 seconds then breathe out as they pop out of the squat as quickly as possible in a controlled manner.

We’re looking for weight pressing on the heels, superhero chest, body upright with a neutral chin, and knees externally rotated tracking over the outside toe. One common mistake I see is the athlete trying to initiate movement with knees instead of hips. That gets them up on their toes and makes it hard to sit back on the heels. From this, we can tell a great deal about the athlete’s mobility.

Next, we’ll add a plate and eventually a kettlebell or dumbbell to the same movement, which gives us even more information on possible dysfunction. We evaluate from the ground up checking for ankle mobility issues, possible knee valgus, hamstring strength and mobility, and core and thoracic strength.

Our final initial step with our lower body evaluation and preparation phase is our unilateral squat progression. We don’t often get to this on day one. If we do, we start with a split squat (even though it’s not a true unilateral movement) version of the eccentric air squat and progress in the same way. Much of the process is the same.

My main cues involve the front knee since athletes often push their hips forward instead of down toward the floor. This causes the knee to shoot out past the front of the foot, throwing the shin angle into excessive flexion. Also, if the knee is out past the toe but the hips are moving down, they likely have their feet too close together in their split. There are many other things we need to look for and coach with split squats, but that’s another article.

The second day our athletes come to us, we shift to the upper body portion of our protocols. These include horizontal push, vertical push, pulls, and weighted pushes and carries. I’ll cover these in depth in a future article because upper body training—while important—has some complicated politics and philosophies that merit a full breakdown.

Stay Patient and Never Stop Teaching

I hope that this article has given you insight into how we start the athletic development process for sports performance at YCHS. We pride ourselves in physically preparing our student-athletes with an evidence-based, step-by-step process that will lead them to advanced barbell movements with heavy loads. As coaches, sometimes we’re in a hurry to have our athletes lifting heavy and doing these advanced movements. I urge you to avoid this path and instead “slow cook” your athletes.

The better prepared athletes are from a young training age, the more strength and power they'll produce in the upper levels of your program. Share on X

Whether it’s using a program like the one I’ve outlined here or another one based on similar concepts, I hope you find the program that’s right for you and your athletes. In the long run, the better prepared they are from a young training age, the more strength and power they’ll be able to eventually put out when they reach the upper levels of your program. As always, feel free to reach out to me to discuss this or any topic. If I don’t have the “why,” I can point you in the direction of someone who does.

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 concept of unstable surface training blew my mind back in the late 2000s. To help pay tuition while I was finishing up physio school, I was training at a big box gym. At that time, it seemed to make so much sense as a way to improve an athlete’s balance and, ultimately, their performance. If they can do it on an unstable surface (which is harder, right?), then I would surely be setting athletes up for huge results.

I was young and excited, and I threw everyone who would let me train them and their mother onto a Bosu ball, balance disc, or physioball. The more complex and unbalanced the activity was, the better. The clientele loved it! If you were training during this period, I am sure you had someone at some point on a balance disc, an Airex pad, or some other sort of unstable surface. Everyone was doing it!

Need to get “toned” for your wedding? Bicep curls while standing on one leg on a Bosu ball is the answer—while your arms are toning, so are your legs. It’s functional!

Want to play golf in college? Working on rotational drills while standing on a Bosu ball or half foam roll is the key. If you can swing and stay balanced on the unstable surface, then you’re going to crush the ball on the course because the ground doesn’t move!

Want to play basketball in college? We definitely need to do all of your work on a physioball and Bosu ball, so you have to use your glutes and entire body to stabilize while you get strong. No way you sprain your ankle now!

I was a genius…and everyone in the gym was blown away by my creativity. They loved that it was new and different. I had a long waitlist of clients to train with me because of a serious case of FOMO.

Unfortunately, my professors in physical therapy school didn’t help curb my “genius.” Evidence-based practice was all anyone talked about, and they were focused on all the great rehabilitation literature that came out at this time.

There were studies that showed proprioceptive training allowed athletes to improve static and dynamic postural control. It not only could have important applications for preventing injuries such as ankle sprains and knee injuries, but might also improve sports conditioning parameters.¹ When you read a bit deeper, however, those “sports conditioning parameters” likely didn’t really mean anything for your athlete’s sport. Back then, though, I missed that important part.

This research was very exciting, as it seemingly gave us a way to improve an athlete’s ability to recover balance after an injury. The research also seemed to suggest that there was a possibility of preventing injury by incorporating proprioceptive training into an athlete’s regimen. Remember this research for later in the article as I’ll come back to it.

As if this wasn’t enough, all the EMG studies furthered our obsession with how great unstable surface training was. I can’t remember a single class in physical therapy school where an EMG study wasn’t brought up in support of a reason to do a specific exercise because it “increased muscle activation.”

EMG – More Activation Doesn’t Always Mean Better Outcomes

There are numerous studies out there that highlight the increase in muscle activation levels when you train someone on an unstable surface. These studies particularly highlight the deep core and the other “stabilizing” muscles. They point out which specific exercises on unstable surfaces elicit the highest activation levels in specific muscles.

This research was great for those of us looking to hit specific muscles or areas to train up performance and do it via unstable surface training. The research seemed to support that we were doing the right things and that unstable surface training was a viable option. Unfortunately, as I came to realize later in my career, I was just looking at research and data long enough and in enough different ways to tell me what I wanted to hear. I was not critically and objectively reading the research: unfortunately, I was cherry-picking it.

