PHYSICAL DEVELOPMENT
FOR THE
AMATEUR ATHLETE
Essential Themes & Lessons for the High School Sport Coach
π
Ryan J. Faer, CSCS
Physical Development for the Amateur Athlete
“If you don't know where you are going, you'll end up someplace else.”
-- Yogi Berra
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Physical Development for the Amateur Athlete
Disclaimer: the thoughts, opinions, and insights within this text are
solely mine and do not reflect those of my employer, with whom I work
alongside, or those for whom we serve.
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Physical Development for the Amateur Athlete
TABLE OF CONTENTS
I. Introduction
II. Basics of Amateur Athlete Development
III. Basics of Program Planning
IV. Basic Parameters of Programming
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Physical Development for the Amateur Athlete
CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
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Physical Development for the Amateur Athlete
You could say that I began my career in the field of sport
performance back in 2014. That winter, as I finished my last semester
of undergraduate studies at the University of Florida, I formally
accepted a job opportunity as a strength and conditioning coach with
the Los Angeles Dodgers organization. All that I needed to do before
then was complete the last few days of my coursework; with passing
marks, the job would be mine.
A few weeks later, I proudly walked across the stage in
Gainesville, Florida to seal the deal: with a diploma in my hand and the
tassel on my cap moved to the left, I finally had the right to call myself a
Certified Strength and Conditioning Specialist (CSCS – the main
credential for those seeking to become a professional strength coach).
However, if I am to be honest, my education and experience as a
strength and conditioning coach started years before then, before I
could ever actually call myself a CSCS. Four years prior, at the age of
eighteen – and barely days removed from my high school graduation – I
lucked into an opportunity that would change my life and set me on the
path to where I am today.
It was 2010 and I was working out in the weight room at DeLand
High School (my alma mater) just a few weeks after graduating. Near
the end of my training session, I was introduced to the newly hired
Head Baseball Coach, Andy
Lyon, as he was receiving a tour
of the facilities. After getting
acquainted briefly, I was asked if
I would be open to joining the
coaching staff, and I obliged
without a second of hesitation.
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Physical Development for the Amateur Athlete
Of course, as a new and young volunteer coach must, I did
anything that was asked of me. I filled the gaps and needs of the
program, no matter what they were.
Sure, I coached some. In fact, on my first day on the job I threw
batting practice to the Freshman team. But, there was plenty of other
work to be done. I stocked
the concession stand,
created playlists for batting
practice, watered the field,
cleaned the locker room…
all of the work you can
think of that comes with
volunteering for a high
school program.
I should note that it wasn’t just me getting my hands dirty – we
did it together as a staff. But, at that time, when I had yet to take more
than a step into adulthood, there was very little value that I could bring
to the players and program outside of just being a body unto which
workload could be distributed. That is, until I pitched the idea of
implementing something new I had read about in my studies of
strength and conditioning.
Those days, I did a lot of “self-study”. I knew from the age of
sixteen that I wanted to be a strength and conditioning coach. So, at
about the same time I was sweeping the sheds, so to speak, I was also
reading every blog article or book that I could get my hands on. One
item I came across was something I had never heard about, and it
sounded promising!
The Dynamic Warm-Up.
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Physical Development for the Amateur Athlete
Before you chuckle at this now mundane and common practice,
you have to consider that, just 10-15 years ago, there were not many
high school strength and conditioning coaches in the state of Florida,
let alone those training the teams for which I personally played. So,
what did we do to “warm-up” in my days of playing? The circle stretch.
Everybody runs to the centerfield wall, gives it a tap, and then proceeds
to circle up for a bunch of static stretches: touch your toes; okay, grab
left foot, now your right foot, etc…
As I transitioned from eighteen-year-old pitcher Ryan Faer to (still)
eighteen-year-old Coach Faer, the plan was to do more of the same. Do
what we had always done: run to center field, then touch your toes;
now left foot, right foot…
That is, until I read that article about the dynamic warm-up. So,
we gave it a go. And wouldn’t you know it, it stuck.
With that, more gaps and needs in player development presented
themselves beyond just the grunt work for which I was originally
tasked. The question became: if we can “innovate” or update
something like our team warm-up, how else can we best prepare our
athletes to get a competitive and developmental advantage?
The next step was conditioning. Should we keep running poles, or
is there something better? Then there was strength-training. Should we
be doing it? Do we actually think we can do it?
As the years ticked by, and with the support of our head coach,
we kept implementing what I learned from books, internet articles, and
the many coaches – true CSCS professionals – who were willing to lend
me their advice and review my programs. By year two we were in the
weight room all summer and fall. Year three we were lifting two days
per week in-season (of all the things that we did, I believe this might
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Physical Development for the Amateur Athlete
have been the greatest game-changer and competitive advantage) .
And, in year four, we actually created our own DeLand High School
Baseball lifting t-shirts – a testament to the culture and buy-in that was
built.
Looking back, the programs were laughable; from year to year,
they certainly got “better”, but they also swung from one philosophy
(and oftentimes the misunderstanding of a philosophy) to another as I
learned more and more.
Regardless, the players
and staff bought in;
freshmen slowly
developed into young
men, and in the end we
all got the chance to
compete on Florida’s greatest high school stage, the state playoffs.
***
At the time of writing this book, I am more than a decade
removed from the first time I ever stepped on the field as a coach and
am now in a leadership role with the Cleveland Indians. As a
Performance Coordinator, my career has transitioned away from the
traditional coaching role. Each year I coach athletes less and less, while
coaching coaches more. I am now predominantly tasked with the
development and support of other strength coaches while I help to set
the direction of the strength and conditioning department as we
develop systems that work to keep our Player Development
department humming like a well-oiled machine.
I love what I do now more than ever, but I can honestly tell you
that a primary passion of mine is still to help those at the high school
level. Not only did I volunteer at that level for years during my
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Physical Development for the Amateur Athlete
undergrad, but I came back to volunteer every off-season after
embarking on my post-grad professional career. I also returned to my
hometown for a year to be DeLand High School’s first ever Strength and
Conditioning Coach for all teams.
The high school level taught me so much. While many of those
tool-box type of lessons will fill the pages of this book – for example,
how to prioritize foundational movements, to what type of training do
young athletes respond best, etc – the main lesson learned is at the
core of why I am writing this book:
Whether you are a CSCS – a true professional strength coach – or
not, it may not matter at all. Just like when I first got a chance to train
our team in the weight room some ten years ago, if there is a gap or
need to fill in the area of athletic development at your school or with
your team, chances are somebody is going to try to fill it.
Maybe that somebody will be you. Or maybe you are already
fulfilling on that need. Either way, while the field of strength and
conditioning continues to grow at the high school level, the fact is, most
high schools don’t have a certified strength coach at the helm. But that
won’t stop coaches from trying to train and develop their athletes to be
successful and healthy young adults.
It surely didn’t stop me ten years ago. Call it ambition or naivety,
but we knew we wanted to help our athletes, to develop them
athletically and personally. And, with the right resources and support, I
believe we were able to do that.
My goal is for this text to serve as a resource for amateur coaches
looking to fill that same gap that exists in the absence of a professional
strength coach to train their team. And by extension, to help all the
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Physical Development for the Amateur Athlete
young athletes under their care to safely and effectively embark on the
quest to get stronger, more athletic, and healthier in the weight room.
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Physical Development for the Amateur Athlete
CHAPTER TWO
BASICS OF AMATEUR
ATHLETE DEVELOPMENT
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Physical Development for the Amateur Athlete
Over the years I have received many inquiries and requests for
programming advice from high school sport coaches. What have they
nearly all had in common? Somewhere in each of their emails, online
messages, or phone calls they mention, “I don’t even know where to
begin”.
This has been a challenging question for me to answer even after
all this time. Never the one to simply hand somebody – coach or
athlete – a one-size-fits-all solution, I have always wracked my brain for
themes that would best help coaches devise a program or system
worthy and appropriate for their team, athletes and circumstances. Like
learning a new language in its entirety versus cherry-picking some
foreign words to memorize, I want to arm the coach with the
contextual knowledge that translates regardless of the circumstances,
rather than simply prescribing them a handful of exercises, sets and
reps.
In my last e-book, How to Maintain While Training From Home, I
believe I accomplished this; the goal was to help those who had lost
access to gyms during the COVID-19 pandemic. Namely, to help them
maintain their fitness capacities. Rather than just giving 1-for-1 exercise
replacements that substituted in-home resources for gym equipment
(e.g. how to do leg curls without a leg curl machine), the book discussed
important points for maintaining physical qualities, and how this could
be achieved with minimal resources, thus arming the reader with the
means to adapt these concepts to their own circumstances and other
applicable scenarios down the road.
However, the temporary ‘Plan B’ that is training from home is not
the same as attempting to optimize training for a competitive sporting
team under real-world circumstances.
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Physical Development for the Amateur Athlete
I would be kidding myself if I didn’t admit to asking myself the
same question that less experienced or educated (in the area of
strength and conditioning) coaches asked themselves when beginning
to write a new program: “Where do I begin?” However, over the years I
have found processes that have proven effective for me, and these are
the ones I plan to share with you in this text.
Personally, I always start two items: the needs analysis and annual
plan. Both of these steps are macro-level planning tools used to
determine what your athletes need and how you plan to address this.
While both of these are critical and will be addressed in a later chapter,
it would be more prudent of us to zoom out a bit further to see the
bigger picture first – to discuss the basic themes of developing amateur
athletes.
Below are the five main themes that we will discuss in this
chapter and circle back to throughout the rest of the text.
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Physical Development for the Amateur Athlete
FIVE THEMES FOR DEVELOPING THE AMATEUR ATHLETE
I.
II.
III.
IV.
V.
Keep It Simple: Training Age, Adaptability & Resilience
Keys to Progress: Specificity & Overload
Long-Term Development: “Slow Cooking” & Diminishing Returns
Hierarchy of Needs: Doing a “Needs Analysis”
The Intangibles: Buy-In and Culture
***
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Physical Development for the Amateur Athlete
I.
Keep It Simple: Training Age, Adaptability & Resilience
In high school weight rooms across America, you will undoubtedly
see some great training administered by strength and conditioning
professionals or well-informed sport coaches. You are also bound to
see some downright atrocious, borderline dangerous training. The fact
is, even the most well-meaning high school sport coaches are often
vastly under-prepared to lead athletes into a room full of liability like
the weight room, and in this way often administer inappropriate
training methods despite their good intentions.
If you hang around high school weight rooms long enough, what
you will also see are some striking similarities: the bulk of the athletes
in both scenarios – the good and the bad programs – will be excited,
enthusiastic, and bought into the program, and my goodness the
athletes in both scenarios will make gains in some fashion, particularly
in strength and size.
How can this be? How can bad programs still yield results? Let’s
start with the obvious, yet so often forgot: the age of the high school
athlete.
There are several ways to quantify a person’s age. In the case of
athletes in high school, they typically range from fourteen to eighteen
years of age. This is denoting their chronological age, which is the term
that refers to how long they have existed on Earth. While chronological
age tells you something about the athlete, it really doesn’t tell you
much.
However, there are several other ways to characterize an
athlete’s age. Biological age refers to the degree in which our bodies
have physically and hormonally matured. Consider the physical
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Physical Development for the Amateur Athlete
differences between most Freshmen and Seniors in high school – size
and stature, yes, but also facial hair and tone of voice. How about
comparing kids on your team with similar chronological ages. You might
have two sixteen-year-olds that display very different levels of physical
maturation. We have all heard the terms “early/late bloomers” and
“growth spurts” – biological age is exactly what this is alluding to.
The biological clock ticking is our body and nature at work. Not
even the worst of the strength and conditioning programs, the poorest
of the movement patterns, or the most negligent of the external
loading can prevent it from ticking away. Time alone enables physical
growth, muscle mass gains, and coordinative improvements all by itself
thanks to the changing chemistry of the human body. However, if you
do expose a maturing athlete to external loads – even poorly
prescribed or executed – the body will only adapt further. This leads us
to yet another way of quantifying age: training age.
Typically, an athlete’s first time in your weight room will also be
their first exposure to the stimulus (or stressor) known as resistance
training. In this case, that athlete’s training age before initiating
resistance training with your team would be zero. An athlete with littleto-no formal and structured training experience (i.e. a training age of
zero) is like a blank canvas or clay ready to be worked by your artistry;
they are a wide open window for adaptation. All they need is the
stimulus.
Throw some conservative loads on a newbie trainee’s shoulders
this week, and no matter how poorly they move it, chances are they
will be able to add a bit more weight the next week, and the week after
that, and after that…
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Physical Development for the Amateur Athlete
This is because their baseline is essentially zero, and it does not
take much to move the needle, so to speak, when you are starting from
the bottom. Thus, even inappropriate training can still yield a net gain.
This is a double-edged sword, as some might read this and think,
“Why go through too much trouble if anything will work?”
On the other side of that logic, I would urge the opposite thinking:
this is an incredible opportunity to make huge progress while doing it
the right way. Why the right why? Because doing it right – teaching
foundational movements correctly, properly prioritizing physical
capacities, sticking to loading progressions – will not only yield gains in
the near-term, but it will also lay the foundation for steady progress
years down the line when your athlete’s developmental curve starts to
flatten with increased training age.
The wrong way, on the other hand, puts the athlete in a
disadvantageous position down the road. It also causes a
collegiate/professional strength coach the inconvenience of having to
clean up the mess that was made before them, wasting even more
developmental time. If you care about your athletes, then doing
physical development the right way – not the easy way – is the only
option.
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FROM THE TRENCHES
As a sophomore in college back in 2011, I was given my first
opportunity to coach a team in the weight room. In preparation, I
crafted a “Strength and
Conditioning Manual” 80pages long. Ridiculous,
looking back on it, but it was
well-meaning.
Before dishing that training
out to our athletes, I asked a
collegiate strength coach to
look it over and provide
feedback, seeing this as an opportunity to leverage his review as
credibility with our coaching staff.
That coach’s feedback was tremendous for my development as a
coach, as he provided many great points. Unfortunately, I wasn’t at all
equipped with the knowledge to interpret the majority of it. After all,
as a college sophomore, I had not even begun classes in exercise
science yet. One piece in particular was his advice of training the
correct “energy systems”. Baseball is a sport that demands highintensity work for just a couple of seconds at a time, followed by
substantial rest time. While he was essentially alluding to how we
should conduct conditioning, I misinterpreted the advice and applied it
to lifting. So, rather than doing more traditional sets and reps, I chose
to have our athletes do 2 explosive reps followed by just 30 seconds of
rest for 8-10 sets. My thought was: 2 seconds of work, 30 seconds of
rest. Just like the game.
