Wednesday, April 26, 2006

The schedule of how to develop strong legs part three

The schedule

how to develop strong legs

Part three:

The third series will be high load and long rest periods of two to four minutes between sets.

The exercises are squats, calf raises, and regular dead lifts with six to eight sets of four to five repetitions.

Repeat the three part schedule after a two session rest break. I guarantee you will have added size and strength to your quads, hamstrings and calves if you follow these suggestions.

The schedule of how to develop strong legs part three

The Schedule

how to develop strong legs

Part three:

The third series will be high load and long rest periods of two to four minutes between sets.

The exercises are squats, calf raises, and regular dead lifts with six to eight sets of four to five repetitions.

Repeat the three part schedule after a two session rest break. I guarantee you will have added size and strength to your quads, hamstrings and calves if you follow these suggestions.

The schedule of how to develop strong legs part two

The schedule

how to develop strong legs
Part two:

The next series is one of front squats, one legged calf raises, and good mornings with high repetitions and short rest periods. Do three to five sets of twenty on all squats, deadlifts and calves. Stay on this schedule for three to four weeks then rest again for two sessions. Continue to eat very well without piling on the fat tissue.

The schedule of how to develop strong legs part one

The schedule

how to develop strong legs
Part one:

After a warm up start with four sets of eight repetitions in the free weight squat, but don't make yourself sick while doing them. The puke factor is NOT in effect here. Go all the way down and all the way back up in your full range of motion. Don’t get into the habit of doing high squats. Do each one right; deep and deeper. Start with the bare bar if you have to but do them right each and every time. Rest between sets last long enough to catch your breath and get your pulse back to about 75% of your target heart rate.

Once you are able to do four sets of eight then on your last set do ten repetitions for two consecutive times. If you are able to do the extra two repetitions then add 10-20 more pounds of weight and repeat the four sets of eight repetitions again with the new weight the next time you lift.

Follow the squats with stiff legged dead lifts for four sets of twelve repetitions.

Now do your calves with high repetitions (12-20) for standing and low repetitions (8-10) for the seated ones with four sets of each version.

Do this for four to six weeks and then take a two session break.

How to develop your legs

How to develop your legs

That is a great question that is asked frequently. The short answer is this: You have got to start squatting with free weights and increasing your caloric intake to make those legs grow bigger. Get off the machines and under the bar.

Let me explain. Most people are able to do more on a machine because the balance factor is not in play on a machine. The machine holds the bar by keeping it in a certain predetermined groove and eliminates most, if not all, of the proprioceptive feedback, so learning the technique is non existent. The end result is decreased benefit to your targeted musculature.

Most people aren’t able to do as much weight on the bar as in the machine. Don't be worried about the load on the bar right now. Just lower the weight, get under the bar and start doing them technically perfect with the free weights.

Keep in mind that age, diet, genetics and gender will have a bearing on how big you can get. There are two ways to increase the size of your muscles: Sarcoplasmic and Myofibrillar, represented in the former by an increase in the sarcoplasm, the interfibrillar semi fluid and in the latter by an actual enlargement of the muscle fibers. Getting large but useful muscles will be dependent upon increasing the size of the fibers and not the fluids that go between each one. Read more strength tips...

Now on to a specific plan of attack:

Get your doctors approval before beginning a new exercise program.

Weigh yourself once a week on a specific day, just as soon as you get up in the morning and after having gone to the bathroom.

Buy a diary and begin writing everything down that you eat or drink and at what times

Keys to growth

Eat five to six balanced meals each day. Space these out at regular intervals of two to two and half hours apart. You have to increase your caloric intake to grow. Don't eat junk food or if you do at least keep it to a minimum. Stay well hydrated by drinking enough to keep your urine looking pale yellow.

Get good rest. Sleep is essential to growth.

Get off the machines and start doing free weight squats with the bar on your back. Find a good NSCA certified coach and learn how to do them correctly.

Exercise the legs three times a week with at least a days break in between each session. None of these should last more than 50-60 minutes. Just get in, lift and get out. Have sips of a sports drink or water before, during and immediately after your lifting times. Once completed and within the first thirty minutes begin to replenish the nutrients that have been used up to start the repair process going. During the first thirty minutes get protein and carbohydrates into your body (chocolate milk is nearly the perfect blend to drink at this time) Within the next two to three hours eat a well balanced meal with a bit more protein and carbohydrate mix to it.