The research seemed to support that we were doing the right things and unstable surface training was a viable option. Unfortunately, I was cherry-picking the data. Share on X

Want to target the obliques more than the rectus abdominis because your athlete has a serious deficit there? Have your athlete do a crunch on a physioball instead of a traditional crunch, as the research shows increased oblique activity with this variation (and decreased rectus activation). I’m not sure how or why you would assess this objectively for sport performance, but the research says you can train those obliques up if you want to!

Fast forward a decade. Today, I have quite a different lens through which I attempt to evaluate all this.

As someone who works exclusively with rotational power athletes and has taken a deep dive into the research, I know this is where the caution flare needs to be shot up for all coaches and physios when it comes to EMG studies and the subsequent unstable surface training that has been touted for over a decade. The gluteus medius is probably the most famous EMG target and my personal favorite. If you are a coach or physio, you have definitely said or heard the phrase “we have to get your glutes firing.”

It made its way through the physio ranks and into the mass media spotlight when Tiger Woods told the world his “glutes weren’t firing” after a round of golf in the mid 2010s. After Tiger said he needed his glutes firing, I am sure the sale of minibands skyrocketed for those abduction walks!

If we stop to think about this for a second, however, obviously his glutes were not paralyzed…they were doing something, right? If they weren’t, how would he have been able to walk and how was he swinging the golf club over 120 mph? This is where my head went, and I hope yours does as well.

This Misunderstanding of EMG Research and Unstable Surface Training

Through all of my research digging, I was unable to discover where the idea of needing to train the deep core and stabilizing muscles even came from. My best guess is that it’s from the rehab world, though. I did find that researchers in one study were unable to find any diagnosis or articles reporting selective deficits of core muscles in strength-trained athletes. They went on in their article to discuss how confused they are about what data even led to the demand for specific exercises to strengthen the deeper trunk muscles, in particular, or improve the ability to selectively activate them. Furthermore, they were unable to find any evidence that classical strength-training exercises (e.g., squat, deadlift, snatch, and clean and jerk) affect only “global” muscles or lead to imbalances between the muscles of the trunk.²

This was of particular interest to me as I dove deeper down this unstable surface training rabbit hole. Wasn’t that the whole reason we had people doing unstable surface training in the first place? We wanted to target those deep stabilizers that did not get hit as well in traditional strength training, right? This only further confused me as to why we all started training this way in the first place. Perhaps it was nothing more than our innate desire for something new and exciting? I kept digging.

Electromyography has traditionally been used to measure changes in externally measurable force. Muscles used to aid in joint stability can contribute significantly to electromyographic signals without altering measurable force.³This means, simply, that you can increase how much muscular activity an EMG will read in a specific muscle group by having an athlete do something in a different way, but without it necessarily being in a way that positively impacts sport performance. For example, that’s great that your gluteus medius fired 20% more on the balance disc, but did you hit the ball farther or straighter afterwards?

While you’ll naturally see increases in the stabilizing musculature activity when someone is on unstable surfaces—does it translate to performance? Share on X

If I have an athlete swing a golf club on a Bosu ball, they have to try not to fall down. To achieve this, there will often be increased activation of their glute med and other hip stabilizers. While there will likely be an increase in EMG activity in these areas, the question that I wanted to know was if they would swing any better? While you will naturally see increases in the stabilizing musculature activity when someone is on unstable surfaces, particularly in the ankles and hips, the only question that matters is “Does it translate to performance?”

Somewhere along the line, people decided to circumnavigate the final connection to performance and instead moved past GO, collected their $200, and jumped to the conclusion that unstable training improves performance because it increases muscle activity. Hence, we arrived at “If you train golfers to swing on unstable surfaces, they will be better for it.” Born at this point was Golf Digest’s Dustin Johnson swinging a golf club while standing on a physioball—classic.

The belief was that having a golfer’s “stability muscles” firing at a higher rate would transfer to better performance because they would be more stable. If we accept this level of clinical reasoning, we should be putting all of our golfers and athletes on unstable surfaces because it increases neural drive to the stability centers, which is the key factor for performance.

The problem with this line of thinking, unfortunately, is that it fails to read the next line in much of the research that addresses the impact on performance of all this increased activity in the stability centers. Above and beyond what would be necessary on the stable ground where the game of golf and many other sports are played, the benefits of unstable surface training dissipate. The increased training of these stability centers has a point of diminishing returns and has even been shown to decrease an athlete’s ability to produce power.⁴

The flare of caution on EMG studies is one of paralysis by analysis. I believe the lack of applicability to performance actually gets lost in all of the numbers and confusing scientific terms of analysis. All of this EMG information is nice to know, but its applicability and usefulness in the training of high-level athletes is questionable at best. Coaches training high school, collegiate, and professional athletes would be better off if they forgot EMG studies exist on unstable surface training.

Coaches training high school, collegiate, and professional athletes would be better off if they forgot EMG studies exist on unstable surface training. Share on X

At the end of this deep dive into the research surrounding unstable surface training, EMG studies appeared to make up a large percentage of the studies that people would use as rationale to train specific muscles and areas. The EMG argument for unstable surface training loses its steam when you view it in the context of sport and performance. Performance happens in uncontrolled environments on stable ground and requires large amounts of power output in most sports. In most cases, EMG studies on unstable surfaces occurred in controlled environments on unstable surfaces with diminished power outputs.