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Physical Development for the Amateur Athlete
What I didn’t know at the time was that this method actually has a
name: “Cluster Sets”. And clusters are an advanced prescription for
experienced athletes, a stark contrast to my novice players in the first
few months of training.
I did not make this realization until years later (when I was
experienced enough to actually come across advanced methods of
power development like clusters), but the crazy thing is: the athletes
got stronger! They got faster and even got bigger! What’s more, they
were bought in and excited to train each day. It was a fun and
rewarding environment.
Ironically, power clusters typically require relatively low loads (50-60%
of 1RM), so our athletes were forced to use light weights, and thus
were never put at too great of a risk. I wish I could say that part was
planned, but it was again a very lucky byproduct of my own
ignorance.
Ultimately, the athletes were safe and excited to train, and they got
better. If I had a do-over, I certainly would not use this method again
at that time, but the lessons learned were clear and could be applied
to any entry-level phase of your athletes’ training programs:
Low loads with an emphasis on movement quality, repeated many
times over the course of training phases and combined with focus and
intent from the athletes, can all add up to safe and steady progress.
Just know that you don’t need advanced methods like clusters to
accomplish this. In fact, there are many more appropriate, fruitful,
and time-efficient ways out there.
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Physical Development for the Amateur Athlete
The key to doing physical development the right way is to be as
simple and consistent as possible, while still maintaining engagement
from the player. But, what about variety, you might ask?
Variation can come in many forms: increasing or altering the loads
used and advancing exercise difficulty through movement progressions
are just two ways to add variety over time. And, if you expose your
athletes to all of the main movement patterns – e.g. the squat, hinge,
lunge push, pull, reach – that in and of itself is a lot of variety for a
weight room rookie. Progress is found within tried-and-true
physiological principles, and “muscle confusion” is not one of them.
What are some of these principles, though? We will now dive into
two that, should you always keep top of mind, will never fail your
athletes.
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Physical Development for the Amateur Athlete
II.
Keys to Progress: Specificity & Overload
In keeping with the approach of discussing the themes of physical
development – themes that will become your tools to attain progress in
any circumstances – we will now dive into two major principles that
stand at the center of just about every successful strength and
conditioning program: the SAID Principle and the Overload Principle.
The SAID Principle
Specific Adaptation to Imposed Demands, or the SAID Principle, is
the concept that explains the way in which our body changes
(adaptation) specifically to the stressors (imposed demands) that are
place upon it.
While not always this binary or simple, below are several examples
of this principle at work:
Imposed Demand: chronic reduction of caloric intake below daily
energy needs
Specific Adaptation: weight loss
Imposed Demand: beginning a long-distance running plan
Specific Adaptation: more efficient circulatory and cardiovascular
systems
Removal of an Imposed Demand: skipping leg days and doing only
upper-body lifting for a year
Adaptation: loss of lower-body muscle mass and strength
Put another way, you could think of the SAID Principle more like
this: if you want to improve it, you have to train it. We can’t get better
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Physical Development for the Amateur Athlete
at a skill if we don’t work on it. We can’t get stronger in our legs if we
don’t train them.
Let’s take this binary thought process and start to add layers of
complexity to it. It isn’t just about imposing a demand, it is about
imposing the appropriate demand. Consider the following questions:
• Can I become a better runner if I spend the majority of my time lifting
weights, and very little time running?
• Will I become a better powerlifter (i.e. lift as much weight as possible in
the Deadlift, Squat, and Bench Press) if I solely do CrossFit?
• Can I improve my ball handling in basketball if I spend all off-season
focusing on my soccer skills?
To the surprise of many, the answer to each question above is not a
resounding “no.” Instead, it is a rather non-committal “maybe.”
For example, strength training can improve running economy;
CrossFit does involve powerlifting movements; working on total
athleticism and coordination can transfer across sports.
However, while there may be some benefit, the transfer is probably
much less than if we were to apply the most specific demands possible
for the adaptations we are seeking. Put differently: many things can
work, but not all of them will be the best use of training time.
So, what adaptations are we chasing in the case of high school
athletics? We will talk specifics a bit later, but for now let’s generalize
to cement the concept of the SAID Principle: we want our young, novice
high school athletes to gain movement competency, coordination and
strength.
Notice how simple and general these qualities are. Why not get
more specific? Bat speed, kicking power, 100m Speed, etc.? As we
discussed earlier, a low training age means that there is plenty of room
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Physical Development for the Amateur Athlete
for adaptation, and therefore it does not take much to improve physical
capacities.
It is then the simple and general qualities that become our low
hanging fruit. By improving these building-block capacities – strength,
coordination, movement quality – many others will be brought up with
them. Not only is this the best use of our time in the early stages of
athletic development, but it will also pay dividends down the road
when passing our athletes off to their coaches at the next level, should
they play beyond high school.
The Overload Principle
Earlier we discussed the concept of training age, and how
introducing a new stressor like resistance training forces an athlete’s
body to adapt. Prior to applying stimuli our body is at homeostasis, or
its baseline. The stressors we apply to it, such as those experienced in
the weight room, disrupt this homeostasis. As a result, the body works
to create adaptations that raise our baseline higher in order to be more
prepared to handle similar stressors in the future.
The goal of training for any specific quality is to fatigue the body
with an appropriate stressor, and then let it recover. In some instances,
we are looking to simply return back to baseline. However, in most
cases, we are looking to push our body beyond its original baseline; we
are seeking supercompensation, or the process of rebounding from
training in such a way that we are even more prepared than before. In
the case of strength training, supercompensation would involve
stressing the body with a strong stimuli and subsequently allowing for
adequate recovery such that the body is able to handle greater loads
over time.
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Physical Development for the Amateur Athlete
The curve below illustrates this concept. Notice how the
adaptation will also start to diminish if subsequent stress is not applied.
In other words, adaptations can be lost over time without adequate
doses of similar or greater stress.
However, if we do apply a subsequent dose of stress (e.g. follow
up Monday’s training session with another later in the week), we can
prevent this diminishment of adaptation. I like to think of it as
incrementally “bumping” adaptation.
Now, to ensure that we continue to progress and make gains –
not just maintain – we have to apply the Overload Principle, which
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Physical Development for the Amateur Athlete
states that, in order to force adaptation (to progress in any area
physically, that is) we need to apply incrementally greater stress over
time. Otherwise, the body will adapt to such a degree that it can easily
handle prior doses.
Intuitively, this should make sense. Take a rudimentary example
from the weight room: let’s say your Bench Press one rep max (1RM) is
around 185 lbs. This would make 135 lbs relatively challenging for more
than a few reps.
For a few weeks you go into the weight room 1-2x/week and
perform 3 sets of 5 (3x5) of 135 lbs. And after some time, we will
expect this to get easier – i.e., you see progression by way of strength
adaptations.
But what if you continued to do 3x5 at 135 lbs for another 6
months? Would you expect to get any stronger then?
Surely, you are thinking no, and that would be correct. Once your
body has adapted to performing 3x5 at 135 lbs, it will simply maintain
its ability to do so week on week, and not help you move on to a
heavier weight for the same reps.
This is why we need to follow the Overload Principle. When we
incrementally increase the stress applied, we continue to make
progress. Some ways to achieve this overload of stress include…
•
•
•
•
•
Increased weight
Slower or faster reps
Increased reps
Decreased rest time
More sets
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Physical Development for the Amateur Athlete
Above are just a few ways in which stress can be incrementally
increased to bump your adaptation further.
As an athlete accumulates training experience, the challenge of
stimulating adaptation gets more challenging; timing and magnitude of
both training stress and recovery will become increasingly important as
an athlete progresses in training age. We will discuss this more in the
next section, however, just know that young athletes with limited
training ages have a wide window for adaptation and a very low
baseline. Thus, your plans for them need not be complex. Keep it
simple and rest assured it will work.
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Physical Development for the Amateur Athlete
III.
Long-Term Development: “Slow Cooking” & Diminishing Returns
I am not much of a card shark myself, but there is one card analogy I
am fond of when speaking about training young athletes: choosing
training methods is like selecting which card out of your hand to play.
If you are playing
highest card wins against
an opponent, and they
pull out, say, a ‘5’ card,
would you grab the
highest card in your hand
– say a King card – and
slam it on the table? Or
would you more aptly
reserve your highest
cards (since probabilities are your opponent has several higher cards
than that ‘5’) and select the lowest possible winning card – say, a ‘6’
card? I am sure you are thinking what I am: let’s save our good cards for
later when we need them the most.
To me, choosing training methods for novice athletes (or any athlete
in general) is about finding the lowest possible winning card. In other
words, what is the simplest, most time-efficient, yet ultimately effective
training method that we can play out of our hand?
For older and more experienced athletes, we might need to go to the
ace or face card up our sleeve – advanced exercises, or complex volume
and intensity prescriptions, recovery modalities and periodization
schemes. But, for our population of young, untrained athletes, the
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Physical Development for the Amateur Athlete
safest, simplest options tend to yield incredibly effective results with
relative ease.
To understand why this is the case, we will expand upon earlier
topics of overload and specificity by layering in the concepts of
Diminishing Returns and Long-Term Athletic Development.
In the above graph, we have a curve that represents a specific
physical quality. Let’s think of it as representing strength for right now.
The Y-Axis (Vertical) is amount of strength; the X-Axis (Horizontal) is
training age over time. As noted several times already, due to the
relatively low training age and physical baseline of young athletes, they
will progress very quickly in most physical qualities, including strength,
and do so without much need for complex methodology. This is
illustrated by the curve’s steepness near the beginning of the X-axis –
the rapid rate at which strength increases relative to training age.
As the athlete gains more experience (or training age), the curve
begins to level off, eventually becoming nearly horizontal as it
approaches a theoretical max capacity for that athlete (this being years
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or even decades down the road, mind you). This theoretical model can
be applied to most other physical qualities: speed, power, size, etc.
The graph above illustrates that, as athletes accumulate greater
training experience, the adaptation they can make for any given unit of
stress/loading/time diminishes. In other words: less bang-for-the-buck
over time.
But why is this? Why can’t we just add 5 lbs to the bar week on week
and expect to see the same results? That would be following the
Overload Principle, right? While this would in fact be adhering to that
principle, it only begins to scratch at the surface of how complex our
athletes are as human organisms.
As humans, we are composed of multiple systems, each one
incredibly complex. The Nervous System and the Musculoskeletal
System; the Endocrine System and the Lymphatic System; the
Circulatory System and the Pulmonary System – to name just a few.
What’s more, each system is also made up of organs, and organs of
tissues, and tissues of cells, and cells of organelles...
We can spare ourselves the Biology lecture by simply stating this: the
body is made up of systems, and systems are complex entities that
interact with one another. A prime, macro-level example of this is how
introducing a respiratory infection can not only cause breathing issues
as it attacks the respiratory system, but it can also cause a cascade of
effects downstream, as impaired breathing radically alters our body’s
ability to do so vital many things.
Now, let’s pull this concept of complex systems back within the
scope of training, relating it to long-term development and why we
can’t just make steady progress week-on-week infinitely. In the early
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Physical Development for the Amateur Athlete
stages of training, one of the systems mentioned above is a near-lock
for expedited development: the nervous system.
In short, the nervous system includes your brain, brain stem, and
spinal cord, as well as all of the nerves running throughout your body.
In the context of training, this system is responsible for communicating
messages to the muscles, telling them when and how to contract and
relax. In other words, the nervous system is the driver of how we
coordinate and express movement.
The initial exposures to resistance training early in the development
of an athlete will require the nervous system to adapt quickly, thereby
leading to substantial strength gains. And this is regardless of biological
age. This is an important concept to understand; it means that an
athlete can get substantially stronger without needing the hormones
required to build muscle mass – the hormones that don’t come until an
athlete’s biological age reaches puberty. That is why training for
strength by developing the nervous system is still so effective; it is
effective regardless of maturation, or lack thereof.
This is why we can see even middle-school-aged athletes (or entrylevel high school athletes) be so strong relative to their meager body
weight. They have developed more efficient and effective coordination
and sequencing of movements, and their nervous system is capable of
sending out messages that elicit stronger muscular contractions,
despite not having much muscle mass yet.
Zooming out a little bit, we might be able to understand then why
this presents as a potential developmental advantage for a player: an
athlete who begins appropriate training prior to the onset of puberty
has the opportunity to get a lot stronger – thanks to the nervous
system – despite not putting on much muscle mass. Thus, when they do
begin to see increases in requisite hormones for muscle growth, they
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Physical Development for the Amateur Athlete
will have a higher baseline of strength. This in turn improves their
ability to handle greater strength-training loads in a phase of their
development that will translate those loads into greater muscle mass.
In other words, they are a step ahead.
Now, this athlete also has more training time under their belt, thus
they will most likely need more advanced methods of training sooner in
their development compared to others; they may also approach their
theoretical max capacity earlier in life. Then again, maybe this will push
that theoretical ceiling even higher. Or maybe only the near-term
matters in the end, if that athlete is not still involved in sport a decade
down the road when it would actually come to matter. Complex and
dynamic systems at work!
Surely, I have overcomplicated the simple questions of “why do we
need to think long-term?” and “why do we have to worry about
diminishing returns?” But now that we have talked about two of the
innumerable systems that an athlete (and how complicated those
systems can be when they interact with one another), let’s see how the
complexity of it all might impact the diminishing returns graphs on a
broader scale.
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Physical Development for the Amateur Athlete
The graph above now illustrates the overlay of several athletic
qualities as the progress along an athlete’s training career. While still a
complete oversimplification, I am sure you understand the point:
Given all of the body’s complex systems, the infinite number of
individual differences between our athletes, and the unpredictable
responses that their bodies will have to training, this is exactly why we
should keep our high cards – the aces of programming – firmly in our
back pocket. Down the road, our athletes will inevitably begin to see
diminishing returns across multiple physical qualities. If we know that
we can achieve rapid progress at the onset of training with simple,
time-efficient methods, then there is no need to do anything more
complicated, strenuous, or challenging than that.
Not only will this be an incredibly time-efficient decision for you, the
athlete’s current coach, but it will also be a meaningful choice down the
road for both your athlete and their future coaches, as it allows the
continual bumping of adaptation for years to come by way of
increasingly advanced methods saved for when they will ultimately
mean the most for development.
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Physical Development for the Amateur Athlete
IV.
Hierarchy of Needs: Doing a “Needs Analysis”
One of the first steps in writing a strength and conditioning plan is to
conduct a needs analysis. While there is no set way of doing this, it
typically involves beginning with a macro perspective by determining
the demands of the sport. Some questions that can guide the process
include:
• What qualities are needed to be successful and durable during a
competitive season?