Overtraining Part 2

In last week’s article, I offered the suggestion that as trainers and coaches, we must take a deeper look at how we program for and train our athletes. I have made a career out of advocating for the use of more moderate training intensity’s and volumes with young athletes, but this goes even further - it goes to the route of our programming abilities and skills. How much time do we truly spend in designing, monitoring and dynamically adjusting our training programs?

General overtraining syndromes impact both the central nervous system as well as the endocrine system. Given that the regulation of many hormones within the endocrine system serve to oversee and manage our stress levels, it is fair to imply that general overtraining could be considered a stress related issue.

Two types of general overtraining have been recognized -

1. Addisonic Overtraining - This version is related to Addison’s disease and involves a reduction in the activity of the adrenal glands. This class of overtraining impacts the parasympathetic portion of the autonomic nervous system, but shows no striking signs at first. A general stagnation or dip in an athlete’s performance (day-to-day) may be an indication or symptom.

2. Basedowic Overtraining - This version is connected to thyroid hyperactivity and named after Basedow’s disease (also known as Graves’ disease). This class of overtraining impacts the sympathetic portion of the autonomic nervous system and brings with it a host of identifiable symptoms (reduced reaction time, tire easily, poor motivation, appetite and sleep requirement changes).

I offer these two definitions in an attempt to encourage us all to take a closer look at our athletes when they walk in our doors. As I mentioned in last week’s article, over the past number of training sessions, I could see subtle signs of both these overtraining conditions in the actions and reactions of my athletes. The Winter Holiday (complete with inappropriate nutrition and sleep deprivation) had combined with Final Exams Week (complete with undue amounts of psychological stress, inappropriate nutrition and sleep deprivation) leaving many of my young athletes looking and feeling lethargic. That isn’t to say that notable extraneous circumstances alone (i.e. Winter Holiday coupled with Finals) will always account for a potential overtraining situation, in fact, very often it can be quite subtle -

- Broke up with girlfriend or boyfriend
- Received a ‘C’ in math
- Doesn’t understand English homework
- Is freaked out about driver’s test coming up in a few weeks

These all may seem like no big deal to you and I, but I again encourage you to think back to your high school days - some or all of these issues can be devastating to a teenager and feel insurmountable.

And these represent only psychological concerns... how about physical ones? -

- Baseball coach makes your athlete stay after school to lift with the team 3X/week
- Football player has to test 1RM on bench, squat and clean in a month - decides to go to the school gym everyday to train for it (and then comes to you later on that afternoon for your session)
- In gym class, your athlete had to run 2 miles for the schools’ standardized testing requirements (and then had to perform push-ups, sit-ups and rope climbing)
- The track and field coach makes your athlete go through a killer, vomit-filled workout full of running and sprinting because he wants his throwers to have a tough mentality

We all must look to generate close, special relationships with our athletes and be firm on the notion that the first thing we do when these kids walk into our training room is ask them how they are - take 5 minutes to learn about what’s going on in there lives today. How do they feel? How was school? How are classes? Learn to understand who each of your athletes are as people and allow this to help guide your programming.

That brings me to a particular point on programming I have long stood for -

Coaching is an art.

With all the periodization dogma and ‘scientific means’ of designing programs out there, the truly special interaction of application and relationship seems to be a dying art in our industry. I certainly believe very much in the science of what we do, but there is so much more to coaching than just understanding principals, exercise selections and executions.

As Mel Siff wrote in ‘Facts & Fallacies of Fitness’ -

“The organization of training is as much a matter of art,
trial-and-error and intuition as it is of science”

Aside from talking with your athletes and actively watching their abilities day-to-day, here are some ideas to put into your training programs and routines:


This article could have gone on forever about periodization dogmatic philosophy and the potential concerns of training athletes in only 6 - 8 week increments when a longer-term approach is so clearly warranted... I opted not to take it that way, but will say that in an effort to stay away from overtraining issues, as a practitioner, steer clear from selling your services to young athletes in short time frames. Understand that technical education alone can prolong a training routine beyond 6 weeks and that the expectations (either because they are assumed or because you are promoting them as such) are that this will be a high energy, butt-busting 6 weeks within which my vertical will increase 8" and my 40 will come down 2 tenths..............