Rehab vs. Sports Performance Applications

This is where the real discussion of this article begins, and we need to start by drawing a vivid line in the sand.

Unstable surface training has been shown to be useful in rehab settings to improve proprioceptive skills and capabilities. That’s it. There are clear positive medium- and long-term effects to proprioceptive measures reported in studies when the athlete is not acutely fatigued from proprioceptive training.¹

Unstable surface training has been shown to be useful in rehab settings to improve proprioceptive skills and capabilities. That’s it. Share on X

Unstable surface training has not shown value in sport performance training for rotational power athletes or any other power athlete and actually has been shown to be detrimental.

That’s the line for where unstable surface training is applicable and helpful. Hopefully, that’s clear enough. Let’s go deeper into the discussion about unstable surface training in the weight room.

Unstable surface training actually should be used with caution in the weight room because it produces short-term negative performance outcomes due to proprioceptive fatigue.¹This means that if a coach preceded heavy power work with intense proprioceptive training, they could actually increase the chances of injury to the athlete because their proprioception would be acutely worse. Coaches and physios should, however, make sure to stress an initial warm-up on stable ground such as a traditional dynamic warm-up, as this showed a general improvement trend in the control group of this study¹.

Leave the Airex pads and balance discs in the closet and avoid unstable surface training as part of your warm-up with your athletes. Keep the dynamic warm-up on stable surfaces and you will set up your athletes to perform better in their workout.

In another study, unstable surface training was found to lower maximum strength and muscle activity in deadlifts. In this particular study, it did not increase performance, nor did it provide greater activation of the paraspinal muscles.⁵The deadlift is one of the most important lifts for golfers to develop strength in, and if you extrapolate these findings to other lifts, it makes you question further the value of unstable surface training to performance in other exercises.

To further this deadlift finding, another study looking at unstable versus stable surface training found that there is a mean force deficit of 29% with unstable surface training compared to similar stable training surface exercises.⁶This is HUGE! For those of you training higher level athletes, putting them on unstable surfaces trains your athletes to produce less force. Not an ideal scenario.

For those of you training higher level athletes, putting them on unstable surfaces trains your athletes to produce less force. Not an ideal scenario. Share on X

To be objective, a number of studies have found equivalent output or no difference in strength outcomes with unstable versus stable training with strength and power markers. To be fair to the faction of physios and coaches who use unstable surface training regularly, it does work, and this is for you! But—and this is a big but—these studies were only done on relatively untrained or older adults, not high-level athletes. Remember, higher level athletes saw decreases in performance when using unstable surfaces, likely due to the, on average, 30% less force created.

This research, in my opinion, is not applicable to the sport performance world, but rather the general fitness and rehab worlds. If you work with seniors or other untrained individuals where you would not recommend higher level loads anyway, there appears to be an equal benefit to unstable and stable surface training on strength gains and power gains. I would call this the “newbie gain” phenomenon. No matter what you give them, they will get better.

There is a threshold, however, where the law of diminishing returns sets in for unstable surface training and it actually starts to become a detriment as shown in the research. It is up to us as professionals to identify where that threshold is and implement appropriate progressions. If you regularly test and retest your athletes, identifying these sorts of negative changes should be simple.

I see this threshold being crossed a lot with our adult golfers who come out of rehab from other locations. Many physio clinics do not progress their patients beyond unstable surface training and low-level TheraBand training. This leads to many recreational athletes and golfers still using low-level training and unstable surface training months and even years later. Because they are not progressed beyond the initial newbie threshold, many of them have significant strength deficits relative to the demands of golf or other sports they enjoy. This, unfortunately, leads to them facing subsequent repeated overuse injuries due to low resilience.

I am guessing, however, that most people reading this are not looking to train “average.” You are looking to train elite athletes who will perform at extremely high levels and require significant stimulus to see training improvements. If this is the case, unstable surfaces are not your answer…emphatically. In fact, they are your anti-gain, as demonstrated by decreased power outputs in elite level players when training on unstable surfaces.⁴

If you train elite athletes who will perform at extremely high levels and require significant stimulus to see training improvements, unstable surfaces are emphatically not the answer. Share on X

Despite the research, golf fitness professionals and golf teaching professionals hold deeply to their personal need to work on “stability” in their golfers. And no one will argue that stability in the golf swing is important. The challenge is that the solution in golf workouts is often to use unstable surface training. Because of this, I wanted to dedicate an entire section of this article to this topic.

Training Stability and Balance in Golf

If you have been in or around the game of golf, you have undoubtedly heard people talk about the importance of stability and balance in the golf swing. These aren’t novel concepts or unique to the sport of golf.

What you have not likely heard is a unified consensus on how to best train those traits. You also have not heard how to objectively measure and define what balance and stability is in the golf swing. This is where the problem starts.

On the instructional side, many golf instructors have taken to having students hold different positions in their swing on half foam rollers, balance discs, or other unstable surfaces. This makes sense to them, as they operate under the same logical line of thinking that I did when I started training back in the late 2000s. If they can get the athletes to be “stable” at the top of their swing or impact and “feel the position,” it surely will be easier for them when they are swinging full speed on stable ground. As we saw earlier, this line of thinking is severely flawed.

