The longer I’m in coaching, the simpler things seem to get. This is especially true in strength and conditioning where oftentimes I feel that we deliberately make things too complicated just to sound smart. We do this with terminology, taking a “systems” approach to things, demanding “evidence based” practices, and taking a pedagological approach to things.
At the end of the day, there are some fundamental principles that apply to all strength and conditioning programs:
- You get what you train for: the body adapts to training according to how it is trained. If you want to get better at your bench press, running marathons won’t help – focus on what you want to improve and train deliberately for it.
- To make gains, you have to improve: the body only adapts as much as it “has” to. So if it isn’t stressed, it doesn’t get bigger, faster, or stronger because it has no need. This means that to keep improving you have to find ways to make things more difficult.
- Strength, power, and speed are skills: This is something that’s hard to understand. Yes these are physical abilities, but you have to practice them to get better at them – means if it’s important to the sport then they need to be a regular part of training.
- The athlete has to be able to use it: if an athlete can’t apply the physical abilities developed via training to the sport then you wasted their time.
- Fundamentals matter: just like in sports, strength and conditioning has fundamental movements and skills that have to be overlearned.
With the above in mind, here are some thoughts. If you want to get better at strength, you have to train heavy. Training heavy means fewer repetitions, more weight, and lots of rest. If you want to be more explosive, you have to focus on exercises that apply strength quickly. Etc.
This is not rocket science. The reality is that these are things we’ve known for forty years now and they aren’t going to change radically. Barbells still work incredibly well, as do plyometrics, and sprints. There is not going to be a study that pins down an exact number of repetitions that a sport should be training with – because everyone is different and that always makes the “evidence based” part of this field so difficult. I can see it now, “Football players need to do eleven reps a set because there are eleven of them playing at one time. This is why the 121 program (11 sets of 11 reps per exercise!) is so effective for football players!”
Design your programs deliberately to achieve your goals. To make gains over time you have to make the workouts more difficult. Understand that things like strength, power, and speed are skills and have to be practiced. Make sure the athlete learns how to use all that strength, speed, and power in a sports context. Finally, focus on fundamentals. If you do all those things you will have a really successful and effective strength and conditioning program, but you might now sound brilliant because you did not include big words, systems theory, or the phrase “evidence based.”
