Coming Up With Strength and Conditioning Principles

This is turning into a cool little exercise for me. After 5 years at Morehead, I finally looked at our S&C page on the website. It's bad. Judging by what is written, this was put up well before I got here. I'm not knocking whomever wrote it. It's just way out of date. So, I just started the process of writing a new one. As of late I have been reading a lot of stuff by Boyd Epley (Nebraska), Buddy Morris and I've spent 2 of the last 4 weekends with Wendler. Lots of training going through my head. I have training principles, but truthfully, I've never really written them down. In my "Training Shit" notebook I have several pages with ideas, beliefs and philosophies. The only issue, in my opinion, is that they're not very concise. My cool little exercise is to really dive into my notes and create a very concise, simple explanation of my training principles. This will serve 3 purposes that I came up with without any thought.

1. It'll serve as our new S&C webpage.
2. It'll force me to "trim the fat" and really get down to what I believe in.
3. It will be the presentation that I give when recruits come in. I already do this, but I can make it much cleaner and easier to deliver.

What I've started with is this list (in no particular order):

• Ground Based Movements
• Multi-Joint Movements
• 3 Dimensional Movements
• Train Explosively
• Triple Extension
• 3 Methods of Strength Development (ME/DE/RE)
• Increase Lean Muscle Mass
• General Strength
• Performance
• Injury Prevention
• Train the Proper Energy System
• Progressive Overload
• Olympic Lifting
• Power Lifting
• Bodybuilding
• Train the Body How it Performs in Sport (Total Body)
• Sprinting, Jumping, Bounding, Tumbling
• Mobility/Flexibility
• Balance

This is a whole bunch of stuff. Some of the language is stolen from books and people that are smarter and much more eloquent than I. none the less, they just said it better than I could. My goal is to get all of this and fit it neatly and concisely (this word is stuck in my head today) on to 2 typed pages. Why two? Because it will force me to be very clear and not say more than I need to. Young and old coaches alike, this might be a good exercise for you. Old guys, like me, I'm going to assume you know what you're talking about, so this can be a great way to see if you're still following your principles or if you need an overhaul. Young coaches, you don't really have any principles, yet. You just regurgitate what you've been told or what you've read. Put some stuff on paper and then look at your program. Does your program do what you say it does? From experience doing this with one of my assistants, no, it doesn't. You're saying the right things, but you're not doing them. Make sure the doing matches up with the saying. Again, I'm assuming you understand what is necessary when it comes to developing muscle mass (bodybuilding), strength (power lifting) and power (Olympic lifting, jumping, sprinting). This is the perfect time of year for this stuff to be bouncing around my head. I should come up with something good. I'll post the final copy once I've finished it.