There is often a huge emphasis on “turning golfers’ glutes on” in the golf swing and activating all sorts of scapular muscles, etc. It is not uncommon to hear a golf instructor tell a golfer to turn their glute med on in the back swing and/or really fire their serratus anterior on the trail side during the downswing. Oh, and simultaneously fire the infraspinatus and teres minor on the lead arm through impact to make sure you finish your release. I am not sure how this all became so ingrained in the line of thinking in golf performance. I suspect it came from the rehab world, where we physios are famous for having athletes do clamshells until their glute medius doesn’t function anymore and then telling people to “squeeze their glutes” when they walk.

At any length, we all know that internal cues are the absolute worst thing to give an athlete to think about when it comes to performance. The best instructors in the world totally understand cueing and everything that goes with it, but they are the minority, unfortunately.

Playing basketball in college, I can’t imagine my coach telling me to fire my glutes when I took a jump shot or jumped for a rebound. That’d be crazy. Yet, that is what many golfers get during their instructional lessons every day across the country.

Again, if it looks like a golf swing, it has to be good for the golfer—until you dive into the research. Share on X

In the golf fitness world, much from the influence of this line of thought, the idea of training balance and stability just morphed into putting a weight in someone’s hand or giving them a cable to rotate with. Again, if it looks like the golf swing, it has to be good for the golfer—until you dive into the research.

We see all sorts of examples of this on social media, in major golf publications, on the Golf Channel, and even in the warm-ups and workouts of the best players in the world. In most cases, I have noticed one of two extremes when it comes to “golf fitness” training.

On the one side of the spectrum is what I call the “Mystical Physio.” This approach is where athletes are trained with little more than a band in all sorts of fancy PNF and other neuromuscular approaches. The golfer (and coach) are afraid of the golfer getting hurt and so don’t use heavy weights. The claim is that they are training neuromuscular firing patterns to maximize efficiency and stay flexible. Ironically, this leads to golfers having poor resilience to the rigors of Tour travel and demands, and increases the likelihood they will be hurt. On a sad note, I have seen this approach be the death of many careers for hypermobile golfers whose only hope for longevity was getting stronger.

The other side of the spectrum is what I call the “Tortured Trainer.” We all know one. They can’t go a week without making up a new exercise and posting it all over social media to show how creative they are. There are always lots of comments about how awesome the exercise looks and how people can’t wait to try it out. The buzz builds, especially when it is a top Tour pro doing it, and next thing you know, all the golfers in the world are incorporating it into their workout.

A recent example I saw of this could only be described as a rear foot elevated jump and land in place with the rear foot elevated stance maintained, followed immediately by a rotational medicine ball throw. You might have to read that three times, but it is the simplest way I can describe what I saw. The issue here is the confusion created from adding too much complexity. The exercise often grows so complex that the skill it was originally intended to train (assuming rotational speed or single leg balance or single leg strength?) becomes so washed out that it is minimally effective, if at all.

Looking back on my early training experience while I was finishing up PT school, I was crushing the commercial gym scene with the “Tortured Trainer” approach. I wasn’t actually good at training people or writing programs to help them meet their goals. But I had a long client list as long as people liked me and were intrigued by what I was doing. The problem with this was that I had to keep making up new stuff to keep them interested and none of it was based in any sort of science or objective measure. It wasn’t sustainable and if I had measured, they probably wouldn’t have been as impressed.

Early in my physio career, I made the transition to the “Mystical Physio” approach—attempting to improve people’s movements with primal movements, rolling, minimal hands-on work, and nonexistent strength training. Again, I had a long client list and people actually thought I knew what I was doing. If I’m honest, I hit plateaus with many clients. (Basically, when they needed serious hands-on work or real strength training that I wasn’t doing).

In both cases above, I missed the middle ground and I had to learn it the hard way. Sometimes it is appropriate to add complexity to an exercise and other times neurological retraining can be magical. But neither one is ever the answer in isolation, and if you do too much of either, the results are counterproductive. They are all part of a larger training and rehab continuum; just as unstable surface training is. The more of us that can realize this, the better it will be for our athletes.

The golf performance world is improving every year and the research on unstable surface training is hopefully becoming clearer with this summary. No matter the sport or the athlete, the first place to start is always an individual evaluation to understand the demands of the sport and how well the athlete is prepared to meet those demands at a high level and without injury.

Regardless of your feelings on the above, we can all agree that the buck stops with performance on the course, field, or court.

Transference – Is It There?

At the end of the day, all of the research, training philosophies, and ideas in the world come down to one question: Does it transfer to sport? That is all that matters.

At the end of the day, all of the research, training philosophies, and ideas in the world come down to one question: Does it transfer to sport? That is all that matters. Share on X

In the world of golf, in particular, this tends to be an oversight. We tend to focus more on the “why we are doing an exercise” and “does it look like it trains the golf swing patterns.” There is a serious deficit of focus on “does this intervention actually move the needle in performance on the course?”

Coaches applying unstable surface training with a proprioceptive training effect in mind may in fact be impairing the development of important athletic qualities such as power, speed, and force output.⁴Power, speed, and force outputs will be trained at about 30% less force output compared to using stable surfaces, which is likely the cause of the development impairment seen when unstable surfaces are used. This suggests that if we want to focus specifically on proprioception training, it should be done on stable surfaces to assure strategies and patterns used in sport are used in training.

Examples of proprioceptive work that would not be detrimental to power, force, and speed outputs would be having young athletes working on proper single leg stance mechanics on solid ground while passing medicine balls to each other versus standing on one foot on an Airex pad passing balls. A dynamic example would be single leg hops or box jumps with focus on stable landing and take-off mechanics.