• What are the bioenergetics (or conditioning determinants) of the
sport?
• How much does absolute strength or pure speed impact play?
• What planes of motion are involved in the sporting skills?
Questions like these can then be sifted down to the position level. In
other words, what does each position demand? And then finally, we
can funnel it down to the micro-level, doing a comparison of the
answers we found to these questions versus the abilities of the
individual athlete.
This general-to-specific, simple-to-complex approach to conducting a
needs analysis is recommended for most strength and conditioning
professionals, especially at the higher levels of sport. However, for
those who would need significantly more time to answer the questions
above (and even more time to act upon these answers), I would
personally recommend doing something different: inverting the
process.
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Physical Development for the Amateur Athlete
Why would I recommend starting with the seemingly most complex
level, the individual? Because solving for the individual when it comes
to athletes competing at the high school level is probably the easiest
and most impactful of all, meanwhile solving for positional and sporting
demands are the least necessary and fruitful. This is an untraditional
take, so bear with me as I explain my rationale.
Let’s circle back to the concept of training age. We have already
discussed how simple, consistent training methods can yield rapid and
steady adaptation of athletic physical qualities with athletes that
possess a limited training history. We also noted how improving
general qualities and capacities during this time can also have a major
impact on more specific abilities. For example, improving strength
capacities early on in a training career can result in enhanced jump and
sprint capabilities. We know that eventually the returns from
generalized training will diminish, but early on this tide will raise all
boats.
Thus, answering for the needs of the individual athlete is not all that
complex (at this level) after all: it simply boils down to their training
age. Since most youth and high school athletes have limited exposure
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Physical Development for the Amateur Athlete
to structured training, their limitations will revolve around general
physical qualities of strength, coordination, and movement quality.
More rationale for the value of solving for the individual first is
embedded in the subsequent levels of the needs analysis, so let’s move
on to positional demands.
Determining the positional demands in your sport would mean
bucketing athletes into silos based on their primary position. However,
let’s consider the value of developing a player beyond their current
position. For starters, many athletes will (hopefully) play multiple
positions. That is, if we are doing long-term athletic development
correctly. In doing so, we will not only encourage more engagement
and prevent burnout, but we will also inherently push holistic athletic
development and prevent the potential risks that come with overspecializing in a sport or position.
Additionally, think about why athletes are often chosen for positions
at the amateur level. From my personal observations, it seems less
about what the athlete is good at, and more often about moving them
away from what they are not:
o Not very fast? Move him to first base
o Not very agile? Move her to goalie
o Too big to play a skill position? Stick him on the line
While this strategy helps the team in the near-term and makes sense
on the field, specifically training for just that position off of the field in
the weight room only cements that player’s fate as a one-position,
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Physical Development for the Amateur Athlete
athletically-limited player. Whereas focusing on holistic development –
seeking to improve all major athletic qualities like strength, speed,
power, jumping, sprints, changing direction, throwing – not only gives
the player a chance to grow into other positions, but also the chance to
positively impact the team if they can bloom into a more versatile
player. Maybe that lineman never becomes a star at another position,
but what if he improved his athleticism enough to add depth as an
outside rusher on defense? That is one heck of an insurance policy for
the team, and it costs very little.
Moving on the final piece of the needs analysis – the demands of the
sport. I certainly would not advocate for glazing over them, however I
think we can ask less questions at the high school level than the
collegiate or professional ranks for three reasons.
First, many players are multi-sport athletes as it is, thus training for
one sport presents the potential of limiting them in another.
Additionally, the demands of the sport at the high school level are
simply not what they are at the collegiate and professional levels. And,
either way, I am sure you have seen just how little it can matter to
young athletes. Many sport coaches (and honestly, strength coaches as
well) have been using misguided intuition and pseudoscience that
mismatches training and sporting-demands for decades. Baseball is a
prime example: the use of incessant distance running as conditioning
along with the fear of strength-training in a sport that is power and
speed driven – the downfall from my generation’s time in the sport.
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Physical Development for the Amateur Athlete
But the fact is, the detriments of being wrong are not as great as the
collegiate and professional ranks. The demands of the game are less.
For example, athletes play less games per year. And, competing
demands (which pose additional stressors on the athlete) are less as
well. For example, high school athletes don’t typically have to worry
about putting food on the table for others in their family (I say typically,
because I do know that it is a tough reality for some). While not quite as
binary as I am making it out to be, it is true that less stress overall
means less on-field risk for the athlete.
Finally, I’d like you to think back through your years in coaching and
ask yourself, how many of your athletes have sustained acute softtissue injuries, such as muscle strains (like the hamstring or oblique)?
Certainly, you will be able to name a few, but how often has it played a
significant role in your decision-making as a coach? My estimation is
not very often. However, as you move to the higher levels of sport,
injury prevention, workload management and recovery strategies
become focal points in ensuring athletes athlete availability and
readiness to perform at their highest when it matters the most. This is
because aging athletes gradually shed their ability to recover and stave
off injury as they get older, and the game will continually ask more of
them as they go along – as will life. On the other hand, young athletes –
by the nature of both their biological and competitive age – are much
more resilient. Additionally, we can think of improving athletic prowess
over the years in terms of cars – upgrading from the family sedan to a
luxury supercar. One of them tops out at 100 mph, while the other can
go above 200 mph; meanwhile one has a stellar safety rating and rarely
needs to see a mechanic, and the other needs tune-ups every few
hundred miles. Our athletes are no different in that the more powerful
and athletic they become, the more thought that will be needed in
their care.
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Physical Development for the Amateur Athlete
Thus, if we combine the three factors above – the prevalence of
multi-sport athletes, the relatively low demands of the game and life,
and the resiliency of youth – we can start to see why inappropriately
prescribed training for the demands of the game do not tend to blow
up in our faces when they happen. And yet, inappropriate training can
still waste the finite resources like time, and also limit athletic
development.
So, rather than fretting over a handful of questions pertaining to the
demands of your sport, it might be a more worthwhile endeavor to
focus on just a few, such as the following:
o What qualities does this sport demand, and how does that
line up with the qualities my athletes need in general?
You might find that your sport demands the ability to effectively
jump and change direction (e.g., basketball needs this more than
baseball). Building strength can improve the capacity to jump and
change directions, however more attention could be paid to the ability
to absorb landing forces and executing proper jumps and cuts. Surely,
we would want to teach all athletic qualities to our young athletes, but
a question like this can help determine if additional emphasis or
allocation of time is necessary.
Another question that could be beneficial…
o What is the predominant energy system of our sport?
Let’s quickly revisit the example above regarding baseball players
and their conditioning. Baseball is predominantly a power-based sport
where an athlete is tasked with performing a high-intensity (nearmaximal effort) movement or series of movements, followed by
substantial rest. Quite the opposite of distance running, right? These
two activities train entirely different systems in terms of producing and
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Physical Development for the Amateur Athlete
utilizing energy for performance. Baseball players also benefit most
from entirely different muscle fiber typologies than, say, distance
running, and this is something that conditioning can certainly influence.
This is especially the case during the young and physiologicallyinfluential years of high school when training age is low and athletes
quickly adapt to whatever demands are imposed on their systems.
Thus, distance running as conditioning for a baseball player is at best
counterproductive. This does not mean that the aerobic energy system
or that steady state conditioning does not have merit for the sport in
any regard. However, it does mean that training it in excess would be a
mismanagement of training time and developmental resources.
One final point to make about holistic athlete development versus
sport/position-specific training at the amateur level: think about some
of the most unstoppable players you have faced on the other side of
the field or court in your time as coach. What did they have in
common? Based on my own experience as a high school coach and
observer of sport, my guess is they were the greatest athlete. It was the
football player who played Defensive Back, Running Back, and Kick
Returner because he could dance all around the field. It was the
volleyball player who never had to be subbed out because she could
jump and block on the nets, hit with power from the back row, and
bump and pass to her teammates no matter where her opponents hit
the ball. It was the baseball Pitcher who could throw five scoreless
innings, then get moved to the Outfield or Shortstop, while also going
2-for-3 at the plate with a couple of stolen bases.
We all want to chalk up these types of athletes as genetic freaks, and
to some extent they might be. But what if you could make each of your
players half as athletic and versatile as your star stand-out athlete?
Sometimes it is hard to see beyond the right now and look past what
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Physical Development for the Amateur Athlete
the athlete in front of you can do to help you win today. But, if you
have coached long enough, you can certainly think of all the times you
wished you had just one more athletically inclined player off of the
bench, just one more strategic or tactical option to help you win a
game.
And, if you can think even further back in time, I am sure you can
think of plenty of “wish I knew then what I know now” moments from
your own playing days. Your athletes deserve an opportunity to expand
their movement and athletic capabilities beyond the box in which their
current capacities place them. Training the whole athlete is the best
way to give them that opportunity.
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Physical Development for the Amateur Athlete
V.
The Intangibles: Buy-In, Intent and Culture
To this point, we have discussed several themes to athletic
development specific to the high school athlete. Our last key item will
be one that applies to athletes of every level, and one that probably
comes to you most naturally as a coach.
These days, most athletic performance departments at the collegiate
or professional levels will identify themselves as evidence-based or
evidence-led. The premise of this approach is that strength and
conditioning professionals choose methods that are backed by scientific
literature, which gives insight into the validity, reliability, and
effectiveness of our practices. The literature (which is typically
conducted in a true or pseudo-clinical setting) often has its limitations
in applicability, as studies are generally performed on populations quite
different from the ones in which we are working (e.g. non-trained 4050 year-olds are quite different physically and physiologically than 2025 year-old professional baseball players, thus we could expect them to
respond differently to experimental conditions).
This is one of the reasons why data collection has become a
paramount practice in strength and conditioning. Over time, collecting
information on our own athletes can further refine our understanding
of the best practices
specific to their needs.
These practices are
the ideal, but I can
understand why the
thought of reading
scientific studies every
day and attempting to
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collect (and analyze) data from your athletes seems like an
overwhelming concept. However, I am not sharing this with you in the
hopes that you take this endeavor on in full force, but rather doing so
to illustrate a point.
While all of the science-backed practices could be thought of as
ideal, none of them will mean a thing if the athletes are not bought in.
Let’s start with an example from the realm of high performance sport:
data collection. In order for data to provide insights, it must – let me
emphasize, must – be consistent and reliable. Let’s take one metric for
example: Rate of Perceived Exertion (RPE).
RPE is essentially a way of attempting to objectify the subjective;
asking the athlete how difficult the training session was to them
(subjective) on a numeric scale (more objective), most often from 1 to
10, with 10 being max difficulty.
Imagine you are seeking to understand if your programming is
appropriate, difficulty-wise, for your athletes. As a coach new to
training your players in the weight room and writing training programs,
this is actually a great way to ensure you’re on track – that your
execution is lining up with your vision.
So, you ask your players to write down their RPE for the session on a
piece of paper as they leave the weight room post-training. After four
weeks of training, you begin to review the results. Below are 2
hypothetical athletes and their results, each with their own underlying
complication.
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Physical Development for the Amateur Athlete
Let’s look at Athlete A. Notice that they have marked ‘10’ for every
session. What are the odds that they actually felt that every session
was max difficulty? You might also remember watching them from
session to session and recall that this does not line up. They clearly did
not listen or care enough to understand the scale, or simply were not
bought into putting forth much thought. Whatever the reason, we
simply can’t trust the data.
Athlete B, on the other hand, reports much more variety in their
responses and they seem to match up more with your plan (e.g. two
hard days per week, one easy day), however there are several gaps on
the log that indicate the athlete failed to record their RPE. Can we
estimate what we think they would have rated a particular session
given their response to similar sessions? We certainly can once we have
enough data, however it is still an assumption. On the other hand, if we
leave these gaps ‘0’ and want to run averages one day, these holes in
the data will surely skew the results.
Both examples above illustrate in a very reduced way what happens
when athletes are not all in. I start with an example wrapped in data
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Physical Development for the Amateur Athlete
because the detriment of dirty data is quite apparent: if an athlete does
not do what they are prescribed and with the correct intent, then the
results are at best unreliable, at worst useless. The same can also be
said about training itself.
As we have learned in previous sections, the human body is
incredibly complex, made up of systems which are composed of their
own systems, all of which interacting to the demands in which we
impose upon the body as a whole. With this complicating the input-tooutput process much more than simple data collection, it is even more
important that we execute our planned and prescribed training
methods. Doing so ensures that we are yielding the results for which
we are seeking. It also gives us the best chance to determine if our
methods are appropriate and working; if the plan is being executed to
the ‘T’, but the athletes are not progressing as we planned, then there
must be something wrong with the plan itself.
Let’s first speak to the former: from your years of coaching, you
probably know more than I that it does not matter how great your
methods are, how much time you put into preparing them, or how
much you believe in them if the athletes are not bought in or
performing them with the correct intentions. On the flip side,
inappropriate protocols can actually still yield decent results if done so
with conviction.
One example is foam rolling. While the scientific literature has
conflicting results on the value of this modality – especially as a preactivity tool – the fact is, if the athletes perceives that it has value to
them and helps them feel prepared, that might be all we need to know
to make a decision on whether to allow it or not.
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Physical Development for the Amateur Athlete
FROM THE TRENCHES: BUY-IN
In a previous example from my own coaching history, we discussed how
I improperly interpreted a training concept my first year of coaching in
the weight room and prescribed advanced and ill-timed training
methods with our young high school athletes. The Cluster Sets we
performed were the very essence of playing the ace up our sleeve about
3-4 years too early.
However, the methods were still conducted safely, and the athletes
bought into them. Thus, they were committed and were rewarded for it
with progress on many fronts.
In my second year, I did what any of us would do: I tried to build off that
success and make the program better. However, I fell victim to what
many young coaches do: I completely re-invented a working wheel.
Rather than adjusting our clusters from, say 8x3 (24 total reps) to
something like 4x6 (also 24 total reps, yet more in line with our strength
goals), I went in a whole new direction, prescribing more “corrective”
exercises (something new I was reading about) for mobility and
stability. As a result, there were very few traditional resistance training
exercises in year two, and even less external loading. For the times that
we did use the Squat, Hinge, Lunge, and perform other major
movement patterns, we spent the majority of it grooving movement
patterns under no external load, and never really progressing.
Sure, we were “teaching the athletes to move.” A phase or two of this
would have sufficed, but instead we did a year of it, and many athletes
lost interest. Several of our top players – and the ones who were
cultural cornerstones to the team on the field – even decided to stop
coming to sessions, opting to see their own trainers. This didn’t just hurt
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Physical Development for the Amateur Athlete
my ego (in a time when I took things way too personally), but it was a
culture killer. At the time I blamed the kids, when in reality it was on me
and my methods.
