Employing Regressions in Training

I am hesitant to write this post, because I honestly believe that I am showing my hand as a coach, and giving away the greatest concept that I have learned to date. However, my desire to see this job done right (or rather, my desire to stop cringing when it’s done poorly) is stronger than my desire to maintain some sort of trade secret. Let’s begin.

None of my athletes perform any lifts with a barbell in their first week of training. None of my (non-weightlifting) athletes snatch or clean or jerk for probably several months, and even then it won’t be full lifts (“squat” snatch/clean, for you CrossFit kids) from the floor.

Why? Because they don’t need to, and they aren’t ready.

I always use the furthest useful regression. Regressions are exercises that are very similar to the exercise you’d like to have your athletes do, but easier for you to teach and for them to learn to perform. A quick example would be a goblet squat instead of a barbell squat. I include the word “useful” because for a powerlifter who can squat >500 lbs, a goblet squat <100 lbs isn’t even going to register as a stimulus. However, even if you get a kid who is very strong, you can still use regressions as a teaching tool to ensure they know how to move properly.

Regressions are immensely useful as teaching tools. This becomes even more important when you’re working with groups of people. Let’s say, for example, that in your mind, you want all of your athletes to increase their squat, bench, and deadlift, but you’re really unhappy with their form. You could keep shouting, “Keep your spine straight! Knees out!” until you’re gasping for air, or you could regress the exercise to something that’s easier for them to learn, like a goblet squat, pushup, and RDL, or whatever regressions you choose. Sometimes I’ll progress a team of athletes to barbell lifts, and 70% of the kids can perform a movement properly, but the other 30% can’t, and that’s fine! I tell this 30% to stick with the regression until they can comfortably progress to the next exercise.

Take your time with your exercise progressions. A lot of you already use regressions, but you speed through them so quickly. For example, the way that the Olympic lifts are taught, even among weightlifting athletes, is often a sped-through progression. I’d rather have a weightlifter spend a MONTH perfecting a snatch and clean from the high hang before I even moved to the hang at the knee. There’s far less to think about, fewer cues to remember, and fewer opportunities to mess up. There are coaches that do this, and have great success; meanwhile, others have their athletes fly through the progressions at the same speed as they learned them in their USAW / CF L1 classes, and wonder why the result looks like garbage. It’s good to teach the progression, but you need to allow enough time to sink in as a motor pattern.

 

Kendrick Farris’ coach, Kyle Pierce, is known to have even his best athletes spend a majority of their training time doing regressions such as hang snatches, hang cleans, and push presses before progressing to full competitive lifts as they approach a competition.

You simply don’t need to do this. Your athletes can likely reap a training effect from a regression on what you currently use. You want your kids to bench? Great. Can they still get the same training effect from pushups? If not, and your kids can crank out pushups with perfect form without struggle, and you’d rather increase their maximal strength rather than work capacity, great, progress to benching. But you’ve got no business benching if you can’t yet do pushups well. And you can use regressions on pushups as well, such as elevating the kid’s hands, etc. There is almost always a regression.

“But barbells are the most effective tool we have to increase strength! You won’t get as much out of silly, light kettlebell goblet squats and pushups!”

I’d rather have an athlete use a full range of motion and proper movement in a safe, relatively unloaded exercise than crank out half-reps with a bad spinal position and their knees caving in with 225 on their back. You tell me who of these two examples is getting a better training effect.

Probably not this guy.

Of course I want my athletes to progress to barbell lifts. I’d love to have all my guys easily repping 1.5x their bodyweight easily and performing full snatches from the floor. But they’re neither ready for that yet, nor can we rush to get there.

I considered providing a list of regressions and progressions that I use, but you should choose to use your own based on your coaching style, familiarity, and facilities. I recommend beginning every program you write by considering broadly, “What do I hope to achieve?” Don’t just choose an exercise because someone told you it’s a good idea; choose exercises that directly contribute to your desired outcomes. For example, if you know your athletes need strong legs, chest, and back, you could use barbell squats, bench press, and power cleans, or you could use any number of regressions from which you can still glean a training effect, and progress as you see appropriate.

If you begin with the most complicated exercise you know, you are setting your athletes up to fail. Instead, lead them through a sensible progression of exercises that are manageable to learn, followed by exercises that are just slightly more involved, and continue this process until the day that that you finally arrive at the most complicated exercise you know, whereby you will have already set them up to succeed.

