Being a successful person in this business is a hard thing to achieve. Being considered an expert in this field is a hard thing to achieve. It doesn’t happen over night. You need to put your time in.
Of course, getting a degree in exercise science or kinesiology is a pre-requisite, but understand that it doesn’t make you better than the rest of us as soon as you get out of school. The biggest mistake you can ever make is thinking that you know everything when you get out of school. A wise man once said: “the day you stop learning is the day you start dying”. It’s very true, and even more true in the strength and conditioning field. Theoretical knowledge is an important thing to have, and something that is important to keep gaining through continuing education.
But continuing education alone isn’t gonna make you better than anybody else. In our field IT IS probably more important than any other field because of the numerous gray areas and the fact that the body is complex machine. But no matter how much you know, how much you think you know or how much you learn through continuing education, that still won’t make you a successful person in this business. You need to put your time in. If you’re already familiar with these names, odds are you shouldn’t worry about not doing enough continuing education: Eric Cressey, Mike Boyle, Charlie Weingroff, Postural Restoration Institute, Functional Movement Screen, Precision Nutrition, Alwyn Cosgrove, StrengthCoach.com, Janda. The point is, if you don’t apply what you learn, it’s worthless. “Knowing and not doing is not knowing at all.”
Putting your time in means doing actual work. Coaching, teaching, running groups, being involved with athletes. Mike Boyle referenced the 10,000 hours rule to become an expert in any given field that Malcolm Gladwell talks about in the book Outliers. It’s true. That’s how it workd in strength and conditioning, just like in any other sphere of life; you can’t expect to have success or be considered an expert if you haven’t put your hours in. Is 10,000 a discriminatory number? I don’t think so. Malcolm Gladwell gives plenty of examples of highly successful people in their respective field in his book, and every single one of them reached success around that same 10,000 hour timeline.
Putting your time in also means making sacrifices, being hungry to work more. You’re not going to get a perfect job where you work 9 to 5, earning 50,000$ a year, with paid vacations and insurance, training only professional athletes in the first 5 years of your career. You can keep dreaming and think that you are that much smarter and better than most coaches out there, but that’s just not going to happen. Period. This year at the Perform Better summit in Chicago, Mike Boyle was saying how he had been working for free for Boston University for years and had to bartend during the weekends to pay his bills before they even offered him a job with a salary! And guess what? He was 30 years old when he got offered that job! He said that most people quit this field before catching their big break.
One of my mentors, Todd Hamer, strength coach at Robert Morris University, once told me he had to work for 3 years full time without being paid and part-timing as a pizza delivery boy before having his first paid job as a strength and conditioning coach. What did these 2 guys do? They put their time in.
If you’re not willing to do that, maybe this job isn’t for you. It’s not easy and sometimes discouraging. Working in sub-optimal conditions, with groups too big, athletes too young, in a shitty facility (if in a facility at all) are all things that are part of the process. It’s called putting your time in, learning, gaining experience so one day you can reach a level of success that’s gonna make you say: “I freakin’ deserve it because I worked hard to get there!”. There are no Cinderella stories; ask any respected coach that are at the top of our business or anyone you wish you had their job. They all busted their ass to get where they are. They put their time in.
Who am I to tell you that? I’m no one special. I’m not trying to sound like I know everything or arrogant , and I certainly don’t pretend like I’m an expert or that I have reached true success in this business because the truth is that I am still working my way there. But I’ll tell you this: I’m putting my time in (note how I said that in the present time); I have worked with 8 years old group of kids, I had to make something out of nothing when I had to run sessions without equipment or any facility with my hockey players a couple years ago, I had to spend time as a personal trainer in a commercial gym for a couple of years because I had no other opportunities to train people at the time. But guess what? I learned a lot through every single one of these experiences and I wouldn’t change it for the world.
I have been in this industry for over 8 years at this point. I have struggled professionally and financially for a long time. Only for the last 1-2 years than I can say that I’m starting to be where I want to be. But I have been putting my time in. And I will continue to do so.
