Performance coaches in the private sector get a bad rap sometimes with coaches who coach a club team or school team. And to be honest, I’m getting tired of it.  

My athletes come back to me telling me, “My coach told me this, or my coach told me that.” And it usually involves a certain philosophy about training athletes that just isn’t the case anymore and disparaging anything I’ve told them.

Don’t get me started about how often I have heard that we are just in it for the money. I don’t see any school coaches coaching for free??!!

Fact of the matter is that most of us do know what we are doing and continue to read up on the latest trends so that we can provide the best training possible for our athletes. That being said, I want to discuss a few philosophies out there that I’d like to see vanish in 2017.

For instance, the lack of emphasis on overall athletic development rather than the skill of the sport by club teams. This is a real pet peeve of mine. People pay their hard earned money for these club teams to develop their kid into a great athlete that will hopefully attract colleges.

These kids might have good skills for their sport, but the overall athleticism is lacking. Thus, they might not be as good as they could be and they might be susceptible to more injuries.  

If you are going to invest in these travel teams, these coaches should replace some of their practice time (not add-on to the practice time) and focus on athletic development (speed and strength training for injury prevention). Or continue to develop highly skilled, unathletic athletes who get hurt a lot.

You aren’t doing speed training, you are doing conditioning. Do you realize that to develop pure speed, you must be training at near maximal effort, that goes no longer than 8 to 9 seconds, and you allow a minute rest for every 10M you did during the drill.

Plus, you have to work on mechanics and changing those around. When I lose athletes because their coach (with good intentions) has developed his/her own speed program, it usually is a conditioning program that has them do a bunch of drills that even I might do, but continuous and non-stop. THAT IS A CONDITIONING PROGRAM!

You must be consistent. In order for strength training to work, ideally you must work the muscles at least twice a week. If not, every time you strength train you will have soreness. If you are consistent, you can grow your strength and muscles and even train during the season.

Speed training is the same way. You have to tax the nervous system with high intensity speed training at minimum once every three days or you won’t make gains. In theory, you could do speed training and have practices inbetween for your sport. But, if your athletes are lazy then how many times will they run full speed in practice to train speed? Good question! They should be going full speed at least in certain parts of a practice, but you never know.

Weight training too early stunts the growth. At my facility, just because I don’t want the headaches, I only let high school age kids participate in our total strength training program. But, younger kids could certainly strength train as long as proper technique is the emphasis.

Now, if you want to complain about lifting too heavy could do more harm than good, I can see that in the off chance there is no supervision. My argument would be how good is it on these growing bodies playing sports 24/7 365 with no break, doubling up in certain seasons because your sports teams demand it, and doing nothing to work on the overall fitness/athleticism.

Depending on the sport, sometimes those activities will do far more pounding on the body than lifting weights.

I have a few more philosophies in mind to discuss, but I will wait to share those for another day. For now, please comment on these in the box below. I’d appreciate what you think and if there are some philosophies that really bug you and like to see changed.

Photo courtesy of Gregor on Flickr: https://www.flickr.com/photos/stoermchen/