I leave you with one of my favorite quotes, from Søren Kierkeaard.

“If one is truly to succeed in leading a person to a specific place, one must first and foremost take care to find him where he is and begin there. This is the secret in the entire art of helping.”

Regarding Box Jumps

Jumps of any kind are a phenomenal stimulus for athletic development, and can be employed to the benefit of most goals within sport and general fitness; however, I frequently see them misused and poorly coached. As a strength & conditioning professional, the question on the forefront of your mind should always be, “How is this exercise helping my athletes get better at their sport?”

At face value, box jumps encourage athletes to jump, and the higher the box, the higher the jump – right? Not necessarily. If your sole purpose is to encourage a strong vertical, there are lots of ways to achieve this end. You can have as forceful of a jump onto a lower box as you have onto a higher box. I’m not wrong – stand up, and then jump as high as you can, landing right where you started. Now do the same, but land on a small step in front of you. The point is, the height at which you land does not alter the force with which you are capable of jumping.

“But my athletes don’t try as hard if I use a lower box!”

Maybe. But by pushing the height of the box, chances are good that you are reinforcing dysfunctional landing mechanics. Just by looking up videos of acclaimed box jump world records on YouTube, I immediately find perfect examples of terrible landing positions. These record heights are made possible by dramatic global flexion – knees, hips, and spine.

And if your objective is to have the world record box jump, then that’s all fine and dandy. But if you’re performing box jumps to improve jumping ability, I highly recommend you also use them to coach proper landings. This should be appealing as an end to itself, as athletes are frequently injured in sport practice and competition due to poor landing mechanics.

I’d encourage a change in mentality regarding box height. Rather than encouraging athletes to seek maximal box heights, encourage your athletes to jump as high as they can, and use landing on a box to diminish forces upon landing, and use it all as an opportunity to coach the proper execution of both jumping and landing. You can still choose a height that demands a forceful jump by the athlete, but without compromising a good landing position, with the added benefit of improving biomechanical patterns.

Like every exercise we do, the objective of box jumps should be not only to get stronger, but also to move better.
EDIT (8/19/17)

At the high school for which I  coach, we have 8 12″ wood boxes for jumps. If  you miss, they’re extremely unforgiving, as some athletes have been sure to test (always in my absence, mind you). My method of progressing box jumps for my athletes currently is to start them on a 12″ box, and once they demonstrate that they can land nearly standing fully upright (ie, roughly a 12″ vertical) I allow them to progress to a 24″ box. If they demonstrate they can land standing on a 24″ box, they get to go to a 36″ box. You get the idea. It works well, because it always challenges them to jump their highest, whether it’s to conquer a lower box by landing tall, or just to get up onto a new box repeatedly. My athletes do not miss box jumps, because I don’t let them push the height nonsensically.

 And for goodness sake, STEP DOWN! If you have a 25″ vertical and you’re training to a 36″ box, and you stand on the box and hop down backwards, you’re falling a full 36″! You can’t even jump that high! Box jumps are primarily meant to decrease forces upon landing! If you jump down off a box that’s higher than your vertical jump, you’re increasing force upon landing!  If you’re #blessed enough to jump to a 36″ box or higher, you should probably also build a series of steps out of lower boxes so you can walk down, because that’s a tough one to step down. 

Train smart, train safe. 

Bondarchuk Classification of Exercise, and Application for Weightlifters

I’ve been doing some study on the Bondarchuk method, particularly in reference to how it can be applied to other sports. As I am a recreationally competitive weightlifter, naturally my thoughts eventually gravitate to “How can I apply this to my own training as an athlete?”

Rather than give you a super sweet cookie cutter 6-week program, I just want to discuss how a lot of the things we already do as weightlifters fall within Bondarchuk’s paradigm of exercise classification.

Bondarchuk identifies four classifications of exercise: Competitive Exercise (CE), Special Developmental Exercise (SDE), Special Preparatory Exercise (SPE), and General Preparatory Exercise (GPE). Below, I’ll discuss their original meaning, as well as how they can be generally applied to sport, and specifically to the sport of weightlifting.

Competitive Exercise (CE) is fairly obvious: movements and loads that are identical (or nearly so) to the competition event. Within Bondarchuk’s throwing programs, this includes throwing a variety of weighted implements. As such, it’s not always exactly the competitive event, because in competition, a male hammer thrower will always throw a 16 pound hammer.

