Designing your program to fit your goals and sport

When dealing with weight lifting for athletic proformance you really have to consider what will make a more effective athlete. For instance, a boxer would not lift so he has huge arms like a body builder- reason being they are not able to effective strike a moving target if they did decide to lift like a body builder. Instead, one has to figure out what makes a more effective you considering your style of play or action. Understand, every person is different, this is the reason why personal trainers generally test a person ability to workout, getting their ROM(range of motion) and health surveys to build a personalized program. The only time the personalized program is not as important is for coaching a nice size team, which the time to personalized may not be beneficial to the team

Personalizing your program

It’s almost common sense but it has to be said, if you are looking to lose massive amount of weight and you are lifting heavy weight and bulking up it should occur to you that you are going against the wave of your goals and amibition. You must choose what you are training for, you are either lifting to strengthen your bones for road friction for your marathon or 5k or you are lifting to compete for a stron man contest, YOU CAN’T DO BOTH.

When you are looking to gain weight or loss weight you have to create more then just a workout program you have to come up with a proper way to eat and consider the extra calories, protiens, sugars and carbs on a daily basis instead of believing just because you are working out that the weight will turn into good weight or that the weight will go away. You are going against yourself if you do not attempt to come up with a nutritional eating plans and workingout like madd man, wandering why the 6 pack you ordered is not in the mail. It’s simple what you eat you become.

So in order to obtain your goals you must consider:
1. What fitness level, health level you are at currently- If you are out of shape and not worked out in years DO NOT KILL YOURSELF, although if you are in ood condition you have to push yourself to get to the next level
2. Again, creating the a nutritional eating diet that compliments your goals, if you are trying to gain weight you need to add more carbs to your diet and eat good foods that adds good growth to your body not just adding extra or if you are trying to lose weight you will still have to maintain a reasonable good amount of food intake instead of depriving yourself of food and over eating once you break… It would be good to eat smaller protiens of food like fish, chicken and light colored foods–>Stay away from fried food.
3. What on your body is imbalanced- find out what parts of your body needs improvement and make it a point to touch on them 1 or 2 days more then you regularly would in your workouts to achieve improvement faster but allow them recovery time… example would be if you have a huge chest and a weak lower back, it would be good to implement more pulling exercises in your workout regimine
4. Work on full body workouts first if you are doing execrises like power cleans, power snatches, high row pulls, squats, dead lifts first–> Many of the execrises have a great deal with cordination and if you are playing the full body movements wrong you may not realize how much the bench took from you until its to late, so get the more complex ones out the way first
5. Bigger muscles first, example first squat, then leg press, then leg curls/extenions and then calf raises which are safe progression working on the bigger muscles trinkling down to the smaller muscles last.
6. Designing your workouts to focus on atleast 2 different body parts to 4 at most, not exceeding 3-4 different exercises on them will make massive improvements then to spend 45 minutes to 1 hour and a half just on chest.
7. When figuring out what body parts to work on work on things that have very little to do with the other or try not to kill the 2 closely related muscles in the same session… for example working the biceps and triceps will make it so that either your biceps or your triceps are not recieving the full benefits of the training them out, So try your best to do one one day and the other the other if you have the time to do so.
8. Sport specific execrises to finish out the training session
9. Replace carbs, electrolytes and eat to replenish.
10. Study tapes, technique and actual games or matches of yourself and others to improve your skills in the competition.

Making a program that fits your team

Unfortunately for teams that the time needed to figure out the strengths and weakness of the team would be kind of hard to impossible to do considering the amount of people are generally on teams. One of the most common mistakes with athletes is having more then 2 coachs in a short amount of time with different philosophys to getting to the next level. Or it may just be that there are over 50 football players and the coach just doesnt have the man power or the coaching staff doesnt know how to workout effectively and safe. It is possible to be effective without being safe–> With the concept of pushing hard with minimum amount of complaining about how this or that hurts makes banged up and damaged high school/college football players who later do not continue lifting becuase of silly injuries cause by neglectful young novice coaches.

Again with so many people, with so little time and with huge goals to achieve… what is the best way to come up with a program that will help your athletes achieve arriving to the next level.

It’s easier to compete, then to coach, sometimes you have to string the athlete through to achieve some of the goals of the season.

Things to consider when coming up with a effective safe program for your team
1. of course consider the level of your team… rookies should make it more fun then hard with games that teach technique, intensivity and fundamentals
2. If you are fortunate enough to have the ability tto lift off season good… but most likely pending on the level you may not be that lucky, you should come up with a typed up workout program with weights teaching them to focus on the machine and execrises that you feel will help the team considering their weaknesses(It’s good to test them but you may not have the time to adequately do so) and taking care of the basic essential types of weight training and teaching good technique when you can.
3. Make it a point to have infomation that may help your team learn about nutrition and focus on teaching them that water is needed especailly during high intense training session, having a good amount of food in your tank is good for training, refilling their tanks after training session/competetion, staying away from certain unhealthy food/lifestyle choices and make it a point to focus on the concept that the activities they deal with off the court/mat/field effects them on it.
4. Figre out who is leader material and allow them to lead stretches, runs and/or lifts pending on their skill level because team members like to look up to someone who is on the court with them not just their coach… Think about it when your classmate or friend is head of it you are quicker to do it then the teacher, coach or judge does it… pyshcological in a sense. They have someone to aspire to work to be like. It i still on the coach to figure out what to work on and how it is to be done->but the best leaders are not the ones who take all the spot light but who knows how to manages he/hers team.
5. When creating the daily plan have an ideal what the team will work on 2 days out minimum but not 2 weeks out pending on your level of team, i you are in the upper level then its ok to know what you are working on but the lower levels you may think they are ready for certian activities and find that certain plays or actions need more time then you expected, so try not to come up with elaborate complicated plans unless your team is top tier.
6. Make it a point to stretch after running/cardio for atleast 10 minutes- reduces chances for injury
7. There should be time to watch tapes of the past competition or to be able to watch higher levels of the sport… for instance boxers whould make it a point to watch and study great fighters like Mayweather who is technic is genuis.
8. Make it a point to emphasis “OFF SEASON MAKES IN SEASON CHAMPIONS” and “The more I sweat at peace, The less I bleed in war” meaning that they should train hard and part of training is scheduling themselves to workout outside of the team workouts by joining a local gym, running group, personal runs or lifts without the team where they can really take thier time to work on the personal weakness in more depth.
9. If you have the time and money make it a point to meet out of training and competitive mode like going bowling or eating out…Events that make more of a friend relationship compared to simply being about competition.
10. Last but not least at the end of the season reward the team with title like most aggressive, most improved esc… in order to do so keep a record of the numbers… many ignore it and do not realize how much this will actually motivate athletes to perform… With no ruler how do you know if they did better then last time or have a mark to work to beat.