September 2017 Blog Posts (9)

“You can’t improve what you don’t measure.”

It’s a classic quote – and let me premise the article by saying that there is a lot of truth in that statement. However, it is not absolute truth.

Strength coaches hear about the principle of tracking and measuring a lot. Blogs and podcasts mention how coaches should be tracking staff performance through managerial assessments. Many directors of strength programs spend time developing and recording on…

As a professional Strength and Conditioning Coach, how many jobs have you applied for and not even made it past the first cut?

You have 5 years of full-time experience, your master’s degree, and worked with many high caliber athletic programs only to get left out of the interview process for a job that you meet the requirements for. You could be on the other side of the coin as well. An undergraduate intern looking for more opportunities to learn or find that graduate assistant…

Neural confusion is a term, a metaphor if you will, that I use to explain what happens when you use exercises that attempt to isolate one muscle at one joint either to enhance performance or to prevent injury. Let recognize that the brain does not recognize individual muscles rather it recognizes and organizes patterns of movement to take advantage of muscle synergies. Attempting to isolate an individual muscle…

What is the glue that binds everything together in your program? Everyone does the same exercises, practices and trains in similar manners. What is your difference maker – the glue? You may not be able to see it, but successful programs have it. It is what gives depth and…

It would be foolish to not consider function during training, but the dynamic understanding and intent of function-ability can easily be misunderstood.  Case in point, we have functional training, but often these modalities are just physical therapy exercises or Yoga poses that pertain to these settings.  We have functional movement screens, great, but again the value outside of clinical applications of highlighting injury or potential for injury is not clearly…

I think it's invaluable to be able to compare training progress and process especially with similar entities. There's are a lot of dynamics at play which contribute to why something works in one situation and not in another.  "Works" meaning the training makes a measurable difference in relation to the intended outcome.  For example, if the intended outcome of a training program is to help produce hardy, more dynamic athletes how would I know if training contributed…

Reward drives human behavior.  Undoubtedly, fitness is a behavior.   Ultimately, we'd like athletes' behavior to be driven more by intrinsic or internal rewards than by external sources, but this type of thinking takes time to develop.  

So, what can we extrinsically reward in terms of fitness behavior?  Here's a place where the prudent coach really has to put some effort into thinking about the big picture.  The trap…

Dictionary.com defines the word adapt as the ability to adjust oneself to different conditions, environment, ect.  Charles Darwin suggested that adaptation is more of a causal factor for survival than strength or intelligence.  I've come to believe he was right.  The ability…