This is not designed to make Louie roll in his grave. It is also not designed to get everyone mad again. There are still S&C coaches who believe all we need to do in drive SBD numbers up. Also, graduation season is upon us and there are thousands of recent grads possibly going into weight rooms. Since we are where strength coaches come to learn – we feel it is our need to talk about this. So, what is key to success in athletics?
Did they come to play a sport, or train with you?
For those of you who work in college/university setting and a recruit comes on campus ask yourself this question. You know the answer – they are there to play a sport. And training with you is part of the process. You can even say the same thing about going to class but that is a conversation for another day.
Keeping in mind that the athletes are coming to work with you because they want to play their sport on campus – you’re job is to help keep them on the field. How do you do that? Step 1 is asking yourself what is the system I work in? If you work in a high performance department then you know you have colleagues to work with. You need to have your training program planned ahead to bring to your meetings to ensure that all of your training fits within the parts they have.
Does your lifting compete with the stress the coaches want for practice? Are you trying to make them sprint maximally with less than 24 hours rest from a high CSN lift/practice? Does the team have access to the proper nutrition to help fuel the current phase of training you are in? All of these questions need to be answered by you before you get to your high performance meetings.
If not, and you work by yourself – you still need to ask yourself the same questions. Only difference is you don’t have people to share your information with (what you can actually do is advocate for these high performance meetings and become the high performance director).
Why are you doing this?
Spending the time doing this on the front end is helping keep the players on the field. Why? Follow this logic. Your job as the S&C coach is to ensure they players are able to compete in practice and games free on injury. Spending the time on the front end and ensuring that the stressors are lined up, you give your athletes the best chance to be healthy.
When looking at your training as a whole you will start to see
- Practice time
- Lift time
- Speed or conditioning time
Think about any team sport – there is a massive lateral and rotational component to the sport. How much is there in powerlifting? None. Therefore when programming the weight room and using Westside principles you will miss the mark.
How should you be training in the weight room?
This is a great question you are asking yourself. If you are a recent graduate click here for a deep dive into training modalities. For now we will keep this high level and get right to the point. When looking at training and the athlete you are working with you need to make sure you are training:
- Ground based explosive
- Knee dominant push
- Posterior chain
- Horizontal push
- Horizontal pull
- Vertical push
- Vertical pull
Within these training programs you can divide them up even more with ground based explosives broken into:
- Olympic lift variations
- Clean
- Snatch
- Jerk
- MB throws
- Double leg stance
- Lunge stance
- Single leg stance
- Jump
- Weighted
- BW
- Shock
- Long SSC
- Short SSC
As well as breaking down the knee dominant push into unilateral as well as bilateral. Posterior chain development can also be divided up into single leg and double leg training. Additionally, posterior chain development can be broken up into knee dominant and hip dominant movements. As for the upper body pressing and pulling they can be broken into single and double arm. As far as torso training this can be broken up into:
- Inner unit/stability
- Flexion
- Lateral flexion
- Rotation
- Hip Abduction
- Hip Adduction
- Extension
- Anti flexion
- Anti extension
- Anti rotation
- Anti lateral flexion
The final area of concern as the strength and conditioning coach would be the isolation body parts:
- Neck
- Ankle
- Wrist/grip
- Hip flexor
- Lateral/rotational lower body work etc…
And program for those
So Westside doesn’t do all that?
In a word, no. The reason they don’t address the body in the same break down. Rather, they focus on the weak spots of a powerlifters squat, bench, and deadlift. So on a given day the primary movement will be one of those three movements. Followed by an accessory movement to drive that primary movement up. An example would be bench press, followed by board press to work on lock out. Or back squat followed by good morning to fix chest dropping. Finally deadlift followed by rack deadlift to overload the lock out.
Is there anything wrong with this? For a powerlifter – no. It’s what they need and what they should be doing. But, for your team sport athlete you are filling up a lot of one bucket and not others. In the bench press example the horizontal pressing bucket is getting filled more than the vertical.
To wrap up. Powerlifting is awesome to watch the impressive numbers that competitors can put up. However, it has it’s limitations for team sport athletes. As a S&C coach who’s job it is to keep your athletes on the field – preparing them with a powerlifting based program (Westside focus) is not what you should do.