In adolescents and young adults, the specific comparison of stable surface training and unstable surface training resulted in contradictory findings. Thus, the use of unstable as compared with stable surfaces during strength training is not recommended in healthy adolescents and young adults if the goal is to enhance performance on stable surfaces.⁷This means that unless there is a specific injury or physical deficit in proprioception, keep the unstable surfaces in the closet for your junior golf fitness classes and your sport performance training.

There have been a number of other studies that have shown a very high statistical correlation of chest pass power, vertical leap power, total rotational power, and others to club speed, which is a direct sport performance measure.^8,9In lieu of the unstable surfaces, look at your programming and training to work on training up the skills to improve the physical traits needed to excel in these areas of power production.

What this all boils down to is that Bosu balls, physioballs, balance discs, and Airex pads should be kept in the rehab clinic. Train athletes on the stable surface they play on. Share on X

What this all boils down to is that Bosu balls, physioballs, balance discs, and Airex pads should be kept in the rehab clinic. When the athlete enters the gym to train for sport performance, train them on the stable surface they play on. In the world of golf and most other sports, that means the ground (unless, of course, they surf or skateboard—then it is likely a different scenario). If you want to train stability and proprioception in the gym, do it on the ground and add proprioceptive challenges in terms of stance widths, external upper extremity challenge, and the like.

The next time you see a colleague having an athlete jump from Bosu ball to Bosu ball or integrating unstable surface training with high-level athletes’ performance programs, please initiate a constructive conversation to improve both of your practices. We need to work together in the sport performance world to help coaches and athletes understand that adding complexity to an exercise to make it look new and different doesn’t always equate to improved performance. We need to challenge ourselves and our colleagues to keep to a higher standard—one of measured transference to sport performance.

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

References

1. Romero-Franco, N, Martinez-Lopez, EJ, Lomas-Vega, R, Hita-Contreras, F, Osuna-Perez, MC, and Martinez-Amat, A. “Short-term effects of proprioceptive training with unstable platform on athletes’ stabilometry.” Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research. 2013; 27(8): 2189-2197.

2. Wirth, K, Hartmann, H, Mickel, C, Szilvas, E, Keiner, M, and Sander, A. “Core Stability in Athletes: A Critical Analysis of Current Guidelines.” Sports Medicine. 2017; 47(3): 401-414.

3. Behm, DG, Leonard, AM, Young, WB, Bonsey, WA, and MacKinnon, SN. “Trunk muscle electromyographic activity with unstable and unilateral exercises.” Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research. 2005; 19: 193-201.

4. Cressey, EM, West, CA, Tiberio, DP, Kraemer, WJ, and Maresh, CM. “The effects of ten weeks of lower-body unstable surface training on markers of athletic performance.” Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research. 2007; 21(2): 561-567.

5. Chulvi-Medrano, I, García-Massó, X, Colado, JC, Pablos, C, de Moraes, JA, and Fuster, MA. “Deadlift muscle force and activation under stable and unstable conditions.” Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research. 2010; 24(1): 2723-30.

6. Behm, D and Colado, JC. “The effectiveness of resistance training using unstable surfaces and devices for rehabilitation.” International Journal of Sports Physical Therapy. 2012; 7(2); 226-41.

7. Behm, DG, Muehlbauer, T, Kibele, A, and Granacher, U. “Effects of strength training using unstable surfaces on strength, power and balance performance across the lifespan: A systematic review and meta-analysis.” Sports Medicine. 2015; 45(12): 1645-1669.

8. Finn, C., Prengle, B. and Cassella, A. Research Driven Golf Performance Training, Par4Success. October 2018, pp. 3-20.

9. Finn, C., Prengle, B. and Cassella, A. Eccentric Flywheel Training and Its Effects on Club Speed in Golfers: A 6 Week Study. Par4Success. April 2019, pp. 2-10.

As a result of the recent tragedies that have transpired in collegiate athletics, there appears to be an increased push by many institutional administrations for the elimination of athletic department “silos.” This coordinated integration of various independent athletic departments is an attempt to cultivate a more homogenous organization. At various higher education institutions across the country, such a merging has begun to eliminate the segregated configuration of the medical (i.e., athletic training) and athletic performance (i.e., strength and conditioning) entities into one unique “Athletic Performance” model.

Throughout my professional career, I have had discussions with members of professional sport organizations, as well as higher educational institutions, with regard to the establishment and/or continued development and management of this type of athletic department model. During these conversations, the most frequent inquiry has been: “What type of professional is qualified to lead this new model, and what are the occupational requirements?”

The commencement and management of such an athletic performance type model will require a very skilled and unique professional to assume the director’s role. As a “formal” organizational structure is beyond the scope of this blog, this dialogue will present both thoughts and guidelines for six simple strategies for the athletic performance director (APD), based on my experience as a business executive, sports rehabilitation provider, and head strength and conditioning coach. It is important to reiterate these are only guidelines offered to the reader, as there are no absolutes, so to speak. Every institutional state of affairs has its own unique concerns.

Is the Individual Candidate Qualified for the Athletic Performance Director Position?

Professionals working in their specific occupation of choice often have aspirations to eventually achieve a supervisory role. Stating the obvious, the APD should have a noted background of experience in the two diverse yet inter-related professions of sports medicine/sports rehabilitation and athletic performance enhancement training. At a minimum, they should have an extensive background in one of these vocations, as well as an extensive appreciation of the complementary profession. Optimal success for this model cannot be dependent upon an expertise in a single professional “silo” of experience.