However, in year three and four the pendulum of my training methods
swung back toward the center, and things started to click. We found a
balance:
Not too much simplicity – because they needed to have fun – but not
too much variation and complexity, because they needed to learn to
move well. A few correctives to ensure our athletes could move well
enough, but not so many that our athletes spent all day rolling around
on the floor.
We did in-season ice baths for recovery (for right or wrong). They mostly
dreaded this at first, but they were so invested in the program that they
ultimately bought into these too; it became a Saturday ritual – practice,
lift, ice baths. Whatever the science or my better educated self might
say, this was our plan and the athletes loved it. Very few athletes
willingly missed a session of in-season or off-season training that year.
This, however, is not necessarily a sign of good training methods. Sure,
we were definitely doing things better than year one and two. But
mostly, it is a testament to the job that the staff and players did to build
a culture of excellence, trust, hard work and commitment; and the
results spoke for themselves. Players stayed safe and healthy, they
progressed, and the team got better.
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Physical Development for the Amateur Athlete
While program design may not be your strong-suit, the beauty is
that the other half of the equation – buy-in and intent -- will largely be
dependent on your ability as a coach to galvanize your kids and create a
culture of excellence, trust, hard work and commitment. As a sport
coach, that is undoubtedly right in your wheelhouse!
So, if I might give just a little bit of advice: do not overthink this
part. The weight room can simply be thought of as an extension of the
culture you have already built on the field, in the classroom, and in the
locker room.
***
Creating a strength and conditioning plan from scratch is a
challenging endeavor, even for the experienced S&C coach. With so
many exercises, rep schemes, and periodization models at your
disposal, combined with the fact that each sport has its own set of
unique needs, and your athletes an infinite number of individual
differences, the amount of programming permutations can be
overwhelming.
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Physical Development for the Amateur Athlete
However, much like the approach we are taught at a young age
for answering multiple choices questions on an exam, the best thing we
can do for ourselves is to eliminate the potential solutions that simply
do not fit the question of how to most appropriately train our athletes.
Understanding training age is one of the main keys to decluttering
such a convoluted question. Since athletes with little-to-no structured
training experience present with a wide window for physiological
adaption, the highly-specific and advanced training methods of their
older, more veteran counterparts are not really necessary, which
eliminates many options from the start.
Additionally, if we then consider two of the main physiological
principles that govern the decision-making of most S&C coaches — the
SAID and Overload principles — and do so in the context of young,
novice trainees, then we can rest easy knowing that all we really need
to achieve progress is slight, incremental changes over time, targeted at
the athletic qualities that we believe will make the greatest impact on
our players’ overall athleticism and development.
Finally, we can begin to take stock of our athletes’ needs and the
demands of their sport. While the needs analysis is a key component
for determining what a program requires, it is also helpful in deciding
what it does not. And, once this is determined, it is vital that you can
rally the support of your coaches, parents, and players behind the value
of the program in order to maximize the intent that they bring to each
and every session.
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Physical Development for the Amateur Athlete
CHAPTER THREE
BASICS OF PROGRAM
PLANNING
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Physical Development for the Amateur Athlete
With a better understanding of the basics of athlete development
at the high school level, we can now begin to shift our focus away from
the theoretical and on to the practical — the X’s and O’s of program
design.
However, programming itself is a cumbersome topic in its own
right. Our approach to this discussion will be to work from macro to
micro, thinking big picture first and then zooming our way back in to
see the finer details. To take this 30,000-foot view first, it is best that
we circle back to a concept briefly mentioned in the opening pages of
this text: the Annual Plan. We will then use the concept of annual
planning to frame important programming considerations and
constructs as we dive deeper into each in a training context.
BLEND TO IN-SEASON
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Physical Development for the Amateur Athlete
I.
Establishing the Annual Plan
One of the most important steps in creating a strength and
conditioning program for your athletes is the the creation of the annual
plan. Thinking a year in advance about anything can seem like a
frightening proposition, but don’t let the word ‘annual’ scare you off.
Much like the yearly planners that we often encourage our studentathletes to use in high school to keep track of their assignments and
activities, the goal is not to fill in every single line of all pages today.
Rather, it is simply a place for us to put pen to paper and convert our
thoughts to a tangible plan.
What’s more, the annual plan is a loose term; realistically, you can
use the same process for more abbreviated planning (e.g. seasonal,
monthly). The more zoomed-out that you can think, the better; however
an entire year’s worth of planning is not necessary. Realistically, the
further we zoom out, the more likely the details are to change over time,
as not only will you undoubtedly learn a lot between now and, say, 6
months from now, but also because we know that life does not live in a
vacuum – things change. In the sample annual plan above, you will see
that, as time goes on, there are more and more blank cells for this very
reason.
The first step in creating your annual plan is to lay out a format
that matches your preference and determine the variables that are
most important and helpful to you in the planning process. Very simply,
I create a horizontal timeline of the months, broken down by weeks just
below. I then address the variables for which I want to track, and line
these variables up on the vertical axis of the chart.
In the pages that follow, we will touch on some of the common
variables (the vertical axis) addressed in an annual plan. First we will
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Physical Development for the Amateur Athlete
briefly define them, and then proceed to dive deeper into each within
the context of training itself.
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Physical Development for the Amateur Athlete
Season
In this section, our aim is to break the year into macro-cycles — or
big chunks — making it easier to plan around relatively large
constraints and demands. Planning for in-season training can look much
different than off-season training; the length of summer training might
be different than that of the fall. Thus, delineating these time blocks on
the annual plan can be helpful to planning.
“Milestones”
Here, we work to
identify big-ticket items
that can impact
programming. What are the
specific dates or periods of
time that might influence
programming? For
example, when are holiday
breaks and exam weeks?
You might consider the
dates for inital pre-season
and regular season games,
or the start of district-play
and the playoffs. You could
even plan your testing days
here.
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Physical Development for the Amateur Athlete
Emphasis
Here, we essentially take the macro-cycles and break them into
even smaller periods of time called meso-cycles (or phases). Phases are
blocks of focused training that carry a consistent and specific emphasis
(or multiple emphases). They can be any length of time, but typically
range from four to eight weeks. For this section, we are seeking to
determine what we will be focusing on during each phase of training
and how long it will last. Is it strength, speed, power, or movement
quality? Or is it something else? Will there be just one area of focus, or
multiple emphases?
Frequency
Now we begin to
plan on the micro-cycle
(weekly) level by
considering how many
days per week we plan to
train. To determine this,
we can ask ourselves the
following: how many
sessions do we need in a
week to best accomplish
the emphasis within each
phase, while also taking
into consideration time
constraints? An entire
phase might involve a consistent weekly frequency of three sessions
per week. Or you might choose to do less (or more) on select weeks; for
example training four times per week for three weeks of a phase, then
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Physical Development for the Amateur Athlete
dropping to three sessions in the final week as a deload or recovery
week.
Intensity
Now we zoom in further to conside the training session itself.
Intensity refers to how heavy or intense the training will be. There is a
lot of freedom and personal interpretation when incorporating
intensity into the annual plan. Because this model of annual planning
only gives one cell per week, we can really only input one intensity
(however, each training session will involve a range of
intensities/loads). I personally like to think in terms of maximum
intensity in a given week, and plug that into the planner; in that way,
when I look at the annual plan I know how heavy each week has the
potential to be.
However, you could also
think in terms of average
intensity. Either way, intensity
itself can be expressed in several
ways, including Rating of
Perceived Exertion (RPE). There
is also percentage of One Rep
Max (1RM). Either way, the goal
is to match up the
intensity/loading with the
desired emphasis for the phase,
within the constraints of the
season and for the allotted
frequency. We will talk more
about how to match them up in
the coming pages.
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Volume
As we continue to discuss the training session itself, we must
determine how much work the athletes will typically do during their
session (usually described in SETS x REPS). Because each cell in your
spreadsheet (or cell in the table) represents one week, we will be
generalizing for all sessions of a week. Thus, this is very simply a loose
estimation. In other words, as part of a planning document, this
variable allows you to consider what a bulk of the sets and reps might
look like, not what every set and rep scheme looks like for all exercises.
I personally like to characterize the set and rep scheme for the main
exercise each day (e.g., if we have three sessions that week and on two
of those days we are focusing on strength, the main exercise each day
might consist of a 5x5 in Week 1, a 4x5 in Week 2, and a 4x4 in Week 3).
While this only represents the parameters for one exercise each
day, these are our most important and they typically will be the ones
characterized in the intensity section as well, as they are typically our
heaviest/most intense exercises each session. As noted above, you
could express the volume as SETS x REPS, or you could also think of it as
total reps. For example, a 4x3 is really just 12 reps in total, and thus you
could plug “12” into that cell instead. This is all up to you and your
preference on how you can best view volume alongside intensity, since
they are stacked one atop another. You might also want to have
multiple rows for volume so that you can populate the prescription for
secondary or accessory work as well.
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Physical Development for the Amateur Athlete
Additional Considerations
One consideration that might be helpful would be to script out
conditioning or other components of the program. These areas could
also include very similar variables, such as Conditioning Emphasis,
Frequency, Intensity, and Volume. I could envision sport coaches laying
out practice plan variables as well on the annual plan. The options are
limitless, really.
It is also worth noting that the annual plan is not meant to be
concrete. In fact, the reason why much of it is so general (for example,
laying out a max intensity for the week rather than the intensity of
every set each day) is because the further out you plan, the more likely
the program is to change. So, as you create your first annual plan, we
can fully expect for it to be emblazoned with red ink over time. You can
also anticipate this being the case with every plan you ever write, no
matter how experienced you get.
Finally, another reminder: you do not need to script out a true
annual plan. In fact, I encourage you to begin with just a training phase
or season first. Ultimately, the annual plan is just another word for
planner. And, as long as we have developed a thoughtful plan, we can’t
be too wrong in how we created it.
Not only does the annual plan help you zoom out to see the
bigger picture and allow you to sort out the endless ways in which you
can program, it also shines a light on what is most important. By
understanding the variables above in the context of the annual plan,
you can now begin to fill out your own plan. However, to truly
contextualize each variable and how they work in concert to help our
athletes achieve their developmental goals, we must discuss each
component in greater detail.
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Physical Development for the Amateur Athlete
Seasonal Demands and Milestones
As we continue with the theme of first zooming out before we
zoom in, now let us begin with the seasonal outlook. It is important to
understand the temporalities of a year specific to your team, as it will
be critical in determining what training methods, emphases, and
frequencies are actually possible.
Each season or macro-cycle within the year will carry its own
unique objectives and constraints that only you, the expert of your
sport, will understand. For example, as a former high school coach
myself, I understand that summer training can be a difficult proposition
for baseball given its overlap with travel-ball. However, youth baseball
players in the south tend to play year-round, so there is barely ever a
respite from play. Thus, we need to find some time to carve out for true
physical development.
Ultimately, understanding the seasons will help you plan which
levers you’re capable of pulling, and when it might be most appropriate
to pull them. When faced with a similar scenario to the one above, I
learned that there wasn’t much value in planning a grand summer
training program for our entire team; the older varsity players were
focused on competing in front of scouts in tournaments that often
spanned a week or more at a time – all summer long, mind you –
making for very inconsistent training. However, what we could expect
was a lot of Junior Varsity and incoming Freshman players showing up
to participate in summer training. And since their training was going to
be slightly different than that of the older players, this allowed us to
plan accordingly.
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Physical Development for the Amateur Athlete
As for the Varsity players, we shifted our focus to the fall,
reserving a consistent window for training by opting to compete in a fall
league that only required 1-2 games per week. This allowed us to focus
the majority of our efforts on physical development with players that
did not spend the summer training with us. In this case, summer held a
competitive emphasis for our varsity players, while fall took on more of
a physical development focus.
Travel-ball might not be the only reason a player is unable to
focus on physical development during a certain time of the year.
Outlining milestones will serve as further guidance as to when training
might need to take the metaphorical back seat other demands of the
game, or aspects of the athlete’s life away from the field.
We discussed how each season throughout the year consists of
different objectives and time constraints. This can also be the case
within a season or macro-cycle as well. Take for example a week inseason when you might play very meaningful games. Earlier in the
season, you might have felt comfortable going into games with a team
that was slightly less fresh than “peak form”, opting to push the gas
pedal down in training. But, for those weeks when the objective is to be
as ready as possible for a tough opponent in a meaningful game,
instead you might choose to alter training variables such as frequency,
intensity or volume to mitigate fatigue.
Understanding the life-demands of your athletes is equally
important. There is research to show that athletes at the collegiate
level tend to be more likely to get sick around the time of exam week,
which could be attributed to the stress that comes with these times
compromising the immune system. Will training still be fruitful during
these weeks? Or will it only be a hinderance or detractor from training
quality, overall student-athlete health, and success in the classroom?
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Physical Development for the Amateur Athlete
Only you, your athletes, and potentially their support system at home
will know the answer to questions like these. Planning ahead allows you
ample time to weigh your options as each “milestone” approaches.
FROM THE TRENCHES: DELOADS…
Most coaches have heard the term “deload” and understand the
importance of recovery. However, I personally believe (both in part
based on anecdotal experiences and evidence in the literature) that
both topics are often misapplied, especially in the high school setting
where the majority of athletes are young, healthy and relatively
untrained.
As discussed in earlier chapters, young athletes are primed for
adaptation. They are also incredibly resilient compared to their older
counterparts. Thus, they can typically handle a lot of physical stress
without much need to unload or deload. What’s more, student-athletes
tend to get natural breaks in their training since their lives do not center
around their sport as if they were professional athletes. School,
holidays, family engagements, hobbies, and underdeveloped time
management and routine skills all pose the potential to create
inconsistencies or breaks in training. Finally, high school athletes are
more likely to be multi-sport athletes, and in these cases physical
development is rarely the sole priority. Considering these factors, it does
not make much sense to schedule further breaks or reductions in
training. In the past, I have found that “deload” weeks actually come in
handy when we want to push the gas more. Let me elaborate…
One of the biggest risks or fears of upping the intensity or load in the
weight room on specific exercises is acute injury during a set. Athletes
with low training ages are less fatigue-resistant and are also less
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Physical Development for the Amateur Athlete
accustomed to mentally pushing through hard sets or reps without
letting the difficulty or fatigue influence movement quality. Additionally,
movement patterns have not been “grooved” to the same extent as that
of more-seasoned trainees. In other words, physical conditioning, neural
drive, and training experience can be limiting factors that lead to poor
movement quality (during a time in their training lives when every clean
rep is vital for developing movement competency).
