Flaw #2 Chasing Too Many Rabbits

This section is a bit more basic then the prior. By the heading, I’m suggesting that

your program has no real direction; you are trying to accomplish too many goals without

proper focus on one. Your body needs to be stressed enough towards one training goal for

it to adapt properly. I think part of the problem is that coaches typically do not even have

a specific goal when designing their training programs. A days training might look like

this:

This

specific training

day is

unstructured. The National Strength and Conditioning Associate prescribe sets and

repetitions for different training goals. To the develop power the recommendations are 3-

5 repetitions, strength 1-6 reps, (I personally break this into two types of strength;

maximal 1-3, general strength 3-6) hypertrophy 6-12 reps, muscular endurance > 15 reps.

So with that in mind, which of those goals would the above training day be

accomplishing? Unstructured workouts like the above are very common in a high school

weight room.

Now, the caveat is that when you have someone brand new to weightlifting, like a

scrawny freshman. Anything will get them stronger for a short while because of neural

adaptation. This is how coaches get in trouble and personal trainers make money.

Coaches will see their kids getting stronger and think it’s a good program. But, they will

quickly plateau and soon accomplish nothing with this program. Personal trainers benefit

from this because they can do almost anything with a new client and see almost

immediate results.

So, what would a properly designed training day look like for developing

strength? Something like the following makes more sense. Can you tell what the training

goal is here?

Now this

is a very

basic and cookie cutter training session to get a point across. There is much more that

goes into developing a proper training session. Getting into great detail is not the point of

this initial article. Instead, I am merely getting you to start to think about your training

program in detail and what you can do to improve it.

So let’s recapped what we learned from our first two “fatal” flaws. First, to

develop power an athlete must be both forceful (strong) and be able to produce large

velocity. Secondly, it makes no sense to attempt to develop power before an athlete can

produce at least moderate amounts of force. Third, your freshman and sophomore athletes

will benefit much more by just focusing on getting them as strong as possible. Fourth,

break up your yearly routine into individual periods with specific goals (hypertrophy,

strength, power (if they’re capable). Lastly, make sure each training session during that

time period addresses that specific goal.

I will be addressing the final three fatal flaws in the coming weeks. In the mean

time take a look at what your athletes are doing in the weight room and ask yourself if it

is following any of my proposed guidelines. You can learn more about me and some of

my philosophies by visiting my blog and reading my about the author page.

http://exerciseopinions.blogspot.com/p/about-this-blog.html.

Thanks for reading and feel free to ask questions. I look forward to hearing from you and

I hope I can help as much as possible.