In This Issue:
FEATURED EQUIPMENT: New Rack Storage Options Now Available
NOW TRENDING: Concordia Weight Room Video Goes Viral
FEATURED ARTICLE: Assessing an Athlete's Readiness
FEATURED EQUIPMENT:
NEW RACK STORAGE OPTIONS
Recently debuted at the NHSSCA Nat Con event in Nashville last month are two new storage options for both our Titan Series and Ultra Pro Series racks.
Is your weight room cluttered by safety arms and/or J-cups laying around? Nothing breaks down weight room flow quicker than misplaced equipment or accessories scattered around the weight room floor.
Now, our engineers have developed simple attachments that will allow for quick and easy storage of safety arms and J-cups that keeps them out of the way for most general rack routines.
On our Ultra Pro half racks, a quick depress of a spring pin and the safety arm locks into place on the sides of the rack, keeping the cage open and walkways clear. Meanwhile, J-cups can be stored with ease on the back upright as well using the J-cup storage attachment.
On our Titan racks, we've developed a 2-tiered rear storage unit. It works on all Titan G2 racks and conveniently stores safety arms and J-cups quickly and neatly at the back of the rack.
In both cases, the equipment is out of the way and at arm’s length for when it is needed again. No more tripping hazards or long walks to store and retrieve these important accessories.
Talk to a territory manager in your area or inside sales representative to learn more!
NOW TRENDING
CONCORDIA WEIGHT ROOM VIDEO GOES VIRAL
Last month, we shared a video that NCAA Division II Concordia University in St. Paul made revealing their new Dynamic Fitness & Strength weight room to their Golden Bear athletes. To date, this video has received over 122,709 views across our social media channels and is still growing! You can watch it here.
The installation itself wrapped up in May. Their room consists of twelve Titan G2 double half racks with dual-post storage. Each rack station features adjustable athletic training arms on one side and custom connectors between each double half rack. Finishing off the room is a dramatic custom bridge unit.
We’re thrilled we were able to help advance Concordia University’s awesome athletic program and we appreciate their trust in our team.
FEATURED ARTICLE
ASSESSING AN ATHLETE'S READINESS
By Guest Contributor: Travis Mash
USAW Senior International Coach, Head Coach at Mash Elite Performance and Host of The Barbell Life
Coaching athletes is the most difficult endeavor I have taken on in my adult life. Being an athlete is a lot simpler than coaching twenty or more individual athletes. Each athlete is unique in their:
Perceived exertion
Ways of dealing with stress
Abilities to recover
Discipline to recover (sleep, nutrition, etc.)
Nutritional habits
Personality (for example, some will communicate and some won’t)
Athlete testing and monitoring is just a way of gathering information. Your exact protocols for dealing with the information is where the art of coaching comes in. In this series, we will go into detail about topics such as:
Basic athlete readiness
GPS tracking
Velocity
Force plates
Detailed data tracking via excel
Wearables: the good and not so good
Psychological factors
Today we are going to start with basic athlete readiness because all of you can benefit from this knowledge starting Monday morning. Although it’s basic and easy to gather the data, it’s some of the most important data you can receive for your athletes.
Here’s why it is so important. Most of the research performed over the years on programming and periodization was collected in athlete populations in countries like Russia with state sponsored programs where athletes have perfect situations: food, sleep, recovery, etc. The same countries are also known to be riddled with performance enhancing drugs.
Does that mean we should ignore their data, and therefore ignore their programming suggestions? No way! Like with most research, you extrapolate the pertinent information and leave behind the impertinent. First we have to realize that our populations in America, much like the rest of the world, have jobs and/or school. That means they have stress outside of the weight room. They have exams, personal relationships, demands at work, and genetic psychological difficulties.
Load and Response
When we write a program, most of us are great at taking into consideration the increasing stress implied by the program. However, many of us neglect the other stresses in athletes’ lives. One thing we have to remember is that the acute response experienced by our athletes is training load plus life load. Therefore:
Training Load + Life Load = Acute Response
Training Load Considerations:
Volume – this is simply the weight lifted multiplied by the repetitions multiplied by the number of sets. This can be tracked in the weight room or on a field of practice like football
Average Intensity – average percentage of one’s 1RM handled in a given period
Relative Intensity – can be defined as the weight you are using for X amount of reps, relative to the maximum weight you can perform X amount of reps for
Frequency – how often one trains or performs a given movement
Duration – how long one trains or performs a given movement
Injury
Diet
Sleep
Life Load Considerations:
Work
Study
Relationships
Stress
Life Events
Genetics to handle each
Accumulated ‘acute response’ leads to chronic response. The goal of most training programs is to produce an overreaching response in each athlete’s program right before a predetermined taper. This creates a supercompensation response. But without proper recovery, overreaching becomes overtraining. Then you have a problem that could equal months of a setback or an injury. Now let’s talk about the simplest way to prevent any of this.
Daily Training Readiness
The easiest way to prevent overtraining is to assess your athletes’ daily readiness. Now there are some complicated and expensive ways, and there are some inexpensive non complicated ways.
Complicated and expensive daily readiness tracking:
GPS – this is one of the latest instruments used in the strength and conditioning world. With it, you can track an individual athlete’s running speed, distance run, their position on the field, their heart rate, and their body’s work rate.
Force Plate – for high force output sports, some coaches use a force plate to assess force output in movements like an isometric midthigh clean pull or isometric squat from a particular height.
Inertial Measurement Unit – this measures the acceleration and angular velocity of an object along three mutually perpendicular axes. IMUs measure these quantities based on the physical laws of motion.
Velocity Based Training – This measures the velocity of a barbell or person. Velocity is simply the amount of time it takes to cover a specific distance. An easy way to use velocity for daily readiness is to track the velocity of a certain percentage of an athlete’s 1RM in a given movement. If that velocity is 10% less than normal, it’s time to abort. If the velocity is higher than normal, consider pushing things a bit.
Wearables – these monitor biodata including heart rate variability (which is a look at the sympathetic nervous system). Here’s an article that I wrote all about the topic: Diving into Heart Rate Variability. Wearables also monitor sleep resting heart rate, sleep quality, and respiratory rate.
My Fitness Pal – this app allows athletes to track total macronutrients against the amount they should actually be consuming. The app also takes a look at activity levels and calories lost from heat.
In other articles, l dive deep into each of the aforementioned systems, but in this article I want to give all of you insight regarding some very simple and inexpensive ways to monitor your athletes. I will also give you some insight as in what to do with