Thus, in order for us to increase intensity in the early stages of an
athlete’s career, it might actually make sense to “deload” the volume,
while keeping the intensity high. Essentially, this mitigates some of the
above risks by removing the extra few sets or reps that might involve
pushing through fatigue. As an athlete’s training age increases, they will
need this additional volume and should be more equipped to handle it.
But, in the early stages of their training career, less might actually
provide more value and do so in a safer manner.
Realistically, this approach is also in line with the way a deload or taper
should be conducted with more highly-trained athletes. I have seen that
strength and power gains are best realized when the volume is reduced
(which can be done through reduced frequency of training or a
reduction in volume) rather than intensity, and the research
corroborates these anecdotal experiences. However, in my journey as
an S&C coach, I have often heard athletes and coaches alike misapply
the principle of deloading by opting to go “lighter” on the weight.
Certainly, both methods do provide a reduction in training stress, and
therefore allow for some form of recovery. However, the reduction in
training volume has proved to be most effective.
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Physical Development for the Amateur Athlete
Training Emphasis
Once you have identified important seasons and milestones
throughout the year, you can then establish how to allocate training
time toward specific outcomes. In other words, you can start to
determine what you are trying to accomplish in the weight room during
each phase of the season or year.
Let’s briefly take a take a look at some of the major qualities that
can be addressed in the weight room.
Movement Quality and Basic Strength
While movement quality should always be of the utmost
importance, there are certainly times when it should take additional
priority in the training process and dictate the focus of sessions. One
prime example in the case of our demographic is during any
introductory period. By introductory, I am primarily referring to two
points in time: the first being an athlete’s initial exposure to the weight
room, and the second being when initiating a new year of training if
they have gone a significant amount of time away from the weight
room.
Focusing on movement quality as an emphasis means spending time
utilizing sets, reps, intensities, exercises, and rest periods (henceforth
we will lump these variables into one: ‘parameters’) that are conducive
for learning new movement patterns or re-establishing movement
quality standards. Consider this the gateway phase into your
programming for new athletes to the weight room, as well as those
returning from long layoffs away from training.
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Physical Development for the Amateur Athlete
Training for movement quality can be done in many ways, especially
given the context of the athlete’s age. However, in our typical setting,
this focus will center around the athlete learning the least
challenging/complex variations of your foundational movement
patterns; these are the movements that are the foundation of your
program, and in most S&C programs, we are talking about the Squat,
Lunge, Hinge, Push, and Pull for starters. For the sake of learning and
safety, the least challenging or complex variations of these movement
patterns are utilized (e.g. Goblet Squat vs. Barbell Front Squat), and
typically with body weight or light loads. Slow tempos (speed of
movement) are often used as well – for example, the Goblet Squat with
5 seconds descending, 3 seconds paused at the bottom, 5 ascending).
Longer rest periods can also be used for more instruction as needed.
As noted above, the target population we are discussing is the least
trained or prepared athletes (new to the weight room or returning after
a layoff); the timing of this phase is traditionally early in the year; the
movements are basic; the loads are light. These constraints and the
associated parameters
inherently allow
athletes to build
“foundational strength”
as a byproduct. In other
words, this phase and
its parameters serve as
a natural steppingstone
from zero loads (prior
to the start of your
program) to relatively
heavier loads in later phases. While this phase might seem rudimentary
to the athletes, it is where foundational strength, tissue tolerance, and
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Physical Development for the Amateur Athlete
movement competencies will be built to handle progressively heavier
loads in subsequent phases.
Maximum Strength
The phase most young athlete is waiting for – the maximum strength
phase – primarily hinges on developing the Central Nervous System
(CNS) to increase its capacity to exert high levels of force.
Although we have learned that our young athletes will typically get
stronger no matter what we prescribe, to do this the right way – the
safest, most efficient way – we must consider very specific parameters:
• Relatively low rep ranges
• Progressively higher intensities in accordance with the Overload
Principle
• Adequate rest between sets
• Stable and general movement patterns for maximizing muscle
recruitment and contributions to force production
Where this phase often gets misconstrued is in the gap between
what we would perceive to be needed to gain strength and what we
actually need. Briefly put, not every Maximum Strength set prescribed
needs to be performed with the maximum weight possible for the given
repetitions. In other words, performing a 4x4 does not necessitate
using a 4 Rep Max load for every set (or any of the sets, in most cases).
We will dive deeper into this during the Parameters section later.
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Physical Development for the Amateur Athlete
Power
Earlier in this text we considered what qualities might make a
standout high school player and came to the conclusion that it is
typically the most athletic player on the field, court, or pitch. While
many qualities are inherently wrapped up in the word “athletic”, one
physical characteristic that is sure to be highly influential is power. In
team sports, outside of the strategy, tactics, and sporting skills involved
in each particular sport, power is largely the equalizer: if all other
aspects of performance were the same between two athletes, the most
powerful athlete would dominate, as power can be applied and utilized
in every sporting action; on the mound and in the trenches, off the line
and in the back-field, in the paint and at tip-off. But, in order to train for
power, and especially with our unique population, we must first
understand it.
Let’s start with an analogy: think of maximum strength as a
bucket, and power being the water flowing from a tap just above. As
you can imagine, the larger the bucket is, the more water that can be
held within it. While not a perfect analogy, as it has its limits once the
athlete gets to a certain level of strength, this is generally an
appropriate way to frame what we can expect by improving strength
capacities at a relatively early stage of a career. The stronger our
athletes get (the larger the bucket), the greater their potential for
power production (the more water that can fill it up). Let me emphasize
“potential”; referring back to our analogy above, we still need to turn
the water tap on in order to fill the bucket. Thus, in reality, training for
power is not as simple as just getting stronger. However, just know that
strength is a major part of the equation.
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Physical Development for the Amateur Athlete
In fact, it is exactly half of the equation. And, when I say equation,
I really do mean that strength – or force – is a factor when we are trying
to sum up power. Below is one way to quantify power mathematically:
Power = Force x Velocity
For the purposes of our conversation, let’s put it this way:
Power = Strength x Speed
In this equation, you can see that strength is quite literally half of the
equation for deriving power. Strength also tends to be highly trainable.
This isn’t to say that speed is not trainable, it can just be a bit more
challenging. And, not to get too far into the weeds, but let’s take
sprinting as an example for the importance of strength to power: in
order to even get to top speed when sprinting, we must accelerate to
get there, and research shows how important strength is to the
acceleration phase of running. This same concept can be applied to
other movements as well. To accelerate your body, an implement, or
your opponent’s body, you must be able to go from a relatively static
position to high speed movement, which means overcoming gravity
(and additional load, in the case of lifting weights or handling your
opponent) with as much force as you can muster – i.e. strength.
While I have purposely emphasized the importance of strength in
power development, this is strictly due to the age and training history
of the athletes we are discussing. In the early goings, strength can be
the metaphorical tide that raises all of the boats; it can lead to
increases in the movement competency, coordination, and motor unit
recruitment needed to increase power.
Over the course of the years that you will work with your high school
athletes, however, they will ultimately need to address all aspects of
the Power Curve (also known as the Force/Velocity Curve).
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Physical Development for the Amateur Athlete
MAXIMAL STRENGTH
STRENGTH-SPEED
FORCE
POWER
SPEED-STRENGTH
SPEED
VELOCITY
The chart above takes our equation for Power and puts each
variable – Force and Velocity (or Strength and Speed) – on the Y and X
axis, respectively, creating a curved continuum. Let me highlight the
curved quality of this continuum: you see, another important aspect to
understanding Power is that its two constituents have an inverse
relationship. That is, when one goes up, the other must go down. An
example for clarity:
Imagine you walk up to an unloaded barbell to perform a Back
Squat, with instructions to move the weight as fast as you can. Chances
are, you can move that unloaded bar extremely fast. Now you are
asked to do the exact same thing, but this time with a load of 135 lbs.
The result was probably a bit slower, but still relatively quick.
Again, you are given the same instructions, this time with 185 lbs.
The bar is probably starting to lose the snap that it had with the last
few loads.
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Physical Development for the Amateur Athlete
We repeat the process: 225 lbs, 275 lbs, etc. until we hit your onerep max (1RM; the most weight you can successfully lift one time). Can
you imagine how much slower each rep got until you finally reached a
slow, grind-it-out max rep? This is an example of the inverse
relationship between strength and speed, or force and velocity; as the
weight got heavier, you were required to produce more force, yet no
matter how quickly you attempted to move that bar, the velocity only
got lesser and lesser.
That is why absolute Force (think about your 1RM Back Squat)
lives on one side of the curve, and absolute Speed (think about jumping
for the ball at tip-off) live on opposite ends of the spectrum, while in
between them lives a gradient of heavier/slower and lighter/faster
movements such as loaded jumps or moderately loaded Barbell Squats
performed for speed. All of these examples mentioned essentially fall
within the “squatting” movement pattern, but the loading parameters
allow you to surf the curve – they help you train all aspects that
contribute to power.
While this discussion on power is certainly a bit long-winded, it
really is essential to understand how power is derived in order to train
for it. The key is maximal intent, regardless of which portion of the
curve you are targeting.
In order to perform a high quantity of high quality, maximal intent
repetitions, the athlete needs to perform them with little fatigue. This
means that the reps per set should be minimal (with as many sets as
feasibly possible while still repeating the same quality and intent), and
the rest periods should be complete. More directly put: the athlete
should get plenty of rest to ensure that there is little decrement in
performance from set to set. Finally, the placement of power-based
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Physical Development for the Amateur Athlete
work within the session, day, and week matters as well, but we will
touch on this in later sections.
Hypertrophy and Muscular Endurance
Hypertrophy is a fancy word for increasing muscle mass. And,
muscular endurance is essentially the ability to perform repeated submaximal efforts for an extended period of time while resisting fatigue.
Although these qualities are not the same and do not exactly go handin-hand, the process of training for them – specifically in the weight
room – is very similar. Additionally, their value to high school athletics
and many team sports are equally less applicable. Thus, we will be
discussing them together.
Let’s start with how to train for these qualities: unlike training for
maximum strength or power, training for increased muscle mass
predominantly involves performing a high number of sets and
repetitions (volume) at relatively lower loads (intensity), and with
minimal rest. While heavy loads do create the kind of muscular damage
that can stimulate muscle growth, this is just one component. The
other two components that contribute to hypertrophy, in terms of
training methods, can be accomplished with the approach of more reps
and less rest. In this way, we accumulate the metabolites (byproducts
of training within and around the muscles) that come from muscle fiber
damage, and the occlusion (restriction of blood flow to the working
muscles) needed to stimulate a muscle growth response post-training.
However, two very important keys must be considered when discussing
hypertrophy.
Not only is muscle growth dependent on training methods, but it
is also vitally dependent on the body’s ability to create the necessary
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Physical Development for the Amateur Athlete
hormones (e.g., testosterone) required for hypertrophy. As discussed in
earlier chapters, this is exactly why focusing on CNS development in the
early stages of training a high school athlete is more effective than
training for increased muscle mass; the fact is, most young athletes just
can’t get much muscle growth to occur prior to puberty. Thus, all of
those extra sets and reps that come from training for hypertrophy as
opposed to strength simply become inefficiencies of time.
Additionally, another rate-limiter of muscle growth is caloric
intake. If an athlete is not in a caloric surplus (taking in more calories
than they are expending), then they will not be able to make inroads
toward the goal of increasing muscle mass, regardless of whether the
hormones are present or not. And, as I am sure you can attest to better
than I: high school athletes tend to have poor fueling habits, whether it
be due to a lack of resources at home, education on nutrition, or time
management skills to ensure that they take the time to eat or pack
food. This quite often leads to under-fed athletes, which in turns means
athletes ill-equipped to reap the rewards of hypertrophy training.
Now, training with higher reps and less rest isn’t all for not, even if
the athlete is underprepared (hormonally or nutritionally) to get the
most from it. Similar rep ranges (and beyond, as you climb above 15
reps or more) can still be useful in creating muscular endurance.
However, I would personally contend that very few team sports at the
high school level necessitate muscular endurance. Or I should say, very
few require it to be trained in the weight room. Sport specific
“endurance” (addressing the bioenergetics of the sport) in team sports
can more appropriately come from the field, court, or pitch, whether it
be from conditioning sessions or just the very act of practice itself (slap
a GPS device on, say, a soccer player in practice and you will see what I
mean). Training for local muscular endurance (e.g., the ability of the
biceps to resist fatigue under load) is very rarely a great use of training
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Physical Development for the Amateur Athlete
time. And, as we both know, training time is a limited commodity in the
high school setting.
***
The physical qualities discussed above are only a handful of the
many that go into sport performance. However, they are the big rocks,
the low hanging fruit, the tides that raise all boats.
Determining which quality to emphasize can be a complicated
process, especially when working with more experienced and advanced
athletes, as they don’t adapt quite as easily as our younger athletes. For
the former, timing and progression of training loads and emphases can
make all the difference. Should we use linear or undulating
periodization? How long should each phase be? What about a peak and
taper?
We have to ask these questions in large part because we know
with quite a bit of confidence that a more seasoned athlete responds
less favorably to concurrent training – or the “mixed bag” approach to
training, where an athlete focuses on many training qualities at once
(e.g. training for Strength, Speed, and Aerobic Capacity equally at
once). For the highly trained athlete, this is a recipe for suboptimal
results in all areas.
However, with our lesser-trained athletes, the research tells a
different story, as concurrent training actually yields promising results.
The beauty of this fact is that it makes the process of programming
much simpler; in essence, our bullseye is much larger with younger
athletes. So, while I would certainly advocate for providing a clear focus
for each training phase, I wouldn’t exclude the other areas entirely. In
fact, I would touch many of them each day. But, more on this to come;
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Physical Development for the Amateur Athlete
for now, just know that each training emphasis covered above
possesses its own prescription of exercises, sets, reps, intensities, and
rest periods that are most conducive to enhancing their associated
qualities. And, where they fit within a training session will be key as
well if we are planning to train in a concurrent fashion.
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Physical Development for the Amateur Athlete
CHAPTER FOUR
BASIC PARAMETERS OF
PROGRAMMING
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Now that we have discussed five common themes of athletic
development and program planning, we will circle back to take a
deeper dive into the parameters of program design, including
Frequency, Volume, Intensity and Buffers. When combined, these
parameters set the plan for the prescription of the strength training
program.