Regularly plot technique days into your athletes’ training weeks. These by nature are low to moderate intensity/volume days and also serve to add to your athletes’ repertoire of lifting skills. I use a lot of Hybrid lifts in my training routines during various parts of the year (I will be discussing Hybrid lifts in a future article). In short, Hybrid lifts are two or more exercises strung together in a sequence. Some examples could include -

- High Pull/Hang Clean/Push-Press
- Shrug/Hang Clean/Front Squat
- RDL/High Pull/Full Clean/Push-Press/Overhead Lunge

Hybrids are great at increasing base levels of fitness and adding technical merit to an athletes’ lifts. In order to add to my Hybrids (or any other type of lift for that matter), once a week when my athletes come in, we will warm-up, learn a lift, practice it, cool-down and go home. To all you ‘intensity-crazed’ trainers out there, that sounds annoyingly easy I’m sure, but my athletes’ get to actually learn something, concentrate on important biomotor abilities aside from just strength or power development (I didn’t say that warm-up was easy), and keep there biological levels in check.
Here’s what a technique day may look like for me -

Warm-Up (15 minutes)

- Hip PNF (draw diagonal patterns across the sagittal midline of the body with accompanied hip internal/external rotations) - 3 sets, 10 reps/leg

- Hip Circuits (ROM movements performed in sequence while on all-fours) - 3 sets/leg, 8 reps/exercise

- Leg Raises (single-leg ROM activity while lying supine) - 3 sets/leg, 3 reps, hold each position for 5 seconds

- Prone Stability (elbows & toes, lifting 1 leg off the ground and holding for 2 - 3) - 3 sets, 8 reps/leg

Technique Development (15 minutes)

I will demonstrate one lift (likely using a whole-part-whole method). Each athlete will then take there time and attempt the lift themselves (bar is un-weighted and all other athletes in this group are actively watching the lift in order to provide constructive comments and/or learn visually)

Once the lift feels good for everyone, we will try it un-weighted within a Hybrid sequence. For example - today, I taught my athletes the staggered stance push-push. Once everyone tried it and began to fee comfortable, we add it to a sequence of exercises -

Hang Clean/Front Squat/Push-Press

Everyone will perform this once or twice until it feels comfortable

Training Time (15 minutes)

Now, we can use our new technique is a training sequence (keeping both the volume, intensity and load moderate).

Sequence (with 4 athletes) -

1. Hybrid Sequence - 1 set, 5 reps total
2. Stretch Piraformis (statically) - 30 seconds/leg
3. Posterior Reaches - 1 set, 15 reps

Athletes rotate through this sequence until everyone has gone through it 3 times.

We would then proceed to a cool-down.

So... we’ve had an hour training session that:

- Wasn’t high intensity
- Didn’t work hard at increasing a vertical jump
- Didn’t impact the athletes’ 40 time

But it was:

- Effective at not eliciting an overtraining response
- Taught a young athlete a new lift that now can be utilized whenever needed
- Worked to increase hip ROM and strength (which is HUGE)

You must as a coach inquire and keep records as to your athletes RPE during a workout - not so much during each rep, but certainly per session and perhaps per set. It is so much more than physical numbers that must be followed when constructing a training program. Correlate your athletes RPE responses to the time of day, portion of the week, part of the year - ascertain why at certain times they may be less ‘upbeat’ than others. This type of subjective reading is crucial in making the program as cohesive as possible for the athlete. Objective numbers just don’t tell the whole story and in fact, incorporating subjectivity into your analysis and dynamic adherence to a training program is often called Cybernetic Periodization.

Also record how skillfully exercises are performed. Although next week you are scheduled to reach for a max effort with your athletes, if you truly take a strong look at how well they are performing each exercise, you may opt to change or ratify your agenda. Create a rating of technique scale within which you record how well the exercise is being executed. This type of subject feedback is crucial in monitoring the effectiveness of a training protocol. Don’t make this scale terribly difficult to incorporate - design it as a scale ranging from 1 - 5 and define what each scores means so you have a working and practical measurement.