The idea is to allow the athlete to practice sport skills at or near competitive intensity. Across the board, competitions of any kind fall within this category. Competition can be replicated and changed in practice. For a team sport, CE can include scrimmages and small-sided games. For a combat athlete, this would include sparring. For a track athlete, CE includes sprints, jumps, and throws at various speeds, heights, weighted implements, and short approaches.

For a weightlifter, this obviously includes snatches and clean & jerks, particularly when approaching maximal weights. As we know, things start to feel different around 90% of your PR – hopefully in a good way. It becomes more difficult to “save” lifts, or use improper technique or recruitment patterns. As such, a single snatch at 60% would not fall within CE. However, if an athlete can only snatch 60% from the high hang, then doing so would be similar enough to the competitive intensity that I would consider that with the classification of CE. Additionally, if a modified exercise or complex is “to a max,” I would consider that to be approaching competitive intensity.

Lu probably practiced this once or twice before.

Special Developmental Exercise (SDE) involves exercises that mimic the competitive event, usually in parts and/or reduced intensities. For a thrower, this can include weighted twists and med ball rotational throws. For a team sport, this can involve running specific plays, and drills that are similar to what would occur in a game. For a boxer, this might include bag work. For a sprinter (or any athlete looking to increase her or his linear speed and acceleration), this will include drills for sprint mechanics, bounding, and resisted sprinting. SDE will often take the form of mindful practice of sport skills, where a drill or movement starts and ends differently than it might in competition, or is slower and more deliberate, as well as special strength exercises to prepare for a specific movement that will occur in competition.

For a weightlifter, this will include lots of partial movements. High and low pulls from any starting position, hang variations, power variations, jerk dips/drives, push presses, various complexes, and even front squats and overhead squats can fit within this category. These all allow you to get more reps in, practicing a particular aspect of the skill that you need more work in.

Lu seems pretty strong in this position.

The tricky thing is that things like hang work and complexes can be part of CE or SDE. In my mind, the way to differentiate between CE and SDE for a weightlifter is intent. Are you trying to set a PR in that exercise, or are you doing that exercise in order to practice that particular movement skill? I realize that a lot of coaches will do both simultaneously; weightlifters love chasing PRs, and having them track PRs for a complex or a partial movement can be a good way of keeping them engaged while increasing overall volume and volume within a particular portion of the movement. I personally don’t like to stress about complexes and hang work, and instead just try to use them to help me “feel” a movement, and practice to improve a particular part of the movement. As such, when I employ SDE, it comes in the form of warming up at lighter weights with more deliberate movement, or doing heavy pulls and jerk dips to strengthen a particular pattern.  Of course, I don’t think anyone within weightlifting worries too much about their clean low pull PR, so I think movements like pulls and jerk dips will almost always fall within SDE. I realize different coaches have a good amount of success using complexes and hang movements “to a max” on a regular basis in place of heavy singles, and I think that’s fine. I suppose the difference there is more about the preferences of the coaches and the athlete.

Special Preparatory Exercise (SPE) involves exercises that do not mimic the competitive event, but do train the muscles and energy systems used involved. For a thrower, this often includes barbell training, jumps, and sprints. For team sports, this will include strength training and conditioning relevant to the sport (10s and 20s for linemen, longer for wide receivers…).

For weightlifters, this can include squats, deadlifts, presses, rows, jumps, short sprints, etc. Anything that will make you generally stronger in a manner that can be utilized within the sport of weightlifting. Again, the tricky thing is that things like front squats and push presses can be SDE or SPE, and once again I’m going to point to intent. Are you doing front squats as a general strengthening exercise? If so, consider it as SPE. If you’re front squatting as part of a complex, perhaps it’s closer to SPE.

I’d say Lu’s generally pretty strong.

Finally, General Preparatory Exercises (GPE) involve different muscles, different movements, and different energy systems than the competitive event. For a weightlifter, I’d consider most bodyweight movements, bodybuilding, and aerobic training to be GPE. Granted, it’s hard to find muscles that aren’t involved in a snatch or a clean & jerk (so maybe your Saturday bench/curl program can be GPE 😛 ). However, weightlifting includes little movement in the sagittal and especially the transverse plane, as well as being quite anaerobic, so any horizontal, rotational, or aerobic movements can be considered GPE.

Lu, what are you doing? That looks nothing like a snatch.

