‘Tis the season once again. The pre-season that is!

On July 14th, TrainHeroic took part in the PLAE xLab at Colorado State University in Fort Collins. PLAE’s events are based on different themes. This one was focused on technology. Speakers from UCLA, Clemson, Rutgers, and the University of Oregon talked about their experiences with various pieces of tech - from force profiling to GPS.

Can you remember when you first got into coaching?

Professional sports leagues across the globe look at youth talent in many different ways. Sometimes development programs appear very sophisticated and detailed, while in other cases they seem a lot simpler. At rugby and soccer clubs around the world, kids start in under-7, under-9, or under-11 junior teams and either rise through the ranks in the academy system or get snapped up at increasingly young ages by larger clubs offering the promise of a professional career.

In these sports, physical qualities are important. But in successful countries they’re always secondary to the technical and tactical adeptness youth coaches and scouts look for. They’re typically assessing young talent in the most real-world scenario in sports: the game itself.

So, to a large degree, what they’re seeing is what they’re getting, with technical, tactical, physical, and psychological elements being simultaneously expressed through skills on the pitch as players on both teams try to stick to their coaches’ game plans while dealing with the inevitable randomness and chaos of the game as it arises in a dynamic, ever-evolving system.

Long-term athletic development is one of the many goals for a high school strength coach. Every day we work to transform the young athlete into a robust machine that can squat, hinge, explode, absorb force (land), press, pull, carry, and lunge.

Many of these attributes can be instilled and enhanced by the core lifts that are performed with squat racks, barbells, dumbbells, and benches. But after a high school facility has the staple pieces of equipment in place, there are five additional pieces of equipment to add to a weight room...when the budget allows.

Supplementing your weight room with these pieces will raise the level of training and allow your athletes to maximize their physical potential.

You can lead a horse to water, but he might kill you if you try to make him drink.

To start things off on the right foot, some common ground coaches and parents can all share is that we want the same thing: for each athlete to become the best they can be. Period.

As a coach, it’s easy to be comfortable with sets, reps, work-to-rest ratios, and 1RM percentages. These are all nice, tidy numbers that are easy to keep track of. They’re a necessary requirement for designing, executing, and monitoring programs.

Be so good they can’t ignore you! Education is just the beginning!

When you tell people you own a gym, they probably respond with some iteration of, “Wow! What a great job. I bet you get to work out all day and take all the vacations you want.”