The APD must possess the knowledge proficiency and key technical skills to both assist and advise this new model’s team. It should also be acknowledged that a weekend course and accompanied certificate of completion do not create an “expert” in any professional field of choice. The APD is the “conductor of the athletic performance orchestra” and, thus, should have a strong familiarity with all of the instruments necessary to attain the harmony desired.

The APD should also have supervisory and proven leadership experience. The ability to lead a team of professionals, organize, interrelate, and communicate—as well as work with other managerial heads and departments including, but not limited to, general managers, athletic directors, head coaches, medical (including team physicians), strength and conditioning, technology, research, video, finance, legal, compliance, etc.—in a positive manner is imperative. Just as a head coach and their team of athletes require the cooperative and coordinated efforts of all assistant coaches, senior administration, and integral related departments, so does the APD and their staff.

Don’t underestimate what a critical asset leadership is for those taking a director or senior management level role. Don’t confuse it with job proficiency and/or management abilities. Share on X

Lou Carnesecca, my former Head Coach at St. John’s University of New York (and in the Basketball Hall of Fame), and NFL Super Bowl Champion Coach Dick Vermeil both instilled in me this significant message: “The players and staff don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.” Leadership is a critical asset for all those assuming a director or any senior management level role and should never be underestimated.

This unique quality should not be confused with job proficiency and/or management abilities. The ability to perform a job well or to manage others does not directly correlate to exceptional leadership abilities. Leadership is the ability to positively influence staff and peers while simultaneously achieving the outcomes desired. This is an assumed yet often lacking quality, as demonstrated by the fact that many prominent assistant coaches have failed to establish themselves as leaders after assuming the role of head coach.

The APD should always be motivated to roll up their sleeves and work side-by-side with their staff, treating each individual staff member as a person and not an object or number. The staff should feel comfortable voicing appropriate opinions and conversations. All new staff additions should be made to feel welcome and at ease with their transition into their new department role. It should also be noted that there is a big differentiation between leadership and standing behind someone and “pushing them forward” via the scare tactics of bullying and intimidation. These destructive strategies are not only negative and demoralizing, but they may eventually become catastrophic as well.

It is important not to confuse the enactment of process with the achievement of results. Share on X

The APD should also be able to identify presently established as well as absent essential department needs, including the advancement, expansion, and implementation of the required processes for the vision and culture of this “new” department model. That said, it is important not to confuse the enactment of process with the achievement of results. Recognition of individual and department competencies, as well as insufficiencies, will help the APD make appropriate decisions for the sustained success of both staff and department.

Knowledge, skill, and role progression for the department as well as individual staff are essential for the retention of excellent staff. Failure to do this will result in stagnancy and regression, while the competition will likely continue to effectively progress forward. Thus, process and educational strategies for continued staff development in knowledge and skill proficiency, as well as valid objective testing to quantify all department strategies, must be employed. Objectivity is fundamental: If “x” is not measured, “x” will not likely change. The APD must also heed department financial budgets and adhere to project timelines. Failure to comply will derail progression and often results in a failure to achieve significant plan objectives.

Don’t forget that the establishment of this new organizational model and director role, as well as any department staff position, is entirely for the benefit of the athlete. Share on X

Lastly—and this should never be disregarded—the establishment of this new organizational model and director role, as well as any department staff position, is entirely for the benefit of the athlete, not for the advantage of any department, staff, or employed individual. Therefore, the ADP must also demonstrate the ability to relate to the athlete and their environment and prioritize the department’s obligations to the athlete in regard to medical care and athletic performance development.

Does the APD Have a Proven Organizational Model Structure?

The potential director should disclose prior success in an organizational model, philosophy, and culture as evidence to heighten the medical care and performance enhancement training of the athlete. This defined model must also positively correspond to the parent organization model. Considerations such as the number of department professionals to be employed, the variety of specific professional vocations (i.e., athletic trainers vs. performance coaches vs. nutritionists vs. additional health care professionals, etc.), and the necessary qualifications for both staff and supervisory roles are examples of some of the multifaceted assessments to be determined.

Additional considerations include, but are not limited to, the evaluation of the present-day department’s staff and existing operational methods employed to the athlete; evaluation of the medical and training facilities, equipment, and supplies; and the noted processes presently employed and intended for future implementation, as well as those to be eliminated. The APD should also be aware of the associated departments of the parent organization that are accessible to assist in the success of this new model.

The establishment of an appropriate department culture is most essential, as all staff must commit to the same medical and athletic performance philosophy, implemented process, work ethic, and goals. As NFL Hall of Fame Coach Bill Parcells has taught me, “there is a big difference between routine and commitment.” Department leaders and staff cannot “do their own thing” nor “R.I.P.” (rest in place), as a strong commitment is required for all implemented processes and programs to result in the successful attainment of all objectives.

No matter how popular an individual staff member or how long their tenure, those displaying inadequate culture, poor work ethic, and lack of commitment should not be retained in the new model. Individual popularity without the proper culture will breed inappropriate culture and likely lead to the voluntary departure of those professionals performing their role admirably due to job performance impartiality. That said, the APD must determine if an individual is truly displaying meager effort or simply lacks the tools and guided supervision for the responsibility and performance desired. At times, some staff members may lack the skill set necessary for success in their present position, and a change in role may foster the positive performance desired.