2 things today I wanted to bring to your attention. First one is a pretty unconventional plyometrics exercise that we’ve been using quite a bit lately at Endeavor with our athletes. The unloaded squat jump is a pretty unique exercise in that you use the assistance of bands to jump, and because of it you jump much higher. What’s the purpose of using the bands? It’s not so much about the jump, but the rebound or landing part of the jump. Because you so much higher than you would normally do, the forces you need to decelerate and re-accelerate to jump back up are much greater and that’s the biggest advantage of this exercise. Another thing is that’s really fun to do. Not that it’s that important, but our athletes love it! Check it out:
Secondly, I wanted to bring to your attention a really cool seminar that’s coming up in 2 weeks. Pete Friesen, the Carolina Hurricanes strength coach, is hosting a seminar August 13th in Raleigh, North Carolina. If you’re not too far from North Carolina, I would highly suggest you go because the line-up of speakers is pretty impressive and the price of this 1-day seminar is even more! If you’re a strength and conditioning coach, you can attend for only 50$! If you’ve been going to seminars, you probably know that you don’t find that many quality seminars you can go to for this price. I was there last year, and I can tell you that it was totally worth it. Check out the link below:
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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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It comes to no surprise to anyone who’s been successful enough in this business to understand the value of continuing education. Everything in fitness and strength and conditioning is evolving and we discover new things on a daily basis. What might be an optimal prescription for your clients and athletes today might be totally outdated in 5 years from now. Human anatomy and physiology is not an exact science; there are a lot of gray areas and researchers find new things about how the body works all the time. Bottom line is we don’t know as much as we might think.
These are the very reasons why continuing education is so important. For most people 5 years ago, doing continuing education meant buying books, going to seminars and networking with smarter people than you. Attending seminars and networking still have their place at the top of continuing education priorities; let’s face it, nothing is ever gonna compare to meeting new people and learning from them on how they view training and how they implement their knowledge.
Eric Cressey once told me “everyone has something to teach. They might not know as much as you do or have more experience, but there is at least one thing you can learn from somebody who’s been in the business for a while”. Whether it is something about anatomy, physiology, practical application, business, marketing, human relations, or anything else, you can learn something from everyone.
But the other continuing education mean, buying books might have lost some value in the last couple of years. Don’t get me wrong, I still buy books myself and the basic anatomy and physiology books are still essential to read.
Still a MUST read
But with the rise of the internet, books have taken a downfall. By the time an author has his book published, there is gonna be at least one thing that will have changed in his perspective. That’s mainly because by the time an author finishes writing a book, there might be some time passing by before the book finds its way on the shelves, sometimes up to 2 or 3 years! This is why the internet has came in so handy; information easily and quickly accessible. Of course with this great solution arises a major problem; the information you find on the internet can be, well, full of crap. Anyone can put information on the web, nobody controls it and we end up with so many self-proclaimed internet experts who actually don’t train anyone and are just good at selling themselves. But I digress. If you know where to look for for quality information, that pretty much eliminates the problem.
So the internet has brought us some easily and quickly accessible information that is more updated than books in general. But as I just mentioned, you need to know where to look for. Granted that it’s not always easy to find good websites and good blogs out there (I’ll come back to this later).
What has made our job even easier are the social networks. Good articles, blog posts, websites, videos, etc. just became so easy to find with Facebook and Twitter!
What first was a network to connect with old friends and stalk people, can actually be an amazing learning and networking tool. When Facebook first became popular, I was pretty much against it and saw it as a waste of time. But then I gave in to the social media wave that struck our entire society (seriously, who isn’t on Facebook in 2011?). But I still thought it was a little retarded and didn’t really see any use to it, other than posting thoughts that nobody cares about or stalking people.