Competitive Exercise	Same muscles	Same movements	Same or similar intensity
Special Developmental Exercise	Same muscles	Similar movements	Different intensity
Special Preparatory Exercise	Same muscles	Different movements	Same energy systems
General Preparatory Exercise	Same muscles	Different movements	Different energy systems

Putting it all together, you probably already have all or most of these categories covered in your programming. If you have a good general dynamic warmup, that will involve a lot of GPE. Your specific barbell warmup and partial movements will involve some SDE. Your strength work will likely involve a good volume of SPE, and we all know that you’re chasing PRs in your CE.  

The beauty of such a paradigm is its flexibility. Jogging is CE for a marathon runner, while it’s GPE for a strength athlete. Squatting is SPE or GPE for most sports, but CE for powerlifting. Regardless of the sport in which you compete, chances are you’ll know a good number of exercises that fit within each of these categories.

Of course, there are many ways to structure your programming, dependent on how you feel you or your athletes need the most emphasis at what part of their career and in relation to their competitive season. Bondarchuk recommends Complex Periodization, which involves using each of these classifications within a block rather than progressing from one to the next, with a heavy emphasis on CE. I think this approach is fine, especially considering he works with high-level competitive throwers. I think that all categories should be used in all blocks, as is done in Complex Periodization, but perhaps different emphases could be placed. For example, the further you are from competition (or the competitive season), the more GPE and SPE you put into your programming, while still including enough CE and SDE to maintain positional strength and sport skills. Later, as you approach your season, the saturation of CE and SDE would increase, while SPE and GPE decrease. Most importantly, I think it’s wise to never completely abandon any classification of exercise, as it’s far easier to maintain any quality than it is to gain or re-gain it.

For more in-depth information regarding Bondarchuk’s programming, you can read his books Transfer of Training in Sports, Vol. 1 and Vol. 2.

For more regarding periodization, check out this article on the old Complementary Training blog.

For more general discussion about the Bondarchuk method and principles from Martin Bingisser, a student and athlete of A. Bondarchuk, check out this series by 8weeksout.com: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4.

Know Your Athlete: Developmental vs. Peak Athletics

Too long, didn’t read?

Developmental athletes need increases in all forms of general athleticism, as well as sufficient sport practice.

Elite athletes require greater saturation of sport practice at competitive intensities, as well as more attention to management of adaptive resources (time, energy, and recovery spent more on relevant adaptations rather than general traits).

 

Every athlete wants to be an elite athlete, and many reach the conclusion that in order to do so, they ought to train like their heroes. Unfortunately, 99% of the time, the information we have about how elite athletes train is horrible advice for a developing athlete, for a variety of reasons. First, many elite athletes are so genetically gifted that it doesn’t matter what they do; they’ll always be good within their sport. Additionally, many of the videos released by elite athletes aren’t actually how they train, but rather something (stupid) that they did one time and put on video because they thought it was impressive. Finally, even if you found information regarding the best methods to train elite athletes, it would likely be wildly inappropriate for a developing athlete.

(The Redskins are clearly Forging Elite Fitness if you know what I’m saying.)

Coaches and athletes would do well to humbly evaluate the status of the athlete’s development, in order to determine what sort of programming would best benefit the athlete. A young athlete with a lot of room to grow can benefit greatly from basic barbell training, and the simplest linear periodization will likely do just fine. Most athletes through high school and early college can be considered developmental, and won’t need much outside of basic resistance training, sprinting, jumping, and plenty of technical/tactical sport practice. A 14-year-old doesn’t need “special strength,” they need to become a better general athlete, and apply their developing athleticism within their sport.

On the other hand, elite athletes will always come with special considerations.
First, consider that these athletes qualify for the highest level of competition – by their very nature, they are definitively outliers, and should be approached as such. A coach shouldn’t expect an outlier to respond to training the same as their less-gifted counterparts. Frequently, these athletes will be far more neuromuscularly efficient and more explosive than their counterparts. Their absolute outputs (strength, power, speed, etc.) will be far greater than at lower levels of competition. As such, realize that they are likely going to require greater recovery time than a developing athlete, both within a session and within a mesocycle. The same relative load and volume that would work just fine for a developmental athlete (5×5@85%, anyone?) will likely crush their recovery.

Remember, these are the outliers. Some of them will respond in ways that won’t make sense to you intuitively. Approach each of these instances as a unique puzzle, and look for trends within their training and responses that can indicate to you how best to train them.

