I’ve been a high school strength and conditioning coach for a very long time. I have had the privilege of working with thousands of high school students and with that, I have learned many valuable lessons from these student-athletes. I wish I could say I learned these lessons early in my career. Unfortunately, it took me getting out of my own way many years after I should have, to truly understand the purpose and magnitude of being a high school strength and conditioning coach.

Here is part one of a two-part series on establishing a highly effective and highly welcoming weight room environment for your high school athletes.

High school kids are not professionals. There is no such thing as an elite-level high school athlete, and the vast majority will end their sporting career in high school. When parents, sport coaches, and strength coaches instead view high school athletes as miniature professionals, it eliminates any fun from sport and training.

So, setting our own agenda aside as parents and coaches, let’s look the issue of motivation from the athlete’s perspective. In any sport, intrinsic motivation is a key factor in long-term adherence and success. If we want athletes to be intrinsically motivated, we need to create a sense of autonomy. When a coach or parents forces their perspective onto an athlete, they minimize the athlete’s individuality and autonomy. Let go of control, if only slightly, and let your athletes voice their opinions on what they want to do.

From the perspective of a coach, this doesn’t mean abandoning sound, evidence-based principles. We should still have our annual training goals, what we plan on testing during a given training block, and our weekly training plan. However, what this does mean is finding unique ways to blend your expertise with your athletes’ desires for fun.

In my weight room, I dish up “Candy” after a workout. Candy, in this context is a good old-fashioned arm pump. I haven’t found a high school boy who doesn’t enjoy staring in the mirror flexing his “guns” after a solid biceps/triceps workout. Just as my toddler only gets his candy after he’s finished his dinner, my high school athletes only get their “arm work” after they’ve finished their other training for the day. It’s simple, its highly effective, and when you incorporate something like this into your program, compliance rates will skyrocket.

Remember, you’re dealing with children, not professionals. Many of these kids will have never stepped into a weight room before. Many of them have never lifted a single weight prior to their first training session. If you expect perfect form, perfect technique, and perfect progression, you will set yourself up for frustration and your athletes up for failure.

Many coaches over-cue, over-coach, and over-criticize. You may feel as if this is your job, but your athlete might feel as if you’re only noticing their faults or that the form you deem as “perfect” is unattainable. This is not a suggestion to disregard things like form and technique but rather a reminder to be patient. Like any other task we wish to learn, true advancement comes from enough exposure (repetitions and frequency).

Let’s take the back squat as an example. You could have the athlete start with bodyweight squats, progressing them through the various iterations of the squat, including zombie squats, goblet squats, box squats, etc. Or, you could start the athlete with a back squat and allow for hundreds of reps and hundreds of less-than-perfect repetitions.

In my early years, I would require my athletes to show competency in early iterations of a given exercise before they could advance to more technical versions. However, I eventually realized that it was simply the repetitions that led to improved technique. I found that athletes who didn’t have to progress through a series of elaborate drills had more fun and progressed just as well as the ones who did. (As an aside, in fifteen years of doing this, I have never had an athlete get hurt in my weight room from back squatting on their first day.)

Sisyphus – an ancient mythological figure – was given the fruitless task of eternally pushing a boulder up a mountain. I believe many strength coaches attempt to shoulder a similar boulder when they wish to improve all facets of athletic ability at once. Although this may be possible in theory, it often prevents growth in one or two key areas and may produce even worse performance overall.

We can use a grading system to demonstrate. Write out a list of all areas you wish to improve. For this example, I’ll use a) power, b) strength, c) speed, d) flexibility, and e) endurance. Now, grade your team on their average performance in these given areas: a) power C-, b) strength A, c) speed D, d) flexibility F, e) endurance F. Although most of these categories need improvement, it’s not realistic to try to improve them all at once.

Ask yourself the demands of the sport. If we use football in this example, endurance is not nearly as important as physical traits such as power, strength, and speed. I could improve their endurance, but how much benefit would my athletes receive from it?

Inversely, areas that are already a strong point for your team, might not need as much attention. In sport, physical qualities are not an infinite progression. While each physical component helps win games, at a certain point, the training demands far exceed the athlete’s needs for on-field success. For example, I have a few high school athletes who are squatting 500+ pounds. I don’t need them squatting 600 pounds. Their training up to their current max of 500 pounds required a lot of work. Attempting to squat 600 pounds would require an exponential increase in effort and time which would detract from time, effort, and energy spent on developing other physical qualities.

Find your key areas of improvement, and spend your time, effort, and energy moving them. Don’t get bogged down by the enormity of the boulder.

As strength coaches, our main responsibility is not within the four walls of our weight room but extends to the field or court. As my teams get closer to their season, we spend less total hours in the weight room and more on the athletic pitch.

By spending time outside of the weight room and focusing on things such as speed (which will get its own rule), plyometrics (bounds, leaps, hops), and change of direction, we are pressing into “sport specialization” to a degree that no amount of weightlifting can do. Many coaches are hyper-fixated on finding a movement that can be performed in the weight room that will most closely mimic their sport, dubbing it a “sport-specific exercise.” Unless you are training power lifters, CrossFitters, or Strongmen, no weight room exercise is sport specific.

Instead, jumping, sprinting, and cutting will produce much greater carryover to sport-specific activities for your athletes. Not only does this approach improve on-field performance to a greater degree than any “sport-specific” weight room exercise, it allows you, as the coach, to spend less time searching for highly specific (and pointless) weight room movements to improve on-field performance.

Leave the weight room for getting bigger and stronger. Use the field for creating athletes.

I believe the term “strength and conditioning coach” is setting us up for failure. It narrows our focus to attempting to improve primarily strength, and secondarily, conditioning. In reality, most sport success – from a performance perspective – depends on speed more than any other physical quality.

Why then do so many coaches neglect to train speed? Part of the reason is that speed training can be exceptionally boring, especially for the coach. Speed training is sprinting. Sprinting is running at maximal effort, and not an ounce less. Sprinting is not running hard; sprinting is not running fast. Sprinting is running at maximal effort. Therefore, in order to properly train speed, the strength coach must allow for adequate rest.

For example, my athletes will run a lot of 40-yard dashes. When we sprint, we put all of our effort and energy into sprinting. This means we sprint prior to our weight training. It means we rest fully between our sprint efforts (5-10 minutes), and it means that I will terminate the session early if I notice a decrease in output. Two or three maximal effort 40-yard dashes doesn’t seem like a lot, and unfortunately, many of us view it as a waste of time. But when you can train your athletes to be fast, you will increase their level of athletic ability, increase their chances of making a play.

Above all, you’ll create a team of highly conditioned athletes, without having to do an ounce of traditional conditioning work.

We’ll wrap up here for part one. I hope you found some of this information helpful and that you’ll begin to find ways to implement these practices into your own strength and conditioning program. In part two we’ll continue to discuss how you can increase compliance and attendance rates in your weight room and how you can establish a culture that your athletes want to be a part of.