And then, when I started my blog last year, I started posting links to all of my blog posts on Facebook (hey, that might just be how you heard about my blog in the first place!), and slowly realize that a lot of strength an conditioning and fitness professionals did the same thing. So I created myself a Twitter account and did the same thing and link to all my blog posts on there too. And at this point, Facebook and Twitter have pretty much became professional tools for me, and I know they are for so many other people too (I would say that 60-70% of the time I use Facebook is for professional use, and for Twitter it’s literally 100% of the time). I’m friends on Facebook and follow on Twitter over 100 strength and conditioning professionals who want to network or who post links to good continuing education material, whether it’s their own blogs and articles they wrote or just some other peoples’ material.
Honestly, it is so easy to access quality information and network with reputable professionals with Facebook and Twitter. You don’t even have to browse every individual website or google everything, once you’ve built your network on Facebook and Twitter. Follow the people you like, friend them on Facebook, “Like” their company or their product; it is THAT easy (and by the way, they will all accept your friend’s request even if they don’t know you; they understand how it works). Once you’ve established that, it doesn’t get any simpler than that. Just log in to Facebook and/or Twitter and check your “News Feed”; you’ll have plenty of quality information to read from!
The other cool thing is that you can tag these same people in your posts and send them direct messages. It’s an easy way to get in touch with them. Even if most of them are super busy people, most of them are very accessible will almost always answer your messages (if you’re polite relevant, of course).
Stay tuned for my next blog post, I’ll tell you who to follow on Twitter and who to “friend” and “like” on Facebook for quality information!
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This year marks the first time in probably over 10 years that I finished all my holiday shopping more than 2 days before Christmas! Hopefully you did too! But if you still have gifts to buy to people around you who are either athletes, a coaches or just fitness enthusiasts, here’s a couple of ideas that you might want to consider.
This might be the perfect gift for anyone who doesn’t have access to a good coach or trainer, or anyone who doesn’t want to spend hours writing his own programs and going through trial and error to find what works. Eric Cressey has done an outstanding job with this product, and he’s basically eliminating the guessing work one needs to go through when building his own training programs. Show and Go is a proven system that has been put to the test by many before Eric actually launched the product. It provides you with 16 weeks of programs that guarantee you the results you’re looking for. The whole Endeavor staff has been on the Show and Go system for the last 10 weeks, and we’ve ALL made tremendous gains in both size and strength! Click HERE to get your copy now!
This is a great gift idea for anyone involved in hockey training; whether it’s for a player or a coach, a membership to HockeyStrengthandConditioning.com is a gift that will help them get better. Some of the brightest minds in hockey training are behind that website; names like Mike Boyle (Boston University), Sean Skahan (Anaheim Ducks), Mike Potenza (San Jose Sharks), Darryl Nelson (USA Hockey) and Endeavor’s own Kevin Neeld are all contributing to the website to help develop better hockey players. For less than 10$/month (less than 100$/year if you pay all at once), a membership to this site will guide any hockey player in the right direction when it comes to his training. What’s even cooler is that you have the option of signing up and getting a 30 day trial for only $1! If you’re not satisfied with the content (which won’t happen trust me!) you can just cancel you subscription. Click HERE to get the 30 day trial.
With the new year coming up, for all these people making fat loss related resolutions, the Precision Nutrition System is definitely the ideal present to guide them through their lifestyle and nutritional changes that will lead them to their results. The Precision Nutrition System includes everything you need to help you make necessary changes in your eating habits in order to get results; everything from cookbooks to online support through the Precision Nutrition website, everything is included. The price is currently down from $147 to $97 for the whole system, so order now!
So if you need a last minute gift for the athlete or fitness enthusiast in your life, one of these should be a perfect fit.
On a side note, as I’ve mentioned last week I’m working on a couple different projects. One of them is related to my website and my readers; stay tuned next week for a special announcement as well as a thank you gift for my readers who have been following my work!
One thing that people overlook too often is the reason why they’re training in the first place. I see too many people who don’t keep their goal in mind when they train. And I’m not only talking about the athletes or fitness enthousiasts themselves here, I’m also talking about the coaches and trainers. Everybody wants to workout hard and do unique style training using all kinds of fancy equipement that they perceive as being magical tools to achieve their special needs.