Second, realize that their status as elite athletes indicates that the time to improve has mostly passed, and the time to perform at the peak of their abilities has arrived. Their greatest investment of time and energy should be more specific to their sport than their developmental counterparts. Increasing an elite discus thrower’s squat from 550 to 600 might not have as great of an ergogenic effect as maintaining their strength, and focusing their resources on perfecting their throwing technique. If possible, let the primary stimulus come from training their sport, and focus your time in the weight room on maintaining their levels of strength, and choose movements that will complement their sport’s athletic demands.

If you look at the similarities between the various systems that take great athletes and make them elite athletes, you’ll see a high saturation of sport practice at competitive intensities. Think of Bulgarian weightlifters, Westside powerlifters, Bondarchuck throwers, Kenyan runners, Charlie Francis sprinters, and on and on. The systems that helped them rise above their competition focused on becoming proficient at their sport-specific tasks at the appropriate competitive intensity.

(Oh right, and they were totally the only ones juicing.)

This sort of approach admittedly has more face validity for measureable events rather than team sports, due to the difference in confounding variables, but the same approach can be applied. Critically evaluate your return on investment, and manage your athlete’s energy such that every ounce of expenditure and recovery is relevant to improving their sport performance. You’re no longer trying to generally increase athleticism, but shifting towards more specific adaptations within their sport.

I’m certainly not saying you should stray from the core exercises of strength & conditioning and have all your athletes train with banded shackles while standing on bosu balls in the name of “sport specificity,” but rather evaluate what adaptations you truly seek.

(Pretty muscle-confusing.)

If you have an athlete whose sport relies on speed, what is the point in having them grind out squats at 95% of their 1RM? Instead, invest in a linear position transducer and track bar speed for squats at lower percentages. Even this will be a general adaptation compared to sport practice, but perhaps increased general speed-strength can have slightly better carry-over than maximal strength. Hopefully, if their sport relies on speed, your athlete is spending sufficient time sprinting at high intensities, and that will be the more potent stimulus.

Again, I’m not saying to get crazy and do something totally different with elite athletes. At the end of the day, the exercises can be the same, but you need to recognize where your adaptive energy is going, and make sure it’s congruent with athletic demands of the sport.

In parting, I want to reiterate that this is not necessarily the best way for a developing athlete to train. A developing athlete can fortunately benefit from more general adaptations. Of course, developing athletes will also benefit from sport practice at competitive intensities, but a great percentage of their adaptive resources would be wisely spent on increases in all forms of strength, power, and speed, such that these can be applied as the athlete progresses through their career. The best athletes get to benefit from their more specific training later in their careers because most of them spent more time on general traits early in their careers.

Adaptation Is Not Stagnation

Frequently one will hear someone present an exercise regimen or a periodization scheme with the end goal of “preventing the body from adapting”.  Products like P90X promote “muscle confusion” and internet users brag about how sore they were from some new workout they tried, leading the endeavoring active individual to believe that if they aren’t sore, they aren’t progressing. People start to think that “adapting to a stimulus” is a bad thing, as if adaptation were synonymous with stagnation, the dreaded “plateau”.

Adaptation does not necessarily denote stagnation, nor does soreness necessarily indicate progress. It would be helpful if we change our connotation of adaptation to realize that recovering from a stressful stimulus – “adapting” – is indeed a positive change within the organism.

Any time you encounter a novel stimulus, or revisit a stimulus you haven’t included in your programming in some time, you will likely experience soreness as a consequence. The difference could be in choice of exercise, rep range, total volume, or a technical quality.

Does one single day of exercise have a drastic effect on your long-term fitness? Of course not. Therefore, to say that one’s soreness from a novel stimulus was indicative of progress is absurd.

On the other hand, if you include a similar stimulus from session to session, and/or from week to week, and progress in some way WITHIN that stimulus (moderate increases in load, sets, reps, volume, speed), you will likely not feel terribly sore from this progression. However, it is undeniable that you have made progress, as you are now capable of something more challenging and impressive than when you had first encountered the stimulus, as evidenced by the internal validity of comparing your physical capacity within the stimulus. This is the nature of adaptation.

This has mostly been a rant about terminology. It’s fallacious for an active person to suggest that they would like to avoid the adaptation of their body; rather, we should recognize the difference between adaptation and stagnation. If you’re adapting to something that you want to be better at, stay the course! Don’t change something just because you aren’t sore anymore! But if you find you aren’t improving, perhaps it may be time to critically evaluate why your progress (adaptation) has stalled, and what can be done to continue adapting towards your goals.  