Brian Grasso is the Executive Director for the International Youth Conditioning Association (IYCA). The IYCA credentials professional Trainers and Coaches throughout the world as certified Youth Conditioning Specialists. Visit www.IYCA.org for more information.

Overtraining Part 2

In last week’s article, I offered the suggestion that as trainers and coaches, we must take a deeper look at how we program for and train our athletes. I have made a career out of advocating for the use of more moderate training intensity’s and volumes with young athletes, but this goes even further - it goes to the route of our programming abilities and skills. How much time do we truly spend in designing, monitoring and dynamically adjusting our training programs?

General overtraining syndromes impact both the central nervous system as well as the endocrine system. Given that the regulation of many hormones within the endocrine system serve to oversee and manage our stress levels, it is fair to imply that general overtraining could be considered a stress related issue.

Two types of general overtraining have been recognized -

1. Addisonic Overtraining - This version is related to Addison’s disease and involves a reduction in the activity of the adrenal glands. This class of overtraining impacts the parasympathetic portion of the autonomic nervous system, but shows no striking signs at first. A general stagnation or dip in an athlete’s performance (day-to-day) may be an indication or symptom.

2. Basedowic Overtraining - This version is connected to thyroid hyperactivity and named after Basedow’s disease (also known as Graves’ disease). This class of overtraining impacts the sympathetic portion of the autonomic nervous system and brings with it a host of identifiable symptoms (reduced reaction time, tire easily, poor motivation, appetite and sleep requirement changes).

I offer these two definitions in an attempt to encourage us all to take a closer look at our athletes when they walk in our doors. As I mentioned in last week’s article, over the past number of training sessions, I could see subtle signs of both these overtraining conditions in the actions and reactions of my athletes. The Winter Holiday (complete with inappropriate nutrition and sleep deprivation) had combined with Final Exams Week (complete with undue amounts of psychological stress, inappropriate nutrition and sleep deprivation) leaving many of my young athletes looking and feeling lethargic. That isn’t to say that notable extraneous circumstances alone (i.e. Winter Holiday coupled with Finals) will always account for a potential overtraining situation, in fact, very often it can be quite subtle -

- Broke up with girlfriend or boyfriend
- Received a ‘C’ in math
- Doesn’t understand English homework
- Is freaked out about driver’s test coming up in a few weeks

These all may seem like no big deal to you and I, but I again encourage you to think back to your high school days - some or all of these issues can be devastating to a teenager and feel insurmountable.

And these represent only psychological concerns... how about physical ones? -

- Baseball coach makes your athlete stay after school to lift with the team 3X/week
- Football player has to test 1RM on bench, squat and clean in a month - decides to go to the school gym everyday to train for it (and then comes to you later on that afternoon for your session)
- In gym class, your athlete had to run 2 miles for the schools’ standardized testing requirements (and then had to perform push-ups, sit-ups and rope climbing)
- The track and field coach makes your athlete go through a killer, vomit-filled workout full of running and sprinting because he wants his throwers to have a tough mentality

We all must look to generate close, special relationships with our athletes and be firm on the notion that the first thing we do when these kids walk into our training room is ask them how they are - take 5 minutes to learn about what’s going on in there lives today. How do they feel? How was school? How are classes? Learn to understand who each of your athletes are as people and allow this to help guide your programming.

That brings me to a particular point on programming I have long stood for -

Coaching is an art.

With all the periodization dogma and ‘scientific means’ of designing programs out there, the truly special interaction of application and relationship seems to be a dying art in our industry. I certainly believe very much in the science of what we do, but there is so much more to coaching than just understanding principals, exercise selections and executions.

As Mel Siff wrote in ‘Facts & Fallacies of Fitness’ -

“The organization of training is as much a matter of art,
trial-and-error and intuition as it is of science”

Aside from talking with your athletes and actively watching their abilities day-to-day, here are some ideas to put into your training programs and routines:


This article could have gone on forever about periodization dogmatic philosophy and the potential concerns of training athletes in only 6 - 8 week increments when a longer-term approach is so clearly warranted... I opted not to take it that way, but will say that in an effort to stay away from overtraining issues, as a practitioner, steer clear from selling your services to young athletes in short time frames. Understand that technical education alone can prolong a training routine beyond 6 weeks and that the expectations (either because they are assumed or because you are promoting them as such) are that this will be a high energy, butt-busting 6 weeks within which my vertical will increase 8" and my 40 will come down 2 tenths..............

