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Subscribe to this list via RSS Blog posts tagged in Technical Proficiency

Posted by on in Coaching Development

There is nothing better than my Mother’s home made Thanksgiving dinner, 4000 calories of turkey, gravy, stuffing, salad, and enough pumpkin pie to feed a small army. In order to make it through without passing out, it’s mandatory to eat one bite at a time. Failure to do so can cause some serious indigestion, nausea, and a quick trip to the men’s room.  Indigestion can also occur in the weight room. Although our athletes don’t fill their bellies with turkey dinner, they do fill their minds with auditory, kinesthetic, and visual cues. Take home point: Don’t over coach! Repetition is the mother of success. If your athletes spend more time listening to muscle insertion points and the finer hip angle of the hang clean, you need some ex-lax because indigestion is just around the corner.

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Who cut the cheese in the weight room? No, I ‘m not referring to the passing of gas; I’m referring to the QUALITY of movement and exercise selection. Too many times we as coaches sacrifice quality for quantity, quality for load, and quality for inflated ego. Any time your clients/athletes engage in training, the smell test must be passed! To pass the smell test: three questions MUST be answered with a YES. If not, your weight room will smell worse than yesterday’s left over’s.

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As Coaches, few of us are fortunate enough to work with college/professional athletes on a weekly basis. Genetically gifted individuals who are strong, skilled and relatively easy to coach. I refer to this population as ” auto pilot” athletes. Give them direction, demonstration and they can make a bad program look good! In contrast, a young, hyper-mobile teenager whose only experience in a gym was a dodge ball class in high school is quite another story. I am fortunate enough to work with both populations.  I train youth athletes (ages 13-18), and many of my Athletic Development Programs in the summer cater to the college and professional athlete (hockey players). Regardless of training experience, our clients represent our product!  Coaching is an art, and many times the best coaches can get the most accomplished with the least amount of verbal interaction. Below are five ways to enhance “technical proficiency” in the weight room without over coaching.

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It’s truly sad that in this day and age we have not set a firm bar/measure of strength in the weight room.  Bench press, front squat, trap bar dead lift maxes have all been inflated to show unrealistic numbers with sub par form.  The truth behind the reality is that coaches inflate their own egos just as much as their athletes’ bench press numbers. The results are arbitrary.  Want to get your athletes strong?  WORK!  The Wikipedia definition of work states: “In physics, mechanical work is the amount of energy transferred by a force acting through a distance.” In the strength and conditioning world, work is defined as the weight (gravity acting on the bar/object) multiplied by the distance the object travels.  If we as coaches don’t set the distance the bar travels, how can we accurately measure our athletes’ strength gains?  The truth is we can’t!  In fact not only do we set inaccurate standards, we guess, which further sets our profession back. 

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