In the end, if you have never have any change in your programming, you will likely plateau pretty hard…eventually. On the other hand, if you never have any consistency in your programming, you will be extremely unlikely to have made any measureable progress in the first place. It’s crucial to know the benefits of consistency and variety, and how to apply these principles to your programming. 

 

The Bulgarians must have missed the memo regarding muscle confusion. I wouldn’t mind “plateauing” with a 200+ kg Clean & Jerk.

Know Your Athlete

You’re given a brand-new client. What program do you put them on?

This is a ridiculous question, of course. You know nothing about this person. Is she a collegiate athlete, or working mother of three? Does he have a history of injury, or perhaps any disabilities? Has he ever been inside a weight room before?

Context is crucial. Clearly there are a lot of details we need before we prescribe any sort of program to this individual.

And yet, we still have internet gurus claiming they have the single best program. It’s positively preposterous to make such generalizations. Furthermore, we have coaches who give their athletes the most advanced programming they are aware of, just because they assume the programs utilized by elite athletes will give their intermediate athletes better results than an intermediate program, or giving their team sport athletes the same programming they see used by competitive powerlifters or weightlifters.

The following are an incomplete list of questions you should ask before prescribing programming to a new training client, athlete, or team.

What is the age? What is the athlete’s gender?

What is the training age? (how much experience the athlete has training as an athlete, particularly in reference to resistance training protocols?

What is the objective of training? (eg., improved health, weight loss, increased strength, increased speed, improved gameplay?)

Is my client an athlete? If so, at what level? What sport?

What are the demands of my athlete’s sport/occupation? What are their relevant strengths/weaknesses?

Where is my athlete in relation to their upcoming season?

Where is my athlete in relation to their full athletic career? (eg., developmental or peak?)

How many days per week is my client able to train?

What facilities are available?

Does my athlete have a history of injury?

Does my athlete have any handicaps?

What stressors are my athletes subjected to outside of the gym, in their sport practice, work, or outside life?

Once again, this is an incomplete list of some very basic questions that a strength coach or trainer should be asking prior to prescribing programming. The answers you find to these questions should inform your programming and coaching process, and you should continue to learn about your athletes/clients and adjust your programming accordingly.

I will touch on a few of these considerations in greater depth in future posts.

Feel free to add any other considerations in the comments! And if you read any of these considerations and weren’t sure how they should inform your coaching, comment as well, so I know which would be good to discuss!

It’s Not About the Barbell

In the sport of weightlifting, there is often discussion regarding the movement of the barbell. Different coaches and athletes preach dogmatically regarding bar path, body-bar contact, and bar position, while strength & conditioning professionals often focus on increasing bar speed or weight.

I encourage you to change your thinking, and realize that weightlifting isn’t about the barbell – it’s about the body.

First, let’s look at the aims of weightlifting and strength & conditioning. In weightlifting, the objective is to get the heaviest weight overhead in a manner that qualifies as legal in competition. In strength & conditioning, the purpose of including snatches, cleans, and jerks is to increase explosive strength (we could discuss whether it’s speed-strength, strength-speed, explosiveness, etc., but that’s not the point; choose your favorite term, and we’ll carry on).

 

As such, a strength & conditioning professional shouldn’t care whatsoever about bar speed or weight; rather, they should care about whether their athlete is becoming increasingly explosive. Increasing bar speed and weight in a power variation of a snatch, clean, or jerk can be an indicator of increased power, as long as you already have an athlete with good mechanics and extension timing.

Power is defined as work (or, force by displacement) over time. We use box jumps for roughly the same reason we use weightlifting – increasing explosive strength, or power. If the weight of the body remains constant but the height of the box increases, the athlete is forced to express greater explosive strength. Yes, the athlete could have jumped just as high and landed on a lower box, but from a psychological perspective, we know that the athlete will necessarily put forth more effort with a more difficult target. The same is true of lifting; we know that we can demand greater power by indicated a bar speed with a relative load, or by increasing the load.

Of course, this is assuming you’ve already instilled proper mechanics. The point is, it isn’t about how fast the bar is moving, nor how heavy. The weight is a target, just like the box is a target. The purpose is to express greater explosive strength; and there are many ways to go about this. Increasing bar speed and increasing the weight of the barbell are both methods of increasing explosiveness; just make sure your focus is on the movement of the body, not so much on the movement of the barbell.

