Strength Training For High School Athletes

Is strength the most important quality to develop in a high
school athlete, ?

For my money, it is.

And it seems to me that quality strength development is very
often overlooked and misunderstood.

What I mean by that is many Coaches and Trainers tend to look
towards speed and agility as the 'sexy' features that they want
to build into their athletes.

Fast athletes are good athletes.

Agile athletes are dangerous athletes.

When a fast athlete is explosively running down the field or
racing through the court, it's an exciting moment and one that
brings the entire crowd to their feet.

'Game Breaking' speed is the single greatest factor in altering
the course of a sporting event...

... And no one would contest that.

But the reality that no one seems to ever want to talk about is
this:

The fastest kid on the field is almost always the STRONGEST kid
as well.

If we were to peel back the layers and strip away all the jargon,
we would see that being 'fast and agile' simply means that the
athlete can create and absorb force well.

And force is nothing more than another word for strength.

That, , is just one of the ways we tend to overlook
the whole strength issue.

But there are other ways we seem to overlook and misunderstand
strength as well.

For many Coaches and Trainers, 'strength' means that their
athletes must spend countless hours in the gym lifting huge
amounts of weight in an effort to 'put up some big numbers'.

How much do you squat?

What's your bench?

These are common questions that have virtually no importance.

How much an athlete can squat is only important if that strength
can be translated into a usable factor.

And that is the key issue.

Spending your life underneath a bar and 'repping' out sets of a
squat with big poundages will make you exactly two things:

Strong and SLOW.

Tell me, , in how many sports would it be an
advantage to be strong and slow?

So basically, the way many Coaches and Trainers misunderstand
strength is in one of two fashions:

a) They want their athletes to be fast and agile, but don't
recognize that strength is the precursor that makes all of that
possible.

b) They want their athletes to lift heavy and hard, but don't
understand that unless they translate that strength to a
functional format, they will be producing terribly strong and
terribly slow athletes.

And those reasons combine as the motivation for why my strength
training programs for high school athletes look dramatically
different than most other Coaches and Trainers.

In a typical training session with me, my young athletes will
perform exactly two strength training exercises.

No more and no less.

I don't train via body part and I don't feel a need to 'hit' a
muscle from several angles in order to 'make it grow'.

More importantly, I don't need my young athletes to put up big
numbers.

I am much more concerned with making their strength gains
entirely functional and translatable to the field or court.

My strength training programs look like this:

a) Hybrid Complex
b) Secondary or Tertiary

Now, you may be asking yourself what those mean --- so let me
explain.

HYBRID COMPLEX

A Hybrid Complex is when two or more strength training exercises
are strung together and performed in sequence.

For example:

Deadlift + Shrug + Romanian Deadlift

Bent-Over Row + Hang Clean + Front Squat

Hang Clean + Front Lunge + Push-Press

See, , rather than focusing on one specific movement
or exercise, I combine several exercises in order to gain the
greatest 'bang for my buck'.

The benefits of Hybrid Complexes are innumerable:

(i) Strength Fitness - many young athletes are de-conditioned and
this is a tremendous way for them to gain strength while
enhancing their fitness levels at the same time.  Give it a try
sometime and see how physically taxing it is to perform different
exercises in a back-to-back manner like this!

(ii) Strength Translation - Rather than performing single
activities with big weights, Hybrid Complexes force a young
athlete to perform large range movements and express power while
changing from one exercise to the next.  That 'change' or
transitional movement requires explosive power and will
dramatically enhance the speed and agility of your young athlete.

(iii) Injury Prevention - Young athletes won't be able to load
up a bar and grunt through some heavy reps.  In fact, the weight
on the bar will be directly proportional to their weakest
exercise.  For example, in the Hybrid Complexes I mentioned
above, a young athlete would be able to Front Squat and Hang
Clean a lot more than they would be able to Row.  In that, the
weight of the bar would have to be limited to how much they could
row.  This means that young athletes can't just load up a bar...
they have to be able to perform quality reps at each and every
movement.  And this will dramatically reduce the number of
weight room injuries.

In a typical training session, I will create one Hybrid Complex
and have my young athletes perform 3 - 4 sets of it (with 2 - 4
reps per movement).

SECONDARY OR TERTIARY

In my secondary/tertiary portion of the program, I create
exercises that involve movements that were not performed during
the Hybrid Complex.

Specially, pulling exercises.

Examples of Secondary exercises would be:

Chin-Ups
Pull-Ups
Horizontal Pull-ups
Climbing Exercises

At the end of of it all, my young athletes have received a
complete and total body workout and trained every facet of
strength that will make them functionally strong, injury
resistant and fast.

I think that's why I'm most proud of my Complete Athlete
Development System, .

There are a lot of training programs out there that give you
sample programs and exercise guidelines.

There are also a lot of training programs that give you DVD
footage of how to perform them.

But in Complete Athlete Development, I actually had multiple
camera angles recording my Hybrid Complexes and Secondary
exercises so that you could see first hand how to use them,
what they're supposed to look like and why they are effective.

Strength really is the cornerstone of everything in sport.

And it's about time you saw how to maximize that in your young
athletes.

Have a look at my Complete Athlete Development system and tell me
what you think.

www.CompleteAthleteDevelopment.com

'Till next time,

Brian