Two days ago, we started having staff lifts again at Endeavor.  For the past 4-5 months, we all have been doing our own thing by ourselves.  The reason being that we had different schedules that didn’t really allow us to all lift together.  Prior to that, me and Kevin have been consistently lifting together for over a year and a half.  Going into the summer and starting to lift by myself didn’t seem that bad of an idea; it was allowing me to wok on things that might be a little more specific for me (injury preventions strategies, limitations, personal goals, etc) instead of having one program for the whole staff.  It was also a good thing to just be able to lift whenever I felt like it and didn’t have to accommodate anyone’s schedule.  And there I went, getting on that journey all by myself, with no set program to follow, just figuring what I would be doing the day of.

Some ideas sound look good in theory, but when you put them to the test…

By doing that, I was slowly doing less and less every training session, being less and less motivated and in the last couple of weeks especially, I felt like I was just training because I needed to.  I wasn’t looking forward to it anymore.  But the worst part of all of this is that I didn’t really realize any of those things until recently.  I’ve always been keeping a training log in the form of a blog for the last 4+ years.  I’ve been doing this because it’s an easy way to keep track of everything, make sure you’re not losing previous training programs, easy to track back previous months and years of training and because it’s free.  Sure it’s there for everyone to see, but I don’t really care about that as I do it for myself and for the convenience of it.  That being said, Lately I was looking back at those last months of training and noticed a couple of things:

• My training volume was really low
• My upper body pulling volume was really low
• I probably missed more training sessions in the last 4 months than I have in the last 4 years
• I progressively stopped conditioning
• My numbers were really not impressive (not that they ever were, but considerably weak for me)

I also noticed recently, as I’ve mentioned earlier, that the idea of lifting weights was becoming less and less appealing to me.  Coincidentally, I had a talk with Kevin about 2 weeks ago and he brought up the idea of doing staff lifts again as he was surprisingly feeling in a similar way I was.  This is pretty much when I realized how unproductive my training sessions had become recently.

I was getting there…

So I wrote a staff training program last week, and me and Kevin were planning on starting to lift together again.  I also happened to e-mail the program to Matt, Karl (the 2 other coaches at Endeavor) and Jared (our boss) as I thought they might be interested in giving the program a shot.

Two days ago, me and Kevin started the new program and Jared jumped in.  Yesterday, Matt also joined us.  I was just thinking that the lower body lift we just did the 4 of us together would have probably crushed me a lot more if I would’ve done it by myself.  It was pretty hard, and I know that I would’ve struggled to finish it.  But training with the boys made it so much more enjoyable and more easier to go through.  I still felt out of breath the whole time and I sweated like a pig, but knowing that these 3 other guys were going through the same thing as me made me just suck it up and push through it. There is a team cohesion component to lifting as a group.  You know that the other guys are going through the same thing as you are, everyone is struggling when the training is hard, and we all have the same end goal: finish the program.  There is also probably an ego component to it; you don’t want to quit or slow down as the other guys keep pushing through it.

Sometimes it’s good to lose what you’ve had for a little bit to realize how great it is.  Do yourself a favor: find a training partner (or training partners) that have similar goals as you, and I can guarantee your progress will skyrocket.

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Sometimes it’s funny to realize how things happen.  There are certain ways of doing things, certain trends that we never really question and we just go with the flow.  It’s part of our life, of our daily routine, but we never questioned why things are the way they are in the first place.  And when you realize why the things are the way they are it makes sense, but at the same time it’s the stupidity of convenience that took us there.

Pretty vague for a blog post intro, right?

Let me explain….

It all started with me reading the book Movement by Gray Cook (which I’m not completely done reading yet).  Well, let me start off by saying that it’s definitely a must read for any fitness and strength and conditioning professional.  Going through the book I learned a lot about how to assess movement, see the body and movement patterns as wholes, not separate muscles and individual segments.  But there were also many ‘Ah-ha!” moments for me in the book.  One of these “Ah-ha!” moments was about the evolution of the fitness business.  I’ll take a step back from specific strength and conditioning and specific sports training here…

Seriously, you need to read this book.

 When you’re educated and competent enough, whether you’re a strength coach or a personal trainer, you know that machines are not the most optimal and functional options for healthy clients and athletes.  But the reality is that across the world there are still plenty of coaches and trainers that still put their clients on these machines.  I’m still not sure if it’s because they don’t know any better, if they’re REAAALLY lazy and don’t feel like coaching simple movement patterns or they’re just completely retarded.  But seriously, if you’re reading this right now it is a sign that you are looking for new information and I won’t teach you anything about why machines are not optimal for strength training.  But have you ever asked yourself the question: “how does this machine epidemic started?  How did the idea of locking someone into a restricted, unnatural movement pattern that doesn’t require any stabilization from the rest of your body came up?

You definitely need GREAT coaching skills for this…

If we ever thought about it, we each might have our little theory.  This one might just be the best one so far….

