Don’t Forget the Basics

As a college strength and conditioning coach for nine years, I’ve come across many different types of training programs, and I’ve used many different types of training when working with my athletes. The one thing I’ve learned is that most programs and coaches usually try and put the cart before the horse, doing too much too early and forgetting the basics. In strength training, there are so many ideas and methods of training that it seems like new ones pop up each day. The sad truth is that we’ve become so enamored with the bells and whistles of training that we’ve forgotten the basics of movement and strength development. In this article, I’ll discuss how I train athletes with a “ground up” approach. I will also discuss our lifting progressions and why we use these progressions with our athletes. For clarity’s sake I’ll be talking about football, and how we deal with our football program. We begin our teaching progression for our three main training movements (bench press, back squat and hang clean) when our players report for fall camp. Regardless of strength levels, we break everyone down to remedial training during camp, mainly because I want to reinforce the technical aspects of training at least twice per year – the second time we do this is during spring practice – to all of our players. During camp, on days where we only practice once, we’ll usually train in the morning and practice in the afternoon. We’ll start off with our simplest movement, then move toward the more complex. We use these progressions because this teaches solid lifting technique and strengthens the prime movers and stabilizers used when performing the movements. Below, I will go through our entire lifting progression during camp, and our transition to our in-season program. * Daily Warm-up: Jumping Jacks x 20, Push-ups x 10, Sit-ups x 10, Leg Raises x 10, Body Weight Good Mornings x 20, Trunk Twists x 20 Each Way, Crunches x 100. Also we will include our daily Hurdle Routine along with Weighted Ab work during the training. As you can see, once we get through all of our lift progressions, we then move into our normal training where we will perform a push/pull style of training. We will squat twice per week during the season, whether it be on our push day or our pull day.

By not forgetting the basics and by spending time focusing on technique and lifting progressions, I’ve seen great strength gains. Better yet, I’ve seen better technical progress by athletes throughout their careers than I did before I implemented this system. As stated earlier, we’ll also go back through our progressions during spring practice. However, when we do that, we’ll do just one day of each progression, not two, since spring practice usually lasts about four weeks. This also allows for my players to really hit the ground running during the off-season and summer program, since they’re usually coming off a technical phase of training. If anyone has any questions about our training, I’m always more than willing to talk about it. Take care, and good luck.