 

To the weightlifting coaches and athletes, I also encourage you to look to the body more than you look to the bar. I see a lot of discussions about whether the bar path should be more curved or more linear, or whether the bar should have violent contact with the body, or whether there is really even a difference in the end. Additionally, USA Weightlifting coaching seminars teach that the bar must stay positioned within the area of the base. All of this focus on the bar detracts from what’s actually going on in the lifts – the athlete is expressing force upon the barbell, the floor, and the lifter’s own body. As such, it’s crucial to consider the lifter-barbell system as a whole.

In engineering, a system is defined as interdependent components of a whole. In weightlifting, this includes both the lifter and the barbell. If we look at the first and second pull, we see that the body and bar move as one, with the feet pushing into the ground (and vice versa) as the only force outside of the lifter-barbell system. It’s important to realize that the body of the lifter has weight additional to the barbell, and as such, the weight of not only the barbell, but also the lifter, must remain centered over the area of the base. In the third pull, we have a change of shape, as the lifter ceases to put force into the floor, and pulls upward on the barbell while simultaneously pulling her or his own body downward (Newton’s Third Law) –the paths of the lifter and the barbell must both be considered, as they are interdependent.

As the barbell cannot move independently of the lifter, nor vice versa, it is the objective of the weightlifting athlete and coach to optimize the continuous positions and recruitment patterns of the body – unique to each lifter – that will be most conducive to efficiently perform the lifts with maximal weights.

 

Regardless of sport, it is crucial that the body move properly and efficiently. Coaches should attempt to perfect the movement of the body rather than obsessing over the path of the implement being manipulated. 

Everyone Must Get Stronger

A stronger individual is a better individual.

I’m not talking about comparing one person to another. Whether you’re an athlete or not, just compare yourself now to a hypothetical version of yourself where you’re twice as strong, but nothing else has changed. Inherently, the latter is better. There are no necessary draw-backs to strength.

Common objections to gaining strength include, “I don’t want to get bulky,” “I don’t want it to make me slow,” “I don’t want to get injured,” and “I just don’t care about how strong I am.” The answer to these first three objections is that those aren’t necessary consequences of strength, while the second is just ignorance of the other positive effects of increased strength.

Most “bulky” people got that way because they wanted to be bulky, so they exercised and ate in a manner that brought them their desired result. There are plenty of strong individuals who wouldn’t necessarily fit the bill as “bulky” – just look at lower weight classes in strength sports. Often women fear this more frequently than men, and it’s a simple hormonal difference that women, with significantly less testosterone than men, won’t pack on muscle mass as quickly, while they can still increase their strength via other various mechanisms. And besides, think of all the gym-goers who are dissatisfied by their struggle to gain muscle mass; clearly, just picking up a barbell won’t automatically turn you into a world-class bodybuilder by accident, whether you want it to or not.

And strength doesn’t make one slow either; rather, intelligent programming leads to increases in strength concurrent with increases in speed. An athlete doesn’t slow down because he or she got stronger, the athlete slows down because he or she gained a significant amount of weight very quickly, or neglected any sort of speed work in the off-season, or only lifted at low speeds and neglected explosive movements.

Lastly, injury rates for strength training are astoundingly low compared to injury rates in sports. Intelligent strength training should not only be injury-free, but should reduce the risk of injury in other activities.

But the last reply isn’t an objection, but rather a misunderstanding. It’s usually followed by, “I just want to look good,” or “I just want to be good at my sport.” This is where you have to intercede as a coach and demonstrate the ways in which increasing one’s strength increases the likelihood of the desired outcome.

General Population

For your typical personal training client, “I just want to look good” is the most common motivation. Often people have preconceived ideas of what it will take to better their physical appearance, and usually their goal is to “lose weight”. Of course, we know that their real goal is to recompose their body. Often this does involve a significant component of fat loss, but they don’t understand how to achieve this. Clients often just want to get their heart rate up, sweat a bunch, feel out of breath, because – in their mind – if it doesn’t suck, it isn’t working.  They want to “burn calories,” which they have been told has to make them feel like garbage.