Frequency and the Minimal Viable Product
The majority of the parameters that we will are dependent on
what we are trying to accomplish and how to best apply the science of
training. Frequency, however, is often dependent on factors less
related to science. In the professional setting, athletes are paid to train
and have little competing demands with their sport. Therefore,
scheduling is not typically a limiting factor for how often or how long an
athlete can train. In this case, you begin with the ideal in mind and then
pair down if needed. In the private sector, frequency is mostly limited
by a client’s willingness to pay for more sessions or the trainer’s
willingness to provide more training for less cost.
However, in the amateur ranks, the athlete or team’s schedule as
a whole will highly influence and limit the amount of time that can be
spent training; as will weight room availability; and at the collegiate
level, NCAA rules will also play a role. Thus, rather than starting with
the ideal in mind and pairing down as needed, we might be better
served to begin with the “MVP” approach – the Minimal Viable Product.
Or in other words, what is the least amount that we can do and still
make progress? We can then pair up from there.
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Physical Development for the Amateur Athlete
While the ‘MVP’ will vary quite a bit depending on your team’s
unique circumstances, you can be quite assured at this point that your
athletes’ low training age will ensure progress with just about any
amount of training stimulus in the early stages of their development.
So, what is the MVP for your athletes?
In my own experiences, three training sessions per week – if
focused and dense – are plenty viable. Even at just 30-45 minutes per
session, your athletes can see improvements in many of the physical
qualities discussed in this text, so long as you use the time wisely. The
less days and time you have to strength-train, the more important it is
focus on the meat and potatoes, if you will, of early athletic
development while you’re in the weight room; this includes movement
competency, strength, and power. The other qualities can then be
addressed in a more creative fashion beyond the four walls of the
weight room.
In 30-45 minutes, your athletes can accomplish quite a bit. Below
is an example of an MVP training session:
•
•
•
•
Warm-Up (5 minutes)
Instruction (2 minutes)
Plyometrics (5 minutes)
Primary Exercise/Strength Work (20 minutes – e.g. 4-5 sets, where each
set (or pairing of exercises) and rest take 4 minutes total [work 0-1
minute; rest and filler exercise 3 minutes])
• Secondary Exercises/Strength Work (10 minutes – e.g. 3-4 sets, where
each set (or pairing) and rest take 3-4 total minutes)
If you find that your schedule permits more than this, it is certainly a
bonus. However, the format above performed with focus and intent
three times per week will provide plenty of training load and
opportunities for young athletes to progress. Meanwhile, qualities like
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movement competency, speed, power (on the lower-load side of the
Force-Velocity Curve), mobility and stability can be bolstered by microdosing them outside of the weight room and on the field during
practice.
Of course, there are many more ways to go about training should
your team have the time. There are four-day training splits (e.g. UpperBody/Lower-Body or Push/Pull days). There are larger two-day splits
that require more time and are best kept for in-season periods where
outside demands are too great to include training more frequently. I
have even used five-day training splits during instruction-heavy blocks,
where the load was very low (thus limited recovery time was required)
but the frequency was needed to learn movements quickly. It is all
about balance though, as the more often you train (thus, increasing
frequency), the less conducive and safe it will be to also increase the
other parameters (intensity, volume, duration) without a proper buildup to that point. More is not always better.
Ultimately, there isn’t only one way to go about scheduling
training sessions, especially with less-experienced trainees. So much
can work, even a Minimal Viable Product. What is crucial, however, is
that you understand the time constraints imposed upon your team, and
also consider the balance of parameters in order to not only keep your
athletes progressing, but also to keep them safe and healthy.
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Volume and Intensity
While these parameters were dissected separately in brief earlier
in this chapter, they are best discussed in tandem as we dive deeper
due to the way in which they are related. Like the inverse nature of
Force and Velocity, Volume and Intensity also have a relationship
whereby one strongly impacts the other.
An easy way to clarify this is to think of your 1RM. Essentially, this
just means the greatest load (intensity) that you can move for the given
1 repetition (volume). We can do this for any number of repetitions or
loads: 3RMs, 8RMs, 135 lbs, 400 lbs, 60% of 1RM, 95% of 1RM, etc.
Whether you are using relative measures or absolute loads, your
current physical capabilities will only allow you a finite number of reps
for a given weight. Again, let’s revisit an example from earlier in this
text:
You are attempting to find your 1RM in the Back Squat.
You walk up to a barbell loaded with 135 lbs and perform 3 reps.
Then 185 lbs for 2 reps…
225 for 2 reps…
250 for 2 reps…
275 for 1 rep…
You do this until the weight starts to move very slowly, signaling
that you are close to your 1RM.
You put on 300 lbs and perform it for one maximal effort rep and
the test is complete.
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Now, what if we could perform a rep max test at every single one
of the loads in one session without accumulating any fatigue? We can’t
actually do this – it isn’t possible –
but humor here. You might find
that you can do 25 maximal effort
reps at 135, 15 reps at 185, 10
reps at 225, 6 reps at 250, 3 reps
at 275, and 1 rep at 300 lbs.
This gradient of maximal
effort reps possible across
increasingly heavier loads
illustrates the nature of the
intensity/volume relationship. And
we can use the table to the right
to put some more structure to this
concept.
This very intuitive concept could have been summed up in a few
short words: with heavier weight you can do less reps. However, I have
gone to greater lengths and used this example for a reason.
Revisiting our example above, why wouldn’t we just rep-max
every single load on the way up to our 1RM? The answer is because
more work comes with a cost: fatigue. And, in the case of attempting to
put your maximum strength capacity on display, it is important that
fatigue not run interference. The same can be said for determining
power capabilities. However, as discussed in the section for
hypertrophy and muscular endurance, the opposite can be said for
increasing muscle mass and stamina, in which case we must be able to
fight through fatigue in order to accumulate a lot of volume and the
subsequent byproducts that stimulate these particular adaptions.
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The overarching point to be made clear here is that managing
volume and intensity is not as easy as simply using the above chart to
prescribe the exact percentage associated with the repetitions
prescribed to your athletes.
Your emphasis matters: are we training for strength, power,
movement quality, hypertrophy? This will have a bearing on the
number of sets you perform, the speed at which your athletes should
move, and the rest that should be allowed (or enforced). It is a
complicated process, especially for the highly trained athlete. However,
we can simplify it for the young, high-school player. We will soon circle
back to each emphasis to discuss the parameters most conducive for
each, including volume and intensity. However, I think it would be best
to define one more concept that will be very helpful in understanding
the best ways to prescribe volume and intensities: buffers.
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Navigating Volume and Intensity with Buffers
Let’s continue with the example above – the stepped 1RM test
– as this will make it simple to understand buffers in training. The buffer
of a given set is essentially referring to the difference between the reps
performed (or prescribed) and the maximal number of reps possible at
that load for the athlete. And we can look at buffers in two ways, the
first being in relative terms, the other in absolute. The stepped 1RM
test is an example of absolute buffers.
Let’s start with 135 lbs. Because this was a warm-up set in the
example, and we did not want to take on any fatigue as we progressed
toward our heavier loads, we only performed 3 repetitions. However,
we speculated earlier that in reality you could most likely perform 25
maximal effort reps with 135 lbs. Therefore, our buffer would be the
number of reps performed subtracted from the max number of reps
possible with that load. In this example, we get a buffer of 22 (22 reps =
25 possible reps – 3 performed reps). The remaining buffers during this
rep max test would be as follows…
185 x 2 (max of 15)… Buffer of 13
225 x 2 (max of 10)… Buffer of 8
250 x 2 (max of 6)… Buffer of 4
275 x 1 (max of 3)… Buffer of 2
300 x 1 (max of 1)… Buffer of 0
Buffers are an important concept to understand, chiefly because
they can make predicting and prescribing exercise difficulty simpler; the
greater the buffer, the easier the set will be. A buffer of, say, thirteen or
eight are clearly warm-ups; a buffer of four could be somewhere in
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between a warm-up and a working set; a buffer of two or less are nearmaximal efforts and can be incredibly taxing, even for trained athletes;
a buffer of zero or one is a maximal effort set and, on some days, not
feasible.
Buffers also make utilizing percentage-based training a lot easier
and more effective. Above, the buffers are absolute – meaning they
describe absolute loads (i.e. 135 lbs is 135 lbs, no matter who you are
as an athlete). Percentages, on the other hand, are relative parameters,
as they will direct each of your athletes to different loads (i.e. 50% of a
300 lbs 1RM is 150 lbs, while 50% of a 200 lbs 1RM is 100 lbs).
Percentages are often used with athletes because they allow for
individual differences while still providing structure – or to put it
another way, without allowing a free-for-all of weight selection by the
athletes. However, percentage-based training can be challenging and
often frustrating for an athlete and coach. In our next section we will
discuss some of these challenges associated with percentage-based
training – as well as the benefits – and how buffers can help alleviate
some of these tension points. We will also look to pull together all of
the parameters, including buffers, to discuss the prescription process
for several training emphases.
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PRESCRIPTION OF PROGRAMMING
Should your program use percentages for load prescription? And,
how many sets and reps should we prescribe?
These two questions are enough of a challenge to keep most new
S&C coaches up late at night at the drawing board. However, with the
concepts we have already discussed firmly understood, we can take a
breath and remember that it can be a simple process for our high
school athletes to see progress. Let’s circle back to the beginning of this
text to cement some very important concepts to remember when
programming for high school athletes
o Athletes with low training ages progress very quickly regardless of
what parameters they are given
o Simple is usually the best approach with high school athletes; the
less we change exercises, the quicker they will learn and adapt
o Strength is the tide that raises all boats for young athletes; get
them stronger in the early stages and you will also improve their
coordination, power, and movement competency
o Young athletes can train concurrently (i.e. they can focus on more
than one training emphasis at a time) and still see results
o Buffers can be key in navigating volume and intensity parameters,
and safely progressing your athletes’ strength capacities
Now, let’s take these themes and apply them into the practical
prescription of several emphases.
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Prescription of Strength
Let’s begin by discussing how we might program to improve
strength, which can be defined as the ability to produce maximum
voluntary force. In practical terms, we can think of strength-training as
the process of increasing an athlete’s ability to produce force. To
effectively do this, we need to expose our athletes to relatively heavy
loads, with the goal of increasing their ability to tolerate them.
It is important to note, however, that an athlete’s maximal strength
(1RM) typically fluctuates from day to day based on their readiness and
training status. If your 1RM was 300 lbs, but you recently took 2
months off from training, then your 1RM probably isn’t still 300 lbs; if
you were sick going into the
1RM test where you hit 300
lbs, chances are your 1RM is
actually higher than you tested.
These are egregious examples
of inappropriate maxes, but
more acutely speaking, sleep,
work/life stress, fatigue, injury,
motivation, and illness are several other factors that contribute to
fluctuating readiness on a daily basis. What’s more: research indicates
that highly trained athletes handle loads closer to their 1RM better
than lesser-trained athletes (i.e., they are more able to keep the buffer
closer to 0 and tolerate it). This is why training near 1RM loads (95100%) can be a tricky proposition for athletes with a lower training age.
So, what can we do to still elicit strength gains?
Here is where buffers come in to help. While strength training is
often viewed through the lens of increasing loads over time, it can also
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be viewed another way: reducing the buffer over time. When we
welcome new athletes to the weight room (or begin a new training
cycle), we usually work with larger buffers at first, gradually and
progressively working our way to smaller ones – whether we know this
or not.
At first you might wonder how working with a larger buffer can make
anybody stronger, but let’s use an example to illustrate the process.
Let’s imagine an athlete’s Five Rep Max (5RM) on the Squat is 200 lbs,
and we are prescribing 3x5 for their working sets. A couple assumptions
can be made right from the start:
1. That particular 5RM is going to be dependent on their readiness and
training status. In theory, it might have been 200 lbs on test day, but it
could be 205 lbs today, or maybe 195 lbs tomorrow)
2. Even if an athlete’s readiness is tops today, it would be very challenging
(especially for the relatively inexperienced athlete) to hit all three sets
of five reps at their 5RM of 200 lbs – in other words, a buffer of 0 reps
for all three sets. To even have a shot, they would most likely need
complete rest beyond four or five minutes. Realistically however, just
one set with a buffer of 0 can fry the CNS
3. For most athletes, even performing three sets with a buffer of 1 rep
(e.g. 3x5 at 185 or 190 lbs for this athlete) can be a huge challenge, and
may not even be possible in the current moment
Given these assumptions, you can understand why simply
prescribing their 5RM (or using a percentage chart that says you should
be able to do 5 reps at 87% of 1RM) will most likely prove to be
ineffective. So, how can we attack this more effectively? The simplest
way would be to strive to improve your athlete’s capacity to handle
more volume with progressively smaller buffers. Below is a 9-week
example to illustrate my point.
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Week 1: 3x5 with a buffer of 3
Week 2: 2x5 with a buffer of 3 | 1x5 with a buffer of 2
Week 3: 1x5 with a buffer of 3 | 2x5 with a buffer of 2
Week 4: 3x5 with a buffer of 2
Week 5: 2x5 with a buffer of 2 | 1x5 with a buffer of 1
Week 6: 1x5 with a buffer of 2 | 2x5 with a buffer of 1
Week 7: 3x5 with a buffer of 1
Week 8: 1x5 with a buffer of 3 | 1x5 with a buffer of 1 | 1x5 with a
buffer of 0
Week 9: 1x5 with a buffer of 1 | 1x5 with a buffer of 0 | 1x5 with a
buffer of 1
In this scenario, the first couple of weeks might seem relatively easy
to the athlete, but as the weeks pass, we slowly raise the load in such a
way that the buffer progressively drops with concomitant increases in
volume with these lower buffers. As this becomes more challenging,
the body is forced to adapt so that it can tolerate greater training loads.
One of the assumptions above was that three sets with a buffer of
one is very challenging, and even just one set with a buffer of zero
might be all an athlete can do. However, in the above example, the
athlete spent 9 weeks progressing toward the ability to perform two
working sets with a buffer of one, and one working set with a buffer of
zero, thus surpassing that original assumption. Their newfound ability
to repeat substantially heavy loads indicates that they got stronger,
even if we did not re-test. And the beautify of this method is that very
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little had to change: the exercise stayed the same (Squat), as did the
volume (3x5).
This process of improving strength by beginning with a larger buffer
and moving toward a smaller one can work with percentages as well. If,
in theory, an athlete can perform 5 reps at 87%, we can instead
prescribe 80% for 5 reps, and then work the percentage higher over
time. Or we can even do the inverse: close the buffer in another way by
prescribing lesser reps at a given percentage, and then build the
repetitions over time (e.g., working from 3 reps at 87% to 5 reps).