Impressive….but stupid
Too often people will judge of the training they’re doing by how tired they are at the end of the session and how sore they are the next day. How ridiculous is that? A wise man once said:”every trainer can make you tired, not every trainer can give you results.”
Google “workout tired”….this is what comes up
This couldn’t be more accurate. Whatever you do, make sure you ALWAYS keep your training goals in mind. Never judge your level of fatigue after a workout as an accurate measure for your goal achievements. Never use soreness either as an indicator of your progress.
If you’re training to improve speed, it doesn’t make sense to do interval based work with short rest periods; you will get tired quickly and you won’t be able to give a 100% on every effort. Same thing goes for people who do crossfit type training (as it seems to be the new trend) and are looking to increase their strength and power for sports peformance.
What’s all the hype with that crossfit stuff anyway?
I do think that there are many pros and cons to consider with this crossfit thing before you get into it, but using crossfit for sport-specific performance is totally ridiculous; doing tons of reps with minimal rest is not going to improve your strength and power for anyone with more than 2 years of lifting experience. Also the risk to benefit ratio with crossfit is not worth it if you’re an athlete, as you often perform complex movements with a high level of fatigue. And as I’ve mentionned times and times before, doing distance running or aerobic based training to improve sport-specific conditioning for anaerobic sports like hockey, football, soccer, lacrosse and the like is equally idiotic.
But I’ll stop here as I feel I’m starting to bitch a little too much here. The take home message is this: always keep your training goals in mind whatever you do. Consider what you really want to achieve; whether it’s to increase your speed, increase your power and strength, lower your body fat or gain muscle. Plan your training in a smart way and be consistent with your goals and train accordingly. Also accept the fact that it’s ok to leave the gym not tired sometimes, and it might actually be more beneficial to your results.
People, especially young athletes, want to train like professionals. They want to do the same type of training their favorite athlete is doing. And why wouldn’t they? If they got to that level it’s got to be because of the way they train, right? Or maybe not…Let me give you a couple reasons why you might want to reconsider training like a pro athlete.
1. Athletes generally don’t know more than you do. Athletes are people just like everyone else, and because they are professional athletes doesn’t mean they know everything there is to know about training or anything else. Granted, they have tremendous skills and physical abilities to perform and they have a lot more training experience than the Average Joe. But the fact is, they are no experts in human anatomy or physiology and they chose to train in certain ways because they have been told (or convinced) by some trainer or coach that it was the best way to do things. And the fact of the matter is that, the trainer/coach in question could be a very knowledgeable one and he might really get it; but it’s also highly possible that on their way to the top, the athlete in question met a meathead trainer who’s a better salesman than he is a trainer and the athlete could’ve fallen for it. Bottom line is, some train smart and some others don’t, but it’s definiltely not because they are professionals that they actually do things right.
2. Don’t confuse what an athlete has been doing in the past versus what he’s doing now. What I mean by that is that athletes might not train the same way or with the same trainers/coaches their whole life; what they did to bring them to the top might be totally different than what they’re doing as an established pro athlete. Many D-1 Colleges have very good strength and conditioning programs that help their athletes get faster and stronger. After spending 4 years in college busting your ass and gaining strength in a good training system will do wonders for you when you turn pro. And when you get there you might do something totally different, but as long as you train you’ll be able to maintain most of those gains.
Whatever Darrelle Revis is doing right now in his training, he gained a lot of strength during his time at the University of Pittsburgh, who’s recognized for his good strength and conditioning program.
3. Money. The sad truth is, because an athlete endorses a training or fitness related product doesn’t mean he actually uses it. Big companies pay big money to have sports icons endorsing their product; it’s called marketing. It doesn’t mean the athlete swears by it nor that he uses it at all.
Did you know that T.O. actually have shares in that bands’ company?