“In the early days of weight training, trainees took the time to learn to squat properly with full range of motion, balance and control.  They developed a strength platform built on a good squat pattern, but modern attitudes disregard the benefits of slow, steady development and consistent acquisition of the squat skill (…).  We started thinking more of exercises than of movements.”

“We saw the obvious benefits of training the legs with the squatting exercises.  Some people couldn’t do these exercises (…).  We modified the general exercise rather than correcting the flawed movement patterns displayed by the trainees.  Moving weight became more important than moving.”

That’s quoted from Gray Cook in the book Movement.  I think this is right on the money!  And that’s how we started modifying exercises to fit people’s limitations.  Using heel lifts, doing quarter squats, and then the machine was the modification all the way down the chain.  The squatting pattern was used to create a machine that would put you in a seated position, where you don’t have to support the weight of your body and where the involvement of stabilizers is minimized because of the guided movement pattern and the support of your torso on a back rest.  That machine is called a leg press.  That’s how it started…

People wanted to workout without realizing the importance of movement patterns.  So as good as our society is at finding quick fixes, we created easy ways for people to exercise without the need to move well first.  We’re more focused on developing muscles than quality of movement.  And this is where we stand today.

From one point of view, I can see the convenience of making exercising very accessible to pretty much everyone, without any consideration for how well you move of your fitness level.  But at the same time, how did we get there in the first place?  Why would we need to develop muscles and cardio-vascular capacity without moving well first?  When doing so, we’re just putting fitness on top of dysfunction.  So we keep making those dysfunctions worse and worse by putting fitness and muscle tone on top of that.  And it obviously leads us to overuses and injuries.  Moving is exercising.  In today’s society we need to encourage people to move more, to be more active, for adopt healthier lifestyles for all the reasons that we already know.  But does it mean that we need to put everyone on machines to develop muscles before any consideration for movement quality?  I don’t think it has to be the answer.

Moving is exercising.  There is no shame on starting at the bottom of the pyramid and focus on what matters.  Development of fitness comes after, once movement patterns are developed and controlled.

It’s crazy how things happen sometimes…

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Although my blog is mostly about strength and conditioning, this post could apply not only to strength coaches, but also to personal trainers, sport coaches or any kind of teacher in the fitness business.

The way we communicate to our athletes is one of the most important thing in our job.  If we can’t get an athlete to execute an exercise or a drill the way we want them to, we failed to do our job, whether it’s because of inappropriate coaching or because of an athlete’s physical limitations or whatever other reason.  In the end it’s still our fault if they don’t do something the right way.

That’s why coaching cues are so important and how we communicate them is of utmost importance.  One of the mistakes I made as a young strength coach when I started in this field a couple years ago, like most coaches who want to help their athletes, is over-coaching athletes.  You want to do everything the right way, and you want your athletes to perform everything perfectly right away.  Because of that, we end up overwhelming our athletes with coaching cues.  We tell them to get their chest up, shift their hips back, keep their weight on their heels, keep their chin tucked back, and keeping their shoulders packed back before they start a new movement.  How do you expect somebody to apply all of those things at the same time?  And then, when they don’t get it right away, we just cue them on every single rep they perform and stop them 3 times in the middle of their set to explain something.  This will cause a couple of things:

• athletes get confused by too many coaching cues
• they can’t apply any of them because they have too much going in their head at the same time
• they’ll get annoyed with you for talking  too much, and not letting them lift

Over-coaching biceps curls…my favorite!

In the end, too many coaching cues will negatively affect the outcome.  The KISS  principle(Keep It Simple Stupid) applies very well here.  When showing a new task (an exercise, a drill, a movement pattern, etc) you should give a very simple description (say as little as possible) of what you want the athlete to achieve and keep your coaching cues to 1 or 2.  This will ensure that the athlete doesn’t get confused with what he has to accomplish and can focus on one thing or two and execute it as best as he can.  Adjust your cues from there with how the athlete responds and reproduces what you taught him.  When gaining experience teaching specific exercises or skills, you also learn which coaching cues work best for different exercises in most cases (I say “most cases” because there are always exceptions).  Also, it’s okay to let your athletes do a couple reps wrong once in a while (as long as it doesn’t get dangerous for them), and just talk about it with them when the set is over; they need to differentiate what should feel “right” and what should feel “wrong”.  And in some cases, they might just need a couple extra practice reps to apply what you cued them to do.

All in all, the more you coach, the less you coach.  By that I mean, the more experienced you get, you’ll find yourself saying less and less; you’re not becoming careless, you’re just becoming a more efficient coach.  Your athletes will get better quicker, and they won’t get annoyed with you for trying to over-coach them.

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Ok, today (and this whole week for that matter) has been absolutely crazy! Therefore I don’t have much time to write a blog post today.  I very rarely do this, but I’ll just give you some links to stuff you should definitely read that I came across lately.  Check this out, and I’ll be  back next week with fresh content I promise!

In-Season Training, by Kevin Neeld

Black and White or Black and Blue?, by Kevin Neeld

Your Arm Hurts? Thank Your Little League, AAU and Fall Ball Coach, by Eric Cressey

The Truth About Real Butter