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

Doubt is the cancer that kills dreams and prevents individuals from pursuing and achieving their ambitious goals.

There are three aspects of improving speed – running technique, muscle elasticity, and strength! The problem is many coaches and athletes aren’t optimizing their speed strength training with the right program design to reap the greatest benefits in speed and force production.

Energy systems within the framework of coaching and athletic development is always a heated topic, and there has been this very unsettling trend within social media and online articles discussing the best methods to incorporate these systems into programs. While this topic is critical to the improvement of athletic performance, implementation, and program design, the use of specific terms and application have been misinterpreted.

As times goes on, the staggering amount of self-proclaimed training and nutrition "experts" within the industry become more obvious. Many are discussing and even advocating basic programming ideas based on these systems without ever really thinking about how they actually work. There are way too many people who speak and write as though these energy systems are completely independent of each other.

Here’s the truth - and I know it may be shocking - but all these energy systems are not independent of each other. They never have been and never will be.

At Force Fitness we work to develop all aspects of athleticism with the hundreds of athletes we see each week. Speed, strength, power, reaction, lateral movement, balance, and even injury prevention all go into this equation to create better, more resilient athletes.

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.

A learning curve is defined as the advancement in apprehension of a given subject. Coaching is essentially teaching, so a better understanding of how individuals learn movements and skills is paramount. Furthermore, combining knowledge of how individuals learn and improving your technique of delivering that information creates an enhanced environment geared toward progressive learning, teaching, and - ultimately - performance.

As the strength coach for Ponderosa High School in Parker, CO, I was challenged in the spring by our head football coach to help him achieve his summer goals for the team. They were:

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