The APD must determine if somebody truly displays meager effort or simply lacks the tools and guided supervision for the responsibility and performance desired. Share on X

Performance evaluations of the department staff are targeted to the criteria of results. It is even preferable to employ an individual with just a little less talent but displaying the right positive work ethic and culture than a talented individual with a very poor work culture. There is a noticeable distinction in the performance outcomes that justifies a staff member’s existence versus a staff member “functioning” to justify their existence.

There must be a well-organized methodology with each staff member in terms of the accountability for their specific job responsibilities. Each staff member should be “managed by objectives” (MBO), whereby each individual professional is provided with specific job tasks and task completion timelines as determined by their supervisor. Provide “stretch” assignments to those who are deemed capable of tackling the larger projects.

All assignments/tasks should be SMART­—Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Trackable—in design strategy. Communication is important and should be provided for both specific and constructive feedback during each project timeline. Although all MBOs are role-dependent, when combined together, the accumulative success of MBO achievement will result in the realization of the overall structured objectives for the APD’s department and positive contributions to the parent organization.

Some guidelines for MBO consideration are provided in the RACI format below.

R = Responsible (also Recommender)
Those who do the work to complete the task. There is at least one role with a participation type of responsible, although others can be delegated to assist in the work required. There should also be a select process for identifying those who participate in a supporting role.

A = Accountable (also Approver or Final Approving Authority)
The individual ultimately answerable for the correct and thorough completion of the deliverable or task; the one who ensures the prerequisites of the task are met and who delegates the work to those responsible. In other words, an accountable must sign off (approve) work that a responsible provides. There must be only one accountable specified for each task or deliverable.

C = Consulted (sometimes Consultant or Counsel)
Those whose opinions are sought—typically subject matter experts—and with whom there is two-way communication. This individual may presently be a member of the organization (i.e., IT, research, finance, etc.).

I = Informed (also Informee)
Those who are kept up-to-date on the progress of the deliverable or task, usually a supervisor and/or APD. This may often occur only upon completion of the deliverable or task. There is often just one-way communication with an informed.

Determine Staff Responsibilities and Roles

Whenever possible, hired staff should be qualified in dual roles. If this dual role requirement is not realized with some hires, then these specific hires should be trained, over time, in a dual role capacity. For example, an assistant athletic trainer may also be a licensed physical therapist and an assistant strength coach may also be proficient in GPS implementation and data collection.

Team athletes are assigned at times, due to injury or unavoidable circumstances, to different positions in game situations. An offensive guard in football may be required to play center, a shooting guard in basketball may need to play point guard, and an assistant coach may be called upon for the role of interim head coach. If player and coaching situations arise that possibly require a dual role, why is this same preparation not instituted in a sports medicine/sports rehabilitation and athletic performance enhancement staff model?

As previously noted, staff communication is essential and should be consistent as an implemented plan of objectives, along with all accompanying processes and progressions. Individual accomplishments and ensuing accolades, as well as noted areas of concern—and yes, when appropriate, discipline—should also be conveyed to each staff member when appropriate and on a consistent basis. Communication is optimal in a two-way environment as it is essential to both listen and share information.

The APD should also arrange for regularly scheduled one-on-one meetings aimed toward each individual’s strengths and weaknesses, as well as present solutions to problems that may arise. All personnel should receive a formal written review at least biannually to ensure no unexpected surprises in job performance are presented only at year’s end. Those individuals deserving of rewards should be recognized, while those not deserving of rewards should not receive what has not been earned, regardless of popularity, position, tenure, etc. The MBOs will provide documented objectivity with regard to the achievement or non-achievement of the individual role responsibilities, state of recognition, and overall department accomplishments.

Know What Is Important and Don’t Worry About the Rest

Establishing an innovative single entity from what was previously two or more “removed” departments is a substantial task. Utilization of a S.W.O.T. (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) analysis or some form of formal enquiry of the present-day department(s) will help establish an operational starting point for the new, desired overall plan expectations. Once plan objectives, processes, and priorities are determined, attack the “elephants” in the room and don’t be concerned with the insignificant “ants.” Don’t get caught up in the minutiae. Don’t let the haunting failures of the past or the “what ifs” of the future intimidate the present.

Don’t let the haunting failures of the past or the “what ifs” of the future intimidate the present. Share on X

A well-thought-out and organized plan, including putting strong process into practice, will usually provide accuracy in predicting future results. Have the “mindfulness” to eliminate the undesirable distractions of the past and future and concentrate on the concerns of the present. Focus on the present state of affairs and determine how to successfully achieve the planned objectives.

It is important to note that when assigning initial assignments to individual staff members, these tasks should be readily achievable. Very few individuals will likely welcome and accept change positively or easily. Many will prefer the “old way” of doing things, especially if the previous organizational operation provided flashes of success. There may be occasions where the environment becomes difficult and even “turbulent,” and these events will require the APD to maintain their composure and keep the staff focused on the present strategy and objectives.

The staff’s involvement in the new process and established positive culture is a prerequisite to continued progress and success. Be sure to balance responsible work freedom for the staff while still making yourself available for advice and any other circumstances that may arise. When initiating a new organizational model/system, it is easier to achieve staff buy-in with the positive feedback of success. If the initial deliverables employed are fairly achievable and bring value, the percentages favor success. The repetitive achievement of success will then set the stage for sustained success.