Regularly plot technique days into your athletes’ training weeks. These by nature are low to moderate intensity/volume days and also serve to add to your athletes’ repertoire of lifting skills. I use a lot of Hybrid lifts in my training routines during various parts of the year (I will be discussing Hybrid lifts in a future article). In short, Hybrid lifts are two or more exercises strung together in a sequence. Some examples could include -

- High Pull/Hang Clean/Push-Press
- Shrug/Hang Clean/Front Squat
- RDL/High Pull/Full Clean/Push-Press/Overhead Lunge

Hybrids are great at increasing base levels of fitness and adding technical merit to an athletes’ lifts. In order to add to my Hybrids (or any other type of lift for that matter), once a week when my athletes come in, we will warm-up, learn a lift, practice it, cool-down and go home. To all you ‘intensity-crazed’ trainers out there, that sounds annoyingly easy I’m sure, but my athletes’ get to actually learn something, concentrate on important biomotor abilities aside from just strength or power development (I didn’t say that warm-up was easy), and keep there biological levels in check.
Here’s what a technique day may look like for me -

Warm-Up (15 minutes)

- Hip PNF (draw diagonal patterns across the sagittal midline of the body with accompanied hip internal/external rotations) - 3 sets, 10 reps/leg

- Hip Circuits (ROM movements performed in sequence while on all-fours) - 3 sets/leg, 8 reps/exercise

- Leg Raises (single-leg ROM activity while lying supine) - 3 sets/leg, 3 reps, hold each position for 5 seconds

- Prone Stability (elbows & toes, lifting 1 leg off the ground and holding for 2 - 3) - 3 sets, 8 reps/leg

Technique Development (15 minutes)

I will demonstrate one lift (likely using a whole-part-whole method). Each athlete will then take there time and attempt the lift themselves (bar is un-weighted and all other athletes in this group are actively watching the lift in order to provide constructive comments and/or learn visually)

Once the lift feels good for everyone, we will try it un-weighted within a Hybrid sequence. For example - today, I taught my athletes the staggered stance push-push. Once everyone tried it and began to fee comfortable, we add it to a sequence of exercises -

Hang Clean/Front Squat/Push-Press

Everyone will perform this once or twice until it feels comfortable

Training Time (15 minutes)

Now, we can use our new technique is a training sequence (keeping both the volume, intensity and load moderate).

Sequence (with 4 athletes) -

1. Hybrid Sequence - 1 set, 5 reps total
2. Stretch Piraformis (statically) - 30 seconds/leg
3. Posterior Reaches - 1 set, 15 reps

Athletes rotate through this sequence until everyone has gone through it 3 times.

We would then proceed to a cool-down.

So... we’ve had an hour training session that:

- Wasn’t high intensity
- Didn’t work hard at increasing a vertical jump
- Didn’t impact the athletes’ 40 time

But it was:

- Effective at not eliciting an overtraining response
- Taught a young athlete a new lift that now can be utilized whenever needed
- Worked to increase hip ROM and strength (which is HUGE)

You must as a coach inquire and keep records as to your athletes RPE during a workout - not so much during each rep, but certainly per session and perhaps per set. It is so much more than physical numbers that must be followed when constructing a training program. Correlate your athletes RPE responses to the time of day, portion of the week, part of the year - ascertain why at certain times they may be less ‘upbeat’ than others. This type of subjective reading is crucial in making the program as cohesive as possible for the athlete. Objective numbers just don’t tell the whole story and in fact, incorporating subjectivity into your analysis and dynamic adherence to a training program is often called Cybernetic Periodization.

Also record how skillfully exercises are performed. Although next week you are scheduled to reach for a max effort with your athletes, if you truly take a strong look at how well they are performing each exercise, you may opt to change or ratify your agenda. Create a rating of technique scale within which you record how well the exercise is being executed. This type of subject feedback is crucial in monitoring the effectiveness of a training protocol. Don’t make this scale terribly difficult to incorporate - design it as a scale ranging from 1 - 5 and define what each scores means so you have a working and practical measurement.