I like to explain to clients interested in fat loss that they are burning calories during strength training, perhaps more so than during conditioning. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not making an argument that conditioning is unnecessary – concurrent training is a fine thing, but it’s a separate topic. I explain to my clients that they are expending calories in three ways. First, by simply performing the movements, they are increasing our calorie expenditure. They should know this, of course, as they associate activity with burning calories already. Second, they are burning calories in recovery. Gaining strength is as much about using energy and macronutrients to recover from the stress put on the body, which is not shown to the same degree by steady-state cardiovascular conditioning alone. So later that night and the next day when you’re sitting on the couch, you still have an increased caloric expenditure.  Third, by increasing their muscle mass, they increase their resting metabolism in the long run. In other words, even when they aren’t recovering from exercise, they still require more calories just to fuel the system that they have built.

This usually makes sense to a client, but often they’ll still have qualms, because it just doesn’t feel right to them. I usually just point out that the strongest people (even if they aren’t bulky) often have to eat a lot in any given day to maintain their bodyweight, just because of the amount of stress they put on their body moving heavy weights frequently. And of course, you can always use some higher rep ranges and conditioning in your programming to compliment your strength work (85%+ of 1RM), which will help increase caloric output and just generally appease the client.

Athletic Population

For an athlete, gaining strength is even more impactful, as her or his goals are more performance-oriented, and increased strength necessarily increases performance. Sure, increasing your squat might not immediately make you better at throwing a spiral in football, but let’s dial back to the basic elements of an athlete.

Al Vermeil outlined the Hierarchy of Athletic Development as work capacity, strength, explosive strength, elastic & reactive strength, and speed, in that order. Without going into depth about each of these elements, let’s discuss how increased strength improves on all other elements.

Work capacity is (generally) the ability to continue productive activity at various intensities and modalities. You can get as complicated as you like with definitions, but work capacity is the ability to do something and keep going. Increased strength improves this capacity by decreasing the relative intensity. Imagine for a moment that your given task is to deadlift 95 pounds for x5 reps, for as many sets as possible, with 60 seconds rest between sets. This is an extremely simplistic example, of course, but ask yourself which of the following individuals will last longer: the person who can deadlift 185, or the person who can deadlift 405? Of course, there are plenty of other forms of work, but most of the ones that don’t improve by being stronger improve more quickly by metabolic changes involved in conditioning. Remember this is not an argument against any other element of fitness, this is an argument to show that increased strength is inherently positive.

Explosive strength is the ability to express strength with maximal speed. This is often demonstrated in a standing vertical or broad jump, and by Olympic weightlifting (snatches, cleans, jerks). After a certain point, it becomes impossible to increase explosive strength without increasing basic strength, as the only way to increase explosive strength is to either add speed or add weight.

Reactive & elastic strength are the ability of muscles to quickly contract after shortening, and are expressed by countermovement and rebounding off of a fall. This involves neural factors, including enhanced strength reflex via muscle spindles and cortical override of inhibition from the Golgi tendon organs, as well as mechanical factors, via the stretch-shortening cycle and stored energy in the tendon. Increased strength improves both of the above neural factors, as well as increasing the strength and elasticity of the muscle and tendon.

Speed can be defined by acceleration and maximal velocity. The acceleration portion of a sprint are most impacted by explosive strength, while maximal velocity is most effected by reactive and elastic strength.

Not mentioned above are coordinative abilities, proprioception, and agility, which go together. Agility has frequently been mistakenly associated with “foot speed,” but is more greatly affected by unilateral leg strength. Additionally, increased strength increases neural factors involved in proprioception and coordination, which will help in the execution of complex sport-specific movements. Additionally, many of the movement patterns necessary in the weight room are mirrored in sport; for example, using leg strength as an initiator of movement, with the arms moving as a follow-through – this is seen in a push jerk, but it’s also seen in a jump shot in basketball.

 

Lastly, decreased risk of injury should obviously be of interest to both athletic and non-athletic populations. Strength training increases bone mineral density, decreasing risk of fractures. It engrains proper movement techniques that can be used by the general population while helping your buddy move a couch into his new place without hurting yourself, and teaches female athletes proper activation patterns to avoid valgus knee collapse in power sports. And last but not least, increased strength is associated with increased muscle mass, increased tendon and ligament tensile strength, all of which protects joints from the various risks that lead to injury.

 

So… gaining strength can help you lose fat, gain muscle mass, improve all aspects of sport performance, and decrease risk of injury in sport and daily life.

Let’s get started.

Introduction

Hello, all.

I began this blog as a platform upon which to discuss strength, speed training, and conditioning. I am a budding strength coach, and will readily admit that I am still learning. That being said, I believe I’ve learned a lot so far in my short experience as a strength and conditioning professional, and I want to be able to share my experience and opinions with anyone interested.