I’m sure Sidney Crosby never even tried a pair of Zigtech…otherwise he would’ve realized how much they suck
4. Pro athletes need more rest. With all the stress, the injuries, and the incredible amount of practices and games pro athletes face on a yearly basis, they might actually need more rest than training. Of course, it all depends on the sport they play, and the length of their season; every sport faces different demands and require different amount of rest. But take into consideration that the pro level (in most sports) is the level where the volume of training (including practices, games, and strength training) is at its highest. So in order to recover, athletes may need more time off. All of this means that what some athletes are doing for their training might be geared more toward recovery rather than actually be geared toward making more gains. Some may train less or take more weeks off during the off-season. Understand that they face different things on a daily basis, and what might be optimal for them, might not be for you.
All in all, make sure what you do in your training is geared toward reaching your goals, but that it is also adapted to your situation, your strengths and weaknesses, your injuries and your schedule…in short, it should be individualized to YOUR needs.
Unless you have been living in a cave with no internet access for the past 6 years, you have probably heard of Eric Cressey before. Eric is one of the industry’s leaders in strength and conditioning. He is a well established coach, writer and business guy as he’s been owning his own facility for the last three years and has been coaching thousands of athletes in different sports. Eric is also an accomplished lifter himself as he used to compete in powerlifting and he still deadlifts well over 600 pounds to this day.
Eric is also a VALUABLE source of information with all the material he’s written. I would recommend all of his articles and products to anyone trying to become a better strength and conditioning coach. To say that I have learned A LOT from Eric during the past few years would be an understatement. Here is just a couple of things I have picked up from him lately. Enjoy!
1. Taking care of shoulder health is more than just strengthening the rotator cuff.
If you want to have healthy shoulders, you obviously need to take care of them in your training. If you do some stretching and some strengthening exercises for the rotator cuff and think it’s taken care of, well, the sad truth is that you are leaving out a lot of very important factors that play a huge role in shoudler health. Here is a list of all the things you should consider when working with people with bum shoulders or when trying to keep shoulders healthy:
1. Soft-tissue quality (primarily pec major and minor, levator scapula, scalenes, lats and rotator cuff)
2. Scapular stability
3. Thoracic spine mobility (in extension and rotation)
4. Range of motion at the gleno-humeral joint
5. Tissue length of the following: pec major and minor, levator scapula, lats and biceps.
6. Rotator cuff strength
7. Hip and ankle mobility of the opposite side (as the shoulder have fascial connections with these 2 joints)
8. Breathing patterns (as breathing through your chest instead of your belly can lead to over stressing muscles like the pecs and scalenes)
As you can see, there is a lot to address to prevent/treat shoulder injuries, and these factors happen to be even more important when dealing with athletes from sports like baseball, swimming and basketball, as these athletes put tremendous amounts of stress on their shoulders.
2. Soft tissue work and flexibility work go hand-in-hand.
Almost everyone by now knows that tissue length and tissue quality are of paramount importance to stay away from imbalances and injuries. But did you also know that these 2 need to be combined for optimal results and lasting changes. Once you work on your soft-tissue quality, whether it is with foam rolling, ART, Graston or just good ol’ massage, you should work on tissue quality right after.
Once you have removed the adhesions (or knots) in your muscles, doesn’t it make sense to stretch them right after, before you have new adhesions/knots reappear? In fact, right after soft-tissue work, your muscles are more pliable and less resistant to any change in length, so you should take advantage of that time to “re-educate those tissues on how to deform properly” as Cressey put it himself.
3. Get out of those high heels!
Wearing conventional “high heeled” sneakers with a lot of cushioning and support around the ankles are probably the worst thing you can do to your feet and ankles. It limits your range of motion at the ankle (especially in dorsiflexion) and it modifies the way you walk and run as you don’t have to absorb ground forces as much as all the padding in the soles is doing the job; your feet are basically becoming lazier. You are also losing a good amount of proprioception in your feet as they are separated from the ground by a 1-2″ cushion. And as Cressey said it himself: “…wearing sneakers has really screwed up the way people run, and in my opinion, has caused the exponential rise in injuries among distance runners.” That doesn’t mean we should all ditch our sneakers, but I think we should definitely make better footwear choices. Nike Frees, Puma flats and Vibram Five Fingers are all better options as they keep you closer to the ground.