There is nothing more demoralizing to an individual than consistent failure, especially when suitable work efforts have been demonstrated. Provide the proverbial “level 100” tasks before implementing “level 200” tasks to ensure that both the deliverables and the processes for achievement of the initial responsibilities are accomplished. Each successfully accomplished task will build upon future planned duties in a systematic fashion for the successful achievement of the overall objectives of the department. The ideal approach to ensure a more difficult “level 200” task is accomplished is to make certain the preceding “level 100” task was optimally achieved first.

The Similarities Between Running an Organization and Coaching a Team

During my role as a chief executive officer (CEO), I had strategic conversations with Coach Bill Parcells. I have known Coach Parcells since my time working with Hall of Fame Strength and Conditioning Coach Johnny Parker and the NY Giants players during their off-season training throughout Coach Parker’s tenure with the team. I personally believe a CEO responsible for a “business team” correlates closely with a head coach who is responsible for a “sport team.” Each scenario requires the ideologies of coaching.

I personally believe a CEO responsibility for a “business team” correlates closely with a head coach responsible for a “sports team.” Each scenario requires the ideologies of coaching. Share on X

The ability to recruit and develop players; implement administrative strategy, game plans, and personnel changes; and integrate various departments to optimize the common cause of “winning,” as well as many other considerations, are imperative in both roles. These scenarios and many more confront both the CEO and the head coach on a daily basis. Both “executive” positions require the ability to lead, communicate, and positively direct staff, as well as make appropriate, and at times difficult, decisions. Most importantly, both the CEO and the head coach must execute! Execution is the key element in the role of the CEO, head coach, and yes, APD.

An important lesson bestowed upon me years ago occurred when an NFL coach from an opposing team made an interesting comment after reviewing the game films of both the 1986 and 1990 NY Giants Super Bowl Champion team seasons. The coach stated he was looking for the “tricks”—the special plays and situations that placed the Giants above their competition. What were the NY Giants implementing that was significantly different than the rest of the teams in the NFL?

After reviewing hours upon hours of game film, he concluded that the Giants had no tricks; they did nothing “special” when compared to other teams in the league. The Championship Giants teams, and frankly all teams under Coach Parcells’ command, simply executed. They executed harder, longer, and better than their competition.

Execution is also imperative when running a business or a department within an organization. Success is highly dependent upon the execution of the organizational plan, including the department staff’s execution of their obligations for that plan. During the initial periods of an organizational change, there may be many excuses and/or defense mechanisms engaged. Staff members may occasionally present “justifiable excuses” for a lack of progress and/or a lack of objective accomplishments; however, the additional inclusion of action plans, as well as the timeline for action plan execution for correction of these deficiencies, are often nonexistent at the time of this same discussion. The choice is to accept excuses or mandate execution, and frankly, there really is no choice, as only plan execution will sow success.

Al Groh, a former Head NFL and Division I College Football Coach who was an assistant coach on Coach Parcells’ staff with the NY Giants, NE Patriots, and NY Jets, once made a significant comment that has remained with me to this day. It is important to note that prior to Coach Parcells’ arrival as a head coach to these NFL organizations, these teams were not very successful in terms of their win and loss record. Coach Groh realized that the ability to bring each team’s culture to a positive and the team record to winning was not magical, a secret, or a result of trickery. Based on his successful experiences with Coach Parcells, Coach Groh believed in the following remedy: “Get the players organized, get them disciplined, get them in condition and keep them conditioned, come up with an organized plan, stick to the plan, and the losers will eliminate themselves.”

Much of this philosophy of coaching can also be applied to any leadership administrative position, including the APD role and the department they lead. An organized and successfully executed plan, with appropriate process as well as the commitment of the staff, will go a long way. It’s all about the ability to execute a plan and the associated accountably of each role, with no tricks or gimmicks necessary. The losers eliminate themselves via their lack of plan execution.

Don’t Be Afraid to Make the Difficult Decisions

There is an old saying that “Good judgement comes from experience. However, experience comes from bad judgement.” Throughout the course of a career, everyone makes mistakes. The key is to learn from them, don’t repeat them, and over time, minimize them. That stated, don’t forget achieved successes, as you can utilize these victories as future road maps: Success generates success.

Throughout the course of a career, everyone makes mistakes. The key is to learn from them, don’t repeat them, and over time, minimize them. Share on X

Success is a strong staff motivator and a reinforcement for continued optimal performance. You should also remember that success is never final, but failure can be. Be organized and execute a disciplined implementation of a well-thought-out plan of action where every staff member is held accountable. Positively develop and enhance the knowledge and skill proficiencies of the staff within the department, focusing on the entities that can and will be measured. Eliminate all that is negative and allow for two-way communication.

Collect data for a specific purpose related to the plan of action and objectives to be achieved, not simply for the sake of the random collection of data. Base decisions on the information provided by collected data, facts, and results. Do not make decisions centered solely upon opinion, as everyone can have their own opinion but not everyone can have their own facts.

Lastly, never base sound judgment and decisions on fear, as the concerns related to the fear will likely not occur. Decisions based on fear will eventually become problematic to both the new model strategy and the staff.

Many difficult decisions will arise during the formation of this new Athletic Performance model, but if all leadership responsibilities, choices, and decisions were simple and easy, everyone would be qualified for the APD role.

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