One last point I will make in support of using buffers (or at least
thinking in terms of buffers during your planning) is that it can also be
used without an RM or percentage as guidance. For example, you can
ask your athletes to build up to a load where they feel like they can
perform ___ reps, while leaving ___ reps still “in the tank”. This
methodology of letting athletes dictate their own loads is called autoregulation, whereby the athlete regulates what they are capable of
doing. This method has proved effective for both experienced athletes
with demanding training schedules in and out of the weight room, and
also lesser-experienced athletes when you have yet to establish a rep
max for them.
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Prescription of Power
Similar to training for strength, our aim when training for power is
to minimize fatigue while maximizing both the quality and intent of the
repetitions performed. What is most important when training for
power is that every rep is performed with the same bar/movement
speed (maximal). Once speed begins to deteriorate, any more reps
thereafter become less effective in improving our rate of force
development (another way to describe power, referring to how fast we
can produce force). That is why, unlike strength, training for power
involves living with a much larger buffer, and not necessarily working to
shrink that buffer, but rather moving the same weight (or progressively
heavier weight) faster over time.
If you were to look at the typical percentages used for training
power, you would see a dichotomy: on one hand, you would observe
very powerful athletes, such as Olympic Lifters or many football
players, performing very heavy Olympic Lifts (e.g. the Clean or Snatch)
between 90% and 100% of their 1RM. But isn’t this the opposite of
what I said above – training for power with a large buffer?
Yes it is, but for good reason: first of all, the Olympic Lifts are
phenomenal tools for developing power as, even with the heaviest of
loads, it takes tremendous bar speed and transfer of energy up the
kinetic chain to take a bar from a standstill on the floor all the way up
to rest on the shoulders. It may be 90-100% of 1RM for a Clean, but it is
certainly not 90-100% of an Olympic Lifter’s Deadlift, hence why they
can move it rapidly still.
Also, if we think back to the Force-Velocity Curve, you can recall that
power is derived from both strength and speed which both work in an
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inverse relationship along a curved continuum. On one side, you have
unloaded jumps, throws, and sprints that train the speed end of the
spectrum, while on the other you have your maximal effort lifts such as
the 1RM Back Squat. In between you can then find a gradient of loads
and movement speeds. Olympic Lifts fall closer to center, strengthspeed aspect of the curve (i.e., the side of the curve more biased
toward strength) when performed with heavy loads, thus they are just
one way to enhance rate of force development.
The rationale behind first noting that a lot of power-based work
should be with a large buffer (therefore relatively light) for your
athletes is due to the demographic we are discussing: the relatively
untrained high school athlete. Early in their training career, exercises
such as Plyometrics, Sprints, Medicine Ball Throws, and Speed-Squats
are ideal for developing greater coordination, reflexive capabilities, and
overall athleticism as they train for power, while also minimizing the
risk of performing heavier, more complex movements rapidly (and
potentially under fatigue). While your athletes might be able to
perform 20-30 reps with 50% of their 1RM, performing just 3-4
repetitions at a time with a short break in between (30-60 seconds) can
be an effective means of accomplishing safe, power-based work
Ultimately, I would highly encourage the incorporation of
plyometrics, medicine ball throws, and sprints early on in the training
career of your athletes, and here is my rationale:
In the first few months – or even in the first year or so – of
training, a lot of your athletes’ work will be focused on developing
foundational and maximum strength for all of the reasons already
discussed throughout this text. In the context of developing power, this
work is done close to the maximum strength or strength-speed portion
of the Force-Velocity Curve. Thus, striving to balance this out with
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speed or speed-strength training (i.e., the side of the curve more biased
toward speed) with lightly loaded or unloaded exercises (sprints, jumps,
throws) makes intuitive sense. And, together, our athletes get the
exposure needed from both the strength and speed ends of the ForceVelocity Curve to prepare them for the center aspect of the curve down
the road, which combines both moderate-to-heavy loads with maximal
intent.
A final note on training the speed and speed-strength ends of the
continuum centers on this concept of maximal intent: athletes must
perform these exercises with max intensity, and fatigue must be
limited. Thus, even though an athlete can probably slam a Medicine Ball
10-20 times before breaking a sweat, breaking a sweat is not the goal.
Our goal is to repeat maximal effort repetitions with as identical of
power outputs as possible (and of course, with flawless technique and
movement quality). And, if you recall the formula for power (Power =
Force x Velocity), then you can understand why fatigue is problematic;
the weight of the implement – in this case, a Med Ball – is going to
remain the same throughout the set and therefore the force needed to
move it remains constant. Thus, in order to maintain Power outputs
from rep to rep, we must move it with as much velocity as possible.
With Force being constant (i.e., the implement does not get heavier), if
the velocity drops, then so too does the power output. This concept can
be applied to sprints and jumps as well: an athlete’s body weight (or
their weight plus a light implement) is going to remain constant. Thus,
their ability to repeat movement velocity is key to maintaining power
outputs. Thus, it is essential that power-based work centers on
prescribing only the number of reps that can be completed with
maximal intent and minimal accumulated fatigue. This is also why the
placement of power-based training within the workout itself (and
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oftentimes the week too) matters as well, which we will touch on
shortly.
Prescription of Hypertrophy
While strength and power both require more nuanced
programming, training for hypertrophy and muscular endurance both
involve less precision for the high school athlete. It is not that they are
any less important or deserve less thought; rather, it’s more that the
target that we are attempting to hit is substantially larger.
This is because stimulating muscle growth and enhanced
endurance does not require us to mitigate fatigue or ensure the utmost
readiness in our athletes. In fact, fatigue and muscle damage are
necessary components for eliciting hypertrophic effects and pushing
through muscular fatigue is exactly how we build local muscular
endurance.
From a programmatic standpoint, like training for strength,
hypertrophy and muscular endurance involve the utilization of very
small buffers; however, unlike working for max strength, it involves
doing so at high rep ranges (typically 8-12 reps for hypertrophy, 12+ for
endurance) with limited rest in between sets. We also concern
ourselves less with maintaining the weight on the bar, and more with
accumulating total volume.
As discussed in earlier sections of this text, most team sports
require little focus on muscular endurance in the weight room, if any at
all, as the majority of sport-specific bioenergetics – the creation and
utilization of energy – will be trained on the field in practice. Also noted
previously is the futile nature of hypertrophy in pre-pubescent athletes,
as it is largely limited by the athlete’s hormonal status. Until the athlete
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has matured, efforts directed toward chasing muscle gains will be time
spent inefficiently.
It should be noted, however, that just because we decide against
devoting significant time toward training for hypertrophy doesn’t mean
our athletes won’t gain any muscle. Their body is still capable of
developing muscle mass, albeit slowly, and two factors will still ensure
this can happen with an untrained athlete in the early months of
training. The first factor is that there are predominantly three types of
stimuli that provoke muscle growth, and one of those is mechanical
stress on the muscle tissues themselves, which can be caused by loads
used at lower rep ranges (i.e. targeting maximum strength). In other
words, heavy loads still cause muscle damage, which is one of the goals
of training for hypertrophy. Thus, the training we will primarily focus on
with our athletes early on will still incite some muscle growth.
Additionally, the second factor is that onset of strength training for the
first time will cause an abundance of adaptations. This includes muscle
growth, as the body will work to ensure it is prepared for the new
challenge of handling external loads.
Ultimately, it is not that we want to avoid training the higher rep
ranges (with lower buffers and shorter rest periods), but rather that we
have little reason in the early stages of a high school athlete’s training
career to spend a significant amount of time on it.
There are some circumstances, however, when training for
hypertrophy does matter. Consider football and any other contact
sport; in these cases, muscle mass helps with absorbing the impact
from opponents and the environment. Additionally, increasing muscle
mass does increase the potential for maximal strength. In the early
stages of training, the athletes CNS will allow for sunstantial gains in
force production. However, over time these returns will diminish too.
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At this point, increasing lean tissue will become a necessary component
of the annual training plan.
For the times when hypertrophy is necessitated, training phases
can certainly be devoted to increasing muscle mass. With high school
athletes, a concurrent approach – where we touch many qualities in a
phase and session – can work as well. There is still room for some
higher volume work to be effective in this mixed approach, as long as
you have the time for it and it is not interfering with more important
work. The latter of these two points is dependent on how we prioritize
training qualities and how the structure of our training sessions support
it – the topic of our next section.
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STRUCTURING YOUR TRAINING: EXERCISE ORDER
A well-structured training session accomplishes two higher-order
objectives: it prioritizes the most important training qualities and
exercises, and it also optimizes efficiency of time.
Once a warm-up is completed, the training session should be
organized in such a way that the most important work comes first. If we
are training concurrently by addressing multiple training qualities per
session, then the order of the physical qualities trained should closely
mirror the hierarchy of needs for the high school athlete.
We have noted several times how important developing Strength
and Power will be, due to their influence on other training qualities and
the low threshold for
improvement with
untrained athletes. For
this reason, these
qualities should take
precedent in most
cases early on in
training, followed by
any higher-volume hypertrophy or muscular endurance work.
Additionally, your primary exercises – the staples of your program that
provide the most value for the time spent on them – should be
prioritized as well. For example, you may have your athlete perform a
Squat and a Barbell Hip Thrust with similar sets and reps, targeting
lower-body strength for both. However, because the Squat is more
commonly used as a primary exercise and addresses more muscles, it
should typically come first.
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The reasons behind placing your exercises in sequential order by
importance are two-fold, with the first simply being temporal. Should,
for some reason, your athletes run out of time and not be able to
complete the session in its entirety, we know by placing the more
valuable work earlier in the session that there is a greater likelihood
that they will still have completed it. This goes for exercises and
physical qualities alike; the later in the workout they are placed, the
greater the chance that an athlete might run out of time to complete
them.
Additionally, allocating the most important work to the front end
of the sessions also serves as a helpful guide in adjusting workouts on
the fly based on the readiness and response of the athlete or team.
Consider the following scenarios:
• An athlete comes into the weight room looking like (or reporting that)
they are exhausted/fatigued
• Finals week is approaching, and you want to give your athletes a bit of a
mental break
• It has been a challenging week in terms of games, with one competition
going into overtime and the other two being highly competitive, against
tough opponents
• Practice ran long and the players have arrived in the weight room
looking a bit gassed
• A player missed lunch today and did not have time for a pre-training
snack either
• An ambitious athlete really got after it in the early part of their session
and looks crushed as they approach the second half of their workout
Given these scenarios, there is no right answer as to how to respond
and/or adjust the training session. However, by structuring your
training session by magnitude of importance – and ensuring your
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athletes are aware of this fact – you can more easily decide on the best
option. Oftentimes, a beneficial adjustment is to reduce the volume of
non-vital work (the exercises on the back end of the training session) or
to chop off whole blocks of exercises altogether from the bottom of the
lift. In this way, the athlete’s training time and load is reduced
significantly without losing the primary focus of that day’s session. Plus,
it is an easier conversation to have with the athlete and a great
barometer for just how fatigued they actually are:
“Hey, let’s focus all of our attention on your Squat and Row today.
The sets might feel a little bit tough still, but that is all we will do this
session. Get those two important exercises in with quality, then get out
of here and start your recovery at home early.”
If an athlete can manage that, then we know they are still getting in
beneficial work. On the other hand, if they can’t muster the energy or
vigor to even do this, then we know they may need a day off
altogether.
The second reason exercise order and training session structure are
pivotal is due to the effects of fatigue. All workload comes with a cost –
whether it be skill work (throwing, shooting, dribbling, etc.), strength
work, plyometrics or conditioning – however, not every aspect of
training yields the same type or amount. Some activities, such as
anything high-intensity in nature, involve significant neural fatigue; the
kind that you don’t really feel – as opposed to muscular fatigue, which
can be more obvious with muscles burning, feeling tight (the “pump”)
or heavy. Nothing in training lives in a vacuum, so any fatigue at all has
the potential to impact subsequent work within the session and the
week as a whole.
By placing your most important work first within the training session,
you are ensuring it gets maximal freshness for that given day. Then, as
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the athlete progresses through their session and accumulates neural
and/or muscular fatigue, it will spill over into work that we have
deemed to be less important that day. For example, we wouldn’t want
accessory work (such as targeted triceps work) to interfere with our
strength or power-focused upper-body exercises (e.g., a heavy bench
press). In other words, if our triceps are fatigued going into our primary
pressing work, then we will have to work at a lower relative buffer, thus
limiting our exposure to strength-eliciting loads. Placing the accessory
work near the end of the training session ensures that this does not
happen.
STRUCTURING YOUR TRAINING: BLOCKING EXERCISES
In practical application, one way to organize your training sessions is
to identify blocks consisting of pairing or groupings of exercises
performed together, with each block having an emphasis and placed
hierarchically with the most important block of exercises coming before
less valuable work. While many names can be used to label these
blocks, here is one format:
Accordingly, the Primary block consists of your most important sets
of the day, while the Accessory block constitutes exercises that matter
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the least. With a hierarchy like this in mind, we can then shift our
attention to filling those blocks with exercises.
There are many ways to fill our training blocks, however one key goal
should be to maximize the bang-for-our-buck. One way to do this is to
increase the density of the training session. Training density refers to
the amount of work completed in a given time. You have probably
heard the terms supersets, compound sets, and group sets. These are all
methods for increasing training density within the session.
Much like Kleenex has become synonymous for tissue (regardless of
the brand), the term superset has taken on a greater, more generalized
meaning than it was originally intended to; in theory, supersets are
defined as pairings of exercises that work the same muscle groups (e.g.,
Bench Press followed by Push-Ups), while compound sets refer to two
exercises paired together that train different muscle groups (e.g., Bench
Press followed by Lunges). However, in reality, trainers and strength
coaches alike typically just use the term superset interchangeably for
any pairing of two exercises, in the same way many people call any
tissue a Kleenex. For the purposes of avoiding confusion, I will refer to
two exercises performed back-to-back as pairings.
Pairings and group sets (three or more exercises performed
sequentially without rest) are a great way to increase training density
and get more out of a training session without adding substantially
more time. Utilizing these methods capitalizes on the concept of active
rest; rather than an athlete completing a set of, say, Back Squat and
then standing around for 3 minutes resting, they can fill that time
period with more work that provides training value while also still
allowing them to recover. The latter point, however, is incredibly
important. Active recovery when using pairings and groupings must
preserve the recovery in between the performance of your main
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exercise in that pair/group. As you’ll note, the concept of mitigating
fatigue and maximizing readiness does not just apply to the day; it is
also vital within the workout from set to set. If we do not respect this
physiological premise, our athletes’ performance during the training
session will suffer, and with it so too will their potential for progress.