Although not yet socially acceptable, this is probably the best footwear choice you could make!
Doing more barefoot stuff (like warm ups and deadlift) in our training is another way to go as it will reestablish proprioception in our feet.
If you’re interested to learn more from Eric Cressey, I would suggest you check out his website and sign up for his FREE newsletter!
I mentioned in a previous post that single exercises like reverse lunges, back leg raised split squats and 1-leg squats can have great value in a training program as it improves your strength, your stability and your balance on 1 leg, which is the way most sports are played. Whether it is when you run, when you change direction, when you skate (if your sport is played on the ice) or when you decelerate, all of these actions take place on one leg at a time.
For these reasons, single leg exercises might be more “functional” than 2-legs exercises like squats. Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely love squats, but they might not be as useful as single leg exercises when it comes to transferring strength gains to your sport. You just need to know which one to use and when.
For many years I have been a big fan of single leg exercises as they help develop strength and balance in the knee extensors (quadriceps), hip extensors (glute maximus and hamstrings) as well as hip abductors (glute medius) and hip adductors (adductor magnus, longus and brevis) all at the same time. But I have to say that I have always been hesitant to use single leg exercises as a main lower body lift in the past because I always thought that you could load 2-leg exercises like the squat a lot more than you could with single leg exercises. And more loads also equals better strength gains….Well that’s what I thought a couple months ago….Not anymore.
With all the athletes we’ve seen at Endeavor this summer, I am now convinced that you don’t NEED 2-leg exercises to significantly load a lower body exercise and see great strength gains.
We’ve had numerous hockey players use over 225 pounds for a barbell reverse lunge with a front squat grip, a couple of them going up to around 265! These guys were D-1 College players or Junior League players around 18-19 years old.
Here is Endeavor athlete Charlie Vasaturo, 19 years old, doing reverse lunges with a front squat grip with 255 for 6 reps:
This is also not uncommon to have younger kids(around 14) do dumbbell reverse lunges with over 50 pounds in each hand.
Here is a video of an other Endeavor athlete, Conor Landrigan, 14 years old, who started training with us about 6 months ago and had pretty much no lifting experience before that. Here he is doing a dumbbell reverse lunge for 6 reps with 65 pounds in each hand:
The fact is that once you get used to the movement pattern of a single leg exercise, you can load them up almost as much as you can with 2-leg exercises like squats(in fact, we have our athletes front squat as well and their number are not that much higher than they are for reverse lunges and split squats).
So don’t be affraid to use a single leg exercise as your main lower body lift, as you will be able to load them significantly, your strength gains will transfer better to your sport and you will improve your balance in a sport-specific way.
Becoming a better athlete means a lot of things. It takes EFFORT. Of course you want to be surrounded by good coaches, have a good training program to help you achieve the best gains possible, but without effort, you’re going nowhere. As strength coach Christian Thibaudeau once said: ”You can have the worst program in the whole world, if you bust your ass, you will still make a lot more progress than someone with the greatest program in the world who doesn’t work hard”.
It couldn’t get more accurate than this. Every athlete willing to get better and reach the next level is always seeking for the best strength coach/trainer out there with the best program; one that will have that “magical ingredient” to his programs that nobody else has heard of and that will make their gains skyrocket.
Let me clear something out; I am all for good programming and I truly believe that every athlete should have a program that suits their needs. But let’s be honest, there is no such thing as a magical training program that will bring you to the next level. Once you’ve covered all the essential components, all you need to make the greatest gains possible on a specific program is to put all your effort and dedication on it.
I’ve seen way too many athletes in my career looking for the perfect program that would take them to the next level. I’ve seen way too many guys like this who talked the talk, but didn’t walk the walk. Success is guided by effort, dedication, sacrifice and commitment.
Your training program is just a piece of paper after all. It’s what you decide to do with it that will guide your success.
