Athletic Performance Training Principles

It’s amazing to glance through the world of the internet to discover the latest and greatest methods in athletic performance training. This usually involves methods that are either outright dangerous, recycled from a previous decade (new eyes means new market), or coaches maybe reaching a hair too far beyond their scope. The last one I check with is my wife Claire who is a Doctor of Physical Therapy and is generally amazed at how trainers and coaches feel comfortable using methods outside of their accreditations. Over the last 18 months, we have peeled back our athletic performance training and it has led back to the best results we have seen in our 9+ years of operation. This applied to a wide range of athletes in their age, sport, and ability. If you’re looking for some new ideas that were leaked from the Bulgarians, this probably isn’t going to fill your desires. If you’re looking to streamline the training while maximizing the response from training, continue on. 

   Learn Movement, Load, Speed

 Velocity-based training has gained a lot of popularity over the last few years and with good reason. There is no doubt that keeping attention to the velocity of movements has a huge carry-over to athletic performance. While training at Westside Barbell, our entire training was based on velocity. Max Effort days were slow velocity and Dynamic Effort were high-velocity training days. Many of our athletes have very low to no training experience. For this reason, we have a system that isn’t based on velocity (until appropriate for the athlete). Taking an uncoordinated athlete and telling them to perform a movement as fast as possible is likely a plan to create poor patterns. There’s a reason most high school parking lots are packed with Honda Civics and not Corvettes. Just because you can go faster, doesn’t mean you’re ready to. Learn the movement unloaded until the athlete is comfortable that way. This is why a warm-up involving many of your core movements is very helpful. It gives practice to the movement each day. From there, we will add a load to the movement. This doesn’t mean a barbell always. It can be a kettlebell, sandbag, band, etc. By loading the movement, we’re improving coordination in the athletes. Then once they have the coordination with load, we can make the movement faster. 

     No Max Effort

 Max effort training can be very valuable to athletes who can handle the higher intensity training and have the skill of performing a one rep max. Even with many of our collegiate athletes, we will wait to use this method because they still need to build their total training volume and display repeated efforts of strength. When done correctly, the volume in max effort training is very low because your body can’t handle an increase in load while maintaining the same reps and velocity. There’s an amazing thing that anyone who has worked with high school and college female athletes has surely noticed. This happens a lot on upper body exercises but could be on lower body exercises also. Let’s say this athlete bench presses 85 lbs for 10 reps. We decided it looked great so we add 5lbs/side. They then get 0 reps. Drop back to 85lbs and the athlete knocks out another 10. Look at the total training volume and worry less about the top weight being used at the end of the exercise. If training volume (sets x reps x weight), increases each week for 4-6 weeks, then you have an athlete able to handle more training. If they have kept the same velocity that entire time (or higher), then you have a much better training effect for that athlete. Always remember the population in front of you and not what you read in a research journal. 

    Introduce New Things Slowly

 Things like specialty bars, bands, chains, and any other training tool can be a huge positive for increasing athletic performance…when used correctly. If an athlete has never used a specialty bar, don’t have them start by using a specialty bar with bands attached to it. That’s two new training stimuli to work around which will lead the athlete to fatigue earlier and could create unnecessary soreness. In addition, with every variable added you need to have a baseline to compare it to in order to know if what you’re doing is effective or just to look cool on social media. The added benefit to this is that you’ll be able to get more out of each tool introduced into the athlete’s training. If your athlete can’t do a pull-up, do they really need to do specific lat or shoulder exercises? Introduce one new tool at a time, then build on that and exhaust it and then make the smallest change possible. 

 If you look at the best athletes, they all have a similar base that involves proficient movement and a great level of strength. This has likely been built over many years and wasn’t a rushed process. When we get a freshman in high school, I try to get them to understand that we’re programming with the next 8 years in mind, not the next showcase. This changes the perception of what training is and the approach taken to have success. 

Nick Showman

Showtime Strength & Performance

www.showtimestrength.com