As we continue in our pursuit of athletes achieving excellence, we are constantly hindered by workouts our athletes have to do with their sport’s teams. I understand I just can’t tell these teams to stop trying to train these athletes that are coming to me. Let the “Big Boys” handle it.

As much as I’d love to say it, this wouldn’t be a great way to establish a relationship with their coaches. It also wouldn’t do our athletes any favors with their coaches and possibly their teammates.

But, what we can do is examine these workouts they are doing and see if we can supplement with exercises (or elements) we think they are missing from their team workouts.

Having done this for some time now, we notice that there are usually two big areas that are not hit very effectively by the “team workouts.” Let’s discuss these two and what can be added into the workout to supplement.

 

  • UNILATERAL TRAINING

    The big exercises usually get addressed in workouts. I see bench press, squats, deadlifts, maybe a clean, and then a few others. I don’t see a lot of single leg training or unilateral training for that matter. The single leg is the one we address a bit more.

    Running is a series of single leg explosions. If you can do some single leg squats or some Bulgarian squats, that will help train those legs to be more explosive when you run. It will also help you develop balanced strength in your legs.

    We will even go as far as to do single leg plyos. Now this is after an appropriate amount of time to adapt to regular plyos. Once the strength has been built up, then entry levels of 1 leg plyos can be added to a workout.

  • POSTERIOR STRENGTH

    This is a big area that is forgotten about in regular team workouts. Not only is posterior strength forgotten about in the lower body, but there is a big imbalance between upper body anterior and posterior strength.

    You will see workouts that cover a flat bench, then incline bench, and maybe finish with pushups. But, then it will only have one pulling exercise and usually not an effective one like a machine lat pulldown.

    Hamstring strength is huge so doing something like glute ham raises would really help you not just in speed development, but in some of your bigger lifts as well – deadlifts and squats for example that the hamstrings play a big role in holding your position.

    For the upper body, if you can put some pull-ups in or bent over rows that would be great. An easy one, yet hard for some athletes not having the proper posterior strength, is using the TRX for a T and a Y combo. Meaning you pull your body and arms into the shape of a capital T or Y.

 

Add these two changes into your workouts, or if you live in Columbus, let us put your workouts together for you. I guarantee you will see changes not only in your overall strength levels, but your speed and explosiveness on the playing field as well.

Photo courtesy of Lance Goyke on Flickr: https://www.flickr.com/photos/125473839@N07/