Thus, while performing a true super-set – where we pair two similar
exercises – is a great way to increase muscular damage and fatigue
during higher-volume hypertrophy and muscular endurance work, it is
not recommended when the goal is strength or power development. In
fact, to take it a step further, depending on the training experience of
your athletes and how much time you have for training, it might be
recommended to avoid pairing any two demanding or heavy exercises
altogether, regardless of whether they address the same body parts or
not. Let’s dive into some examples to illustrate the point and provide
rationale.
Example 1:
While the above pairing trains opposing segments of the body
(Lower- and then Upper-Body), they are both relatively heavy and thus
demand a lot of the entire body as a whole. In other words, even if they
work different body parts, they still ask a lot of the athlete from an
effort (and mental) standpoint. This pairing is not necessarily off limits,
but I would personally advise you to save this intensive of a match-up
for your secondary or accessory work. As for your primary, or most
important work of the day, here is a more conducive pairing:
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Example 2:
Any low-intensity exercise could be filled into the 1b section, but
core, mobility, or goal-specific work tend to be great fillers when
looking to add density to your heavier, more intensive training sets.
Ultimately, whatever you choose to prescribe, the goal is for it to be
minimally fatiguing, less mentally challenging, and relatively brief so
that the athlete still has some time to prepare for the next intensive set
of their primary. This is the approach I typically take with my athletes’
(and my own) primary work. I don’t want too much time to stand
around, however because our primary work is the most important of
the day, I also don’t want to take away from it by pairing that exercise
with something else that is intensive, thus compromising just for the
sake of time. As we addressed earlier, the order of exercises within the
workout already sets us up to ensure that we place an emphasis on the
most significant work by doing it up front in the session. Compromising
readiness for each set by making the wrong choice of pairings only
negates this plan’s positive effect.
Now, what about secondary and accessory work? This is when I
would advocate a similar approach to Example 1, or even moving to a
group set like the following:
Example 3:
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In Example 3, we now pair two relatively challenging exercises of
opposing body segments, and also add in a third low-intensity exercise
to round out a group set. In this format, the lower-body is still getting
some rest while the upper-body exercise is being performed, and then
both segments get active rest during the filler exercise. And, because
this is not your primary, most important work of the day, even if there
is some residual fatigue from set-to-set, we do not need to be as
concerned.
You’ll also notice that our filler exercise in 2c only has 3 sets, one less
set than 2a an 2b. This was intentionally done to provide an example of
a way to be even more economical with time. Filler exercises can be
important, but just like the order of exercises within the session, the
order of exercises in a group will also denote just how important they
actually are, as by the end of the group set, athletes will typically be the
most fatigued and least focused. By chopping off one set at the very
end of the grouping, the athlete can move on to the next
pairing/grouping of exercises (in this case, they would move on to
accessory work) after completing the fourth set of Inverted Rows. In
other words, their last set would only consist of the Single-Leg
Romanian Deadlift and the Inverted Row. This saves the athlete a brief
amount of time and allows them to clean up the equipment from this
grouping (or move to another spot in the weight room) and get the
weight necessary for the next block. All the while, they will not be
losing any high-leverage work, just one set of a filler exercise. You do
not need to prescribe your training in this way, but it just another
example of how to prioritize your most important work while also being
economical with time.
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Finally, let’s look at an example of accessory work:
Example 4:
In example 4, we see a grouping of three exercises, each with
substantially more reps than the previous examples. Additionally, all
three exercises are multi-joint in nature, targeting specific muscle
groups; in other words, there are no filler exercises like core or mobility
work. Because this is our accessory work – thus, our least important
and near the end of the training session when time might be running
short – mitigating fatigue is no longer a priority. Thus, adequate rest in
between sets or exercises is not the primary focus, nor is maintaining
the load on the bar from set to set. This makes the accessory block(s) a
great time to focus on hypertrophy or muscular endurance. That is also
why I oftentimes instruct athletes to immediately begin the next set
after completing a round of all three exercises (i.e. no rest in between
sets, as long as form and technique can be maintained with the building
fatigue), as this only further enhances the hypertophic/endurance
effects.
By now you have probably realized just how important it is to
understand your training emphasis, and how managing fatigue and
readiness is vital to programming. This allows us to determine what
goes into a workout given the time of year, and also how to structure
each workout to get the most out of them. In this way, we have now
zoomed out to see the big picture (emphases throughout the year) and
dived in to see the value of structure on the micro level (within the
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workout). Finally, let’s conclude by shifting our attention toward the
middle ground: understanding how these very same concepts of
emphasis and structure, fatigue and readiness can be applied when
scheduling the entire training day and week as a whole.
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STRUCTURING YOUR TRAINING: Daily and Weekly Outlook
Just as we want to optimize the structure of an individual training
session, so too do we want to create purposeful structure within the
training day and week themselves. Ultimately, the aim is still to
minimize fatigue that might negatively impact the quality of any
significant work. What is deemed as significant, however, might be
dependent on the season or time of year. For example, let’s consider
the pre-season and in-season phases.
Considerations for Pre-Season & In-Season Structure
During the pre-season and in-season phases, the importance of
practice, games, and training will fluctuate and progress as time passes.
On one end of the spectrum, we can imagine how the importance of
winning pre-season games is significantly less than the importance of
winning post-season/championship-season games. Thus, the time and
energy spent training, practicing, and conditioning will inevitably differ
as well.
Let’s begin with the pre-season. While competition will be initiated
for the first time during this period and will gradually take on more
importance, I would argue that both practice and training carry
relatively equal importance early on. Below is my rationale:
• This is the final window of time when training can still take or share
priority before significant competition begins
• Athlete game loads will still be minimal during the onset, which leaves
room for substantial training loads
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• Practice might be the most critical piece of the puzzle, as the players (as
individuals and as a collective) work to prepare themselves strategically
and tactically for the competitive season.
If we are placing a significant amount of weight on all three aspects –
practice, games, and training – then there is a good chance we might
train and practice on the same day. We might even train and compete
on the same day too. Thus, the key would be to structure the training
day in accordance with what matters most.
In a scenario where a training session falls on the same day as a preseason match, might feel comfortable lifting several hours before the
competition, building in time for rest and recovery in between the two.
In-season, however, we would probably opt to train once players
have finished competing for the day. Now, what about on a practice day
that lines up with a lifting and conditioning session – how might we
structure this day? During the pre-season, a major objective is to
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prepare the team and its individuals for match play, making practice
quality a prime consideration. Thus, preceding it with a challenging
training session might not be the most beneficial way to ensure
readiness for skill development. Rather than being fresh for their
tactical session, they might instead be fatigued, which can negatively
impact the quality of their skill work. Ideally then, a lifting session might
be best saved for the conclusion of practice.
However, ideal is not always possible. On the other side of the
spectrum, if the weight room is only a possibility prior to practice, then
we might have to accept that practice quality might be diminished
slightly if we find strength-training a valuable component for inclusion
that day. In this scenario, we would need to think on the weekly and
phasic level how to strategically place our training and practice sessions
so that more important skill work comes on days that we don’t train.
Another option would be to train your team prior to the start of the
school day (e.g., 6:00am weights session). This would give the athletes
plenty of recovery prior to their skill work later that day (potentially 810 hours). However, just know that this too comes with a compromise:
according to masses of literature, sleep has proven to be one of the
most vital influencers of readiness and wellbeing. Young athletes might
seem resilient, capable of staying up until 11:00pm and waking at
5:00am. However, compromised sleep will have detrimental effects.
Any way that you slice it, planning for practice and training will
surely be a challenge, especially at the amateur levels where the sport
is not a profession just yet. Fitting in training, practice, competition,
recovery, school, etc. will always lead to compromises somewhere.
Ultimately, it is up to you as the head coach (or assistant tasked with
practice scheduling) to determine what training components are most
important to your athletes and team, and then work out how to
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creatively find solutions to address these components with the time
allotted.
While pre-season training might allow more affordances for training,
the in-season period understandably shifts our focus further away from
training in favor of competition. Likewise, practice can take on greater
importance, as it becomes a time to improve and make adjustments in
response to the results of competition. Thus, training might need to
take place less often (reduced frequency), and potentially further away
from competitions (e.g., Friday night games might mean training
sessions on Sunday and Tuesday); it might also need to follow practice
(or take place in lieu of it altogether).
We should note, however, that a simple paradigm shift might
actually help stave off scheduling obstacles before they even arise.
Rather than thinking of practice and training separately, I contend that
they can all be viewed as one entity – where the practice field is simply
an extension of the weight room, and vice versa.
Let’s first remember that our goals during pre-season and in-season
periods deeply revolve around quality in practice and performance.
Thus, readiness for these sessions/competitions should be a primary
focus.
Now, let’s consider the constituents of a hypothetical, concurrent
strength-training session:
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In this scenario, we wouldn’t
necessarily need a weight room for
three out of the four components.
If time is a constraint (e.g., not
having enough time post-practice
to get in a full lift), considering
practice as an extension of the
weight room and vice versa could
easily solve this for this problem. The warm-up can be accomplished on
the field prior to practice, as could the plyometrics (potentially at the
back end of the warm-up). Right there, we might have saved 10-15
minutes of weight room time by conducting those blocks on the field.
And, we would have accomplished the goal of ensuring readiness for
practice, as – if anything – the warm-up and plyometrics would have
primed the athletes for the work to come, not fatigued them for it.
Following practice, the team could move to the weight room.
Already hot and loose, little preparations would be needed before
starting the strength-based work. Twenty minutes later, your athletes
could have their session completed. Should you want them to do any
recovery work, this could be ticked off outside of the weight room (if
another team needs the facilities) or back at the field; you could also
conduct a team meeting during this cool-down period to save
additional time.
This is merely one example of how the coaching staff can get
creative during competitive periods in order to maximize training time,
while also ensuring athletes are fresh for practice. Ultimately, when the
practice field/court/pitch and weight room blend, we are left with one
large canvas on which to paint athletic development.
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Considerations for Off-Season Structure
While the mission during the competitive season is to maintain
freshness and readiness, the off-season on the other hand turns its
focus toward physical development. In other words, the emphasis shifts
toward maximizing training doses and our athletes’ ability to respond
to them.
During the season, quite often the approach to physical training
revolves around efficiency; getting splashes of training stimulus here
and there in order to maintain hard-earned physical qualities
developed in the off-season, while not losing time on the field or
hindering sporting performance.
However, the off-season is about the effectiveness of training;
outside of time constraints imposed by weight room scheduling, there
should be few impediments to the training process, thus we can shoot
more for the ideal training structure.
Now, what is ideal is more up to you as a coach and what you learn
from training your athletes. This could involve three total-body sessions
per week. Or it could entail four training sessions – two focusing on
upper-body, two on lower-body. There are many other methods as well
– there is the push/pull split, and also the four-to-five total-body
sessions approach. I encourage you to do your research to find the best
fit for your athletes. But as you do so, I will also remind you to keep in
mind the keys to athletic development with young athletes that we
discussed at the start of this text: simple is still the most appropriate
approach.
Taking ‘simple’ to the next level involves understanding a critical
difference between in-season and off-season training. Surely you are
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aware of the importance of recovery and have seen or heard of many
recovery modalities through social media and the like. It is important to
understand why we focus on recovery and what it actually is doing; let’s
take a brief step back and review a topic from earlier. Bear with me, as
we will expand upon this to make the connection to recovery and the
effectiveness of training.
When we strength-train, we are applying stress to the body. When
the stress is substantial enough, it forces our body to respond and
adapt. The adaptations we are seeking (e.g., improving strength and
lean muscle mass) are the byproducts of training and subsequent
recovery, however the acute response to each dose is often an
inconvenient result, especially in-season. This response can often
include soreness and muscular fatigue, as well as central fatigue.
Soreness is not indicative of effective training; however, it often does
occur as a result. Fatigue, on the other hand – whether we feel it or not
– will always be a cost of substantial training stress.
The goal of a recovery method is to enhance readiness by mitigating
this response to training stress. In order words, it is attempting to blunt
soreness and fatigue. But the seemingly negative consequences of
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training carry value in the off-season. Our body’s response to stress is a
critical part of the adaptation process. Thus, while recovery helps
prevent fatigue, it is also altering (or potentially limiting) the adaptation
process the body would normally experience as a result of training,
dampening adaptations.
With this in mind, we can certainly appreciate not only how much
enhanced recovery matters in-season, but also how it might be more
beneficial to let recovery occur naturally in the off-season in order to
allow for greater adaptation. We go at some lengths to discuss this for
two reasons, the first being to ensure that you know what to expect
from your athletes in the off-season. They may not seem to recover or
bounce back as well day in and out, but that is okay. As long as your
approach to programming is appropriate and measured, and your
athletes do have some off-days each week to allow accumulated
fatigue to dissipate (and adaptation to occur), then they should be able
to recover naturally. Additionally, we discuss this because, although it is
the off-season, I know that time will always be a constraint at the high
school level. Thus, spending time on recovery methods when they
aren’t quite needed would not only minimize the effectiveness of
training, but also reduce efficiency as well.
***
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At this point, we have spent time discussing not only the training
parameters that compose a session, but also concepts that will guide
you in structuring these sessions throughout the week and season, all
based on scientific principles.
If you were expecting a
simple playbook
prescribing exactly what
to do, how much it and
how often, I apologize for
disappointing. However,
at the start of this text,
we discussed the
rationale for arming you
with tools – and the
knowledge to use them –
rather than handing you the finished product. Ultimately, you will best
serve your athletes when you can combine some knowledge of how to
build programs with a keen and unique understanding of your athletes
and their specific circumstances.
There is nearly an infinite number of ways to go about training
athletes, with an overwhelming amount of science and rationale for a
multitude of methods. Science and objectivity are key to ensuring that
effective and efficient practices are chosen, however you and I both
know that science alone is not enough. The application of any methods
– “good” or “bad” – has a major influence their effectiveness too.
In simpler terms: coaching matters. And coaching involves taking all
of the available and ascertained information, sifting it down to what
can and should be appropriate for your specific situation, and then
applying it in the correct doses. This is exactly why I did not just lay out
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a ready-made, science-back plan for you to use with your athletes
today.
While the Twitterverse’ will argue whether it is the art of the science
that reign supreme in sport performance, I contend the following:
The art is in the application of the science.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ryan Faer is currently a
Performance Coordinator with
the Cleveland Indians Baseball
Organization. Prior to his time
with the Indians, Ryan made
several stops in professional
baseball, including stints with the
Los Angeles Dodgers and New
York Mets. Additionally, Ryan has
experience in other sectors of the
strength & conditioning field,
including the collegiate and
private sector, and parts of 8
years working in the high school
setting.
To contact Ryan, please see the following:
• Email: rfaer@indians.com
• Twitter: @ryan_faer
• Website: ryanfaerblog.com
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