Strength development for athletic performance is one of the most overused and misunderstood tools there is. While it is true that strength training has the most potential to do good for an athlete, by natural law, it has the most potential to do harm as well.
While I don’t believe that any coach or parent would purposely hurt an athlete, without having the proper information, they could unwittingly do so.
This ax doesn’t just swing one way. Coaches and parents who are completely against strength training are just as dangerous. Only instead of the injury coming while in the weight room, it comes on the field, because their body was not properly prepared in a weight room. To make sure you have all the information you need to make great decisions about your athletes, we are going to give you five nonnegotiables for strength development in athletes.
The first NonNegotiable in strength development for an athlete is:
Weight training must happen
$10,000! That is how much money The Spot Athletics has offered if someone can come up with a reputable, peer reviewed research study that shows that weight training for youth athletes does anything harmful. As long as the training is properly programmed and coached, every study shows the earlier an athlete begins weight training, the better performance and less injuries they will have.
Although wives tales still exist about weight training stunting growth and waiting until after puberty to start weight training, the research actually shows the exact OPPOSITE to be true! If athletes wait, they have a higher chance of injury. As far as the stunting growth, that one has unequivocally been proven false as well. How these untruths still exist, I don’t know. When it comes to beliefs, I have learned that no amount of facts can sway someone from an illogical and emotional belief.
Now that we know weight training must happen for an athlete to reach their full athletic potential, we must ensure that it is performed in the proper manner. I would rather see an athlete NOT lift weights than do it improperly. That is why we will spend the rest of the blog discussing how proper strength training should happen.
The next NonNegotiable is that:
It must be progressed
It is inexcusable for an athlete to have a barbell thrown on their back on day one of training. When I see this, I know one of two things: 1. that coach has a ton to learn or 2. they don’t respect, or worse ignore, the harm that weight training can do.
At The Spot Athletics we have a rule that every client must
“Earn the right to touch a barbell.”
There are technical and load standards that must be accomplished before an athlete is allowed to use a barbell. The technical and load (lifting a certain amount of weight for a certain number of reps) standards are accomplished by using variations of the main movements that can be done in an easier to teach and safer manner.
If your athlete is in a program that does not provide a clear path of mastery from easier to harder movements, then this is a clear sign to remove them from the program. The person in charge does not yet posses the knowledge or does not care enough to run an effective athletic development program.
Technique must come first
The body improves at whatever technique you perform a task with. So if movement is being done poorly, then you become very good at performing tasks poorly. The focus must be on consistent, quality movement before any increased loading or speed of movement occurs.
We are really big on teaching everyone: “it is not how much you lift, but how you lift it, that matters”. In other words: Quality before Quantity - Movement before Load
There must be a plan
At The Spot Athletics, we utilize a Long Term Athletic Development (LTAD) model to guide our programming. This includes everything discussed above, plus about a thousand other factors. We realize that the program we have developed over the last 20+ years doing strength development for athletes is going to be far more robust than most. However, no matter what it looks like, the thing that should alway be a nonnegotiable for anyone working to make athletes better is: THERE MUST BE A PLAN. As a parent or an athlete, you should want to see that plan. As a coach, you should be excited to show off the plan that you spent countless hours developing.
It must be transferrable
None of the things above matter if they do not make the athlete better in their chosen sport. This is why performance tests are the real indicators if the strength development work being done is worth while. If the strength work being done, doesn’t transfer into better play on the field, then it was a giant waste of time.
The way we ensure that this happens at The Spot athletics is we test performance indicators every 6-7 weeks. We never test the max weight an athlete can lift, because lifting weights is not the sport they compete in. We test power, speed and endurance tests to ensure that all our training is transferring to a better athlete in their sport.
Thanks for caring!
I started this blog by telling you strength training is one of the most misunderstood aspects of athletic development today. Thank you for caring enough to read this blog and get a better understanding for how it should be done. Hopefully, you have a better understanding of the things you already knew and a different perspective on some things you thought to be true.