I was having coffee with a friend of mine the other day. He’s a basketball strength coach at a Big East school, and as you would assume, he has his hands full with long, lengthy athletes, with poor postural control. If you’ve ever worked with basketball, you know what I’m talking about, a bunch of [...]
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A Need for Enjoyable Lower Body Days: 6 Week Workout Template
I was talking about different training splits the other day with an area Football Coach. I told him I favor total body lifts, as they have a high degree of efficiency and usually take up only 3 days of the week. Numerous factors go into designing workouts for teams, so he brought up some great [...]
Practical is the New Functional
I love innovation. I love new exercise variations. I love learning new methods. I love new technology. It’s fun for me to watch new trends come and go, and I enjoy trying to predict what’s coming. Over the past year, however, it’s been hammered home time and time again that practicality is one of the [...]
Combination Lifts: Wasteful vs. Meaningful
There’s definitely something to be said about training efficiently. We don’t always get an optimal amount of time to accomplish our needs, so it’s sometimes important to exercises with several movements per rep or combine lifts. Implementing multifaceted exercises has sort of stemmed from the need to feel original, get a lot done in minimal [...]
Need a “Buffet” Workout?
Sometimes we need workouts that allow for great variability when the only thing consistent with the lifter is the amount of inconsistency. They might miss a couple workouts here and there. Maybe you need to put something together that’s extremely convenient to coach, because you have one high school skier who wants to lift at [...]
Shades of Grey – Part 3
In this edition of Shades of Grey, we will explore Spinal Flexion Exercises and Olympic Lifting. If you didn’t catch the beginning of this series, I started it because I’ve been thinking about some of the things that I’ve changed my mind about through the years. These are things I used to see in black [...]
Choose and Coach Meaningful Weights
How do you choose your working weight or how do you Coach it? The weight that you put on the bar for your sets of back squat, bench press, barbell deadlift, trap-bar squat…how do you choose it? I used to be surprised when kids gave me the cross-eyed look and responded with, “However we feel [...]
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Most of Us Should Begin With This
I know everyone wants a workout that is covered in pictures of some guy with abs growing out of his abs or claims to increase your bench max by 30 lbs. in 3 weeks. C’mon you know what I’m talking about, it’s the workout in the magazine that has supplement ads every other page (that [...]
Short and Sweet: A Real 2 Day Split
I’ll flip through workout magazines at the grocery store once in a while to keep up with some of the silliness out there. A lot of the workouts I read are hardly practical or logical. It’s great when I see workouts in those magazines that are efficient and practical for the masses. I’d love to [...]
Shades of Grey – Part 2
In this edition of Shades of Grey, we will explore Single Sets vs. Multiple Sets and Training to Failure. If you didn’t catch the beginning of this series, I started it because I’ve been thinking about some of the things that I’ve changed my mind about through the years. These are things I used to [...]
Shades of Grey – Series Intro
Shades of Grey – Series Intro: When I got into strength & conditioning back in the early 90’s I was young and thought everything was black and white. That’s how things appear when we’re young. I was a hot-shot college strength coach and I thought I was right about just about everything. I didn’t have [...]
Developing a Weightroom Culture
Developing a Weightroom Culture: Effort Based Programming I get questions all the time about strength and conditioning, and I love them. Yup, I don’t think I enjoy any other topic nearly as much. I’ve been thinking of a decent topic to write about lately and I figured I’d touch on the most common question I [...]
Starting Too Heavy Vs. Starting Light
Beginning Weight “The weight you begin with, can ultimately determine how far you will go with that exercise” -Intelligent Lifter There are a handful of reasons why an exercise progression may fail. There are many reasons why an exercise fails the first time it’s performed. It could be poor technique, poor weight choice, poor effort, [...]
Don’t Have Mindless Exercise Choices
A long time ago I was doing a phone interview for a Strength Coach position. The Associate Athletic Director was actually the one who asked this question. I don’t know if she gave two shits about the answer I gave, but this was over 6 years ago and my answer to this question has stayed [...]
For the Best Traps, Do More than Shrugs
Trap Training When most of us look at the trapezius, we see the lump of muscle directly over the shoulders. It’s probably one of the most intimidating muscles when trained correctly and developed. Not too many guys pick a beef with the hoss that has traps growing out of his ears. Everyone remember Goldberg? Yup….nobody [...]
What is Neck Strength Training?
Neck training is not HIT, it’s not a strong-man competition, it’s not German Volume training, it’s not training the proprioceptors of the neck to become more explosive athletes (Even though some neck muscles have shown a high density of muscle spindles, yes, that is a knock on idiots claiming idiotic things). I’ve been watching an [...]
Don’t Do This….Ever
We’ve talked about neck training several times, and you’ve probably heard us talking about some of the crap that’s out there or unsafe exercises. If you haven’t been looking closely, you may not be aware of how bad it actually is. Well, this is an example of something you SHOULD DEFINITELY NEVER DO, but it’s [...]
Allowing Poor Technique
In no way am I a perfect rep freak, but coaches should strive for good technique in most cases. Certain exercises have a low risk for injury if performed with poor technique. I’m not saying you shouldn’t practice good form, but exercises like curls, pushdowns, pulldowns, side raises, etc. probably aren’t going to get you [...]
Glute Ham Lean with Tube Pull Combo
There are certain exercises that have a huge “bang for the buck” factor. For example, the trap-bar squat uses a lot of muscle fiber per repetition, so it has that factor. The Glute Ham Lean with Tube Pull is another one of those great exercises that can get a lot done with minimal time and [...]
Tough (Haphazard) Vertimax Conditioning
There’s dozens of ways to overload triple-extension. Olympic movements, jumping movements with dumbbells, weighted vest jumps…the list goes on. Some ways may be safer than others, easier to implement, easier to coach, or even more efficient. It’s all up to you. The Vertimax fits several of the criteria we look for, for the movements we’re [...]
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