Brian Grasso is the Executive Director for the International Youth Conditioning Association (IYCA). The IYCA credentials professional Trainers and Coaches throughout the world as certified Youth Conditioning Specialists. Visit www.IYCA.org for more information.

Overtraining Part 1

I have long supported the notion that the zeal many Trainers and Coaches show with respect to conducting high intensity training sessions with young athletes is akin to the unsure actor who feels a need to ‘over-do’ his or her role in a given appearance for fear that the audience may disapprove of his acting ability.

Almost like a ‘they paid for it and now I must deliver it’ mind set.

As a Coach, you sometimes feel as though you must have your athletes walk away from a training session dripping with sweat and barely able to open their car doors. After all, if they don’t feel as though you are ‘training them hard enough’, they may opt to go and seek the services of a different Coach.

The problem is that overtraining syndromes are not hard to develop with adolescent athletes and must be recognized as an issue with respect to programming.

For ease of explanation sake, let’s just say that if your athlete walks into your training center at what would constitute a normal biological level, and if your training stimulus was at an intensity that would enable the athlete to dip below this normal biological level, but not be too much so as to not be able to ascend into a level of supercompensation, then, well... that would be good.

But there are energy’s in the world that effect an athletes recoverability from a training session (you know... recovery... that’s the part of the training routine during which your athlete’s body actually makes improvements and gains).

For example:

- Nutrition
- Emotional Stress
- Sleep

Let’s examine those individually for a second.

Nutrition

I communicate with my athletes daily as to what they should be eating and when. The problem is that they are teenagers who don’t always listen to everything as much as they should! Also, they are not solely responsible for this particular issue in their lives. Mom or Dad have a strong say in what the food selections are in a given week (‘cause they are the ones who typically pay for the groceries). More over, my teenage athletes don’t often cook dinner for themselves and very often have to deal with hectic class schedules and sometimes teachers who restrict snacks in class, both of which serve to make eating meals at regular intervals difficult.

I am not embarrassed to say that even though I have very open lines of communication regarding nutrition and other issues, I too have athletes walk into my facility who haven’t eaten anything for 5 hours. Maybe not the time for a ‘ass-kicker’ of a work out??!!

Emotional Stress

I have brought this point up far too many times and had adults tell me something to the effect of ‘kids don’t have stress... wait until they’re out in the real world’. That is shear garbage. First off, think back to when you were in high school. Assuming you took your academic life seriously, how stressful did you find tests, exams, term papers?? I know I felt a great deal of stress in my adolescent years due to school pressure (you wouldn’t know that to look at my high school report card, but I digress...). Add to that dealing with boyfriends and girlfriends... you know the one... she was the one you were going to marry, remember? Dare I say, the adolescent years are chalked full of emotional tugs-of-war that are exasperated by two relatively forgotten points -

A. Kids are kids. They don’t have a ton of life experience so the stress they are facing is the severest that they know. You can look at your life and think high school was a breeze compared to what you’re going through now, but teenagers don’t have this reflective capability... their frame of reference is restricted to their experiences.

B. Teenagers, in most cases, have not yet developed certain life coping skills that see them through particular issues. As an adult, I can talk with my young athletes about their problems and offer solutions that they couldn’t see because my coping skills are more advanced than theirs. Need-less-to-say, emotional stress is a very real concern in the life of a teenager and can dramatically effect their ability to recover post workout.

Sleep

The two best examples I can give with respect to sleep (or more appropriately, sleep depravation), happened with a few of my athletes over the past couple of weeks.

A. Over the Winter Holiday recently, I noticed many of my teenage athletes coming into my facility for a 2:00pm workout looking absolutely exhausted. Upon probing them for information as to why, their response was that they had just woken up. Because of the Holidays, they were staying up until 4:00am and not waking until 1:00pm. Forecast three weeks later, now these very same athletes are still looking exhausted because once school started again, they couldn’t seem to re-regulate their bodies to going to bed at a reasonable time and waking up at 6:00am.

B. Connect that example to the fact that Finals have just concluded in the school district nearest my training facility. Like many students, many of my athletes spend hours studying - very often at the expense of sleep.

The reality is that I council my athletes daily as to nutritional habits, sleeping patterns and stress reduction, but they are still teenagers and in many cases are going to do what they want. The one leverage I have however, is their training routine. I control the strings on intensity!!

This is an important issue to reflect on however. How many young athletes in our culture are over stressed, over tired and nutritionally deficient?

Now, how many Trainers and Coaches could care less and still program nothing but intense-filled training sessions.

Brian Grasso is the Executive Director for the International Youth Conditioning Association (IYCA). The IYCA credentials professional Trainers and Coaches throughout the world as certified Youth Conditioning Specialists. Visit www.IYCA.org for more information.

Teaching Basics

Teaching Basics
By - Brian J. Grasso

In the initial phases of training with a young athlete (technically referred to as General Preparatory or GPP), the undeniable key and focus (outside of fun!) should be aptitude development. This aptitude should transcend to both movement-based skills in their basic elements (balance, jumping, throwing, linear and lateral motion progressions etc) as well as strength-based exercises. I have always firmly believed that basic squatting techniques, for example (along with squatting variations and unilateral efforts), should be introduced into the training sessions of young athletes.

That being said, how does one begin the process of teaching movement habits.

When working with truly young athletes (6 - 7 years old), one needs to adopt a progression template within which to work. No template can ever be applied to 100% of your athletes 100% of the time - that is the beauty of coaching; understanding what to apply, when and for how long (i.e. knowing when to progress or regress on an individual basis). Trust me when I say that no system is foolproof and that any strength coach or trainer that claims to ‘have all the answers’ is completely full of crap. For that exact reason, one of my industry hero’s is Mike Boyle.

He is a) straight to the point with no fluff and b) bold in his assertion that he is still developing and evolving as a coach himself.

After 10 years of working with young athletes, I have reached one undeniable conclusion - the more I learn, the more I realize I don’t know and the more I want to change my methodologies.

Having said that, these are the first three progressions I use in teaching a movement habit -

Skill: Lateral Deceleration

Firstly, break key points down into skill sets that are easy to remember so that kids can recite them both to you and to themselves (this makes teaching and cuing much simpler). I have four points I want my athletes to learn/know/commit to memory with respect to lateral deceleration:


Bend your knees and drop your hips
Be on a flat foot or slightly on the ball of the foot
The toe/foot of the decelerating leg should be square to the angle of the body (i.e. not out)
The foot placement should be outside the box (the ‘box’ is a reference to an invisible line drawn from the shoulder to the floor. Any placement outside of that line is good; within or too close to the line will result in a poor deceleration and potential injury).

Have kids understand each of these items individually and then in conjunction with each other.


Progressions:

These represent the first three of my progressive steps:


I. Repeat Statically - have the athletes assume an athletic position or stance. From here, they will ‘hit’ the decelerating position upon command. Be patient with this step and make sure all your athletes are comfortable and competent with the motion. Add fun to this by calling out different legs unpredictably.

II. Repeat Dynamically - when you feel your athletes are ready, have them perform one or two moderately paced side shuffles prior to ‘hitting’ the decelerating position. The side shuffles should be slow and easy. At this point, you will begin to ascertain if further teaching is necessary (it likely will be). With the additional movement prior to the deceleration, a common mistake you will see is athletes not planting their foot outside of the box far enough. This results in a poor alignment and a less than satisfactory deceleration (even at these slow speeds). My colleague, Lee Taft, calls this a shoulder sway (because the shoulders lean towards the decelerating leg rather than sitting back in a ‘braking’ type position). I love this term and reflects what the actual concern looks like.

III. Repeat Randomly - Now that the athletes are comfortable with the motion, create games and situations within which they react to a particular signal and move (unpredictably) different directions. On your ‘point’ for example, the athlete will take one or two moderately paced side shuffles and then ‘hit’ a deceleration. Have them hold the position so that both you and them can ascertain what is right and wrong with their posture.


Brian Grasso is the Executive Director for the International Youth Conditioning Association (IYCA). The IYCA credentials professional Trainers and Coaches throughout the world as certified Youth Conditioning Specialists. Visit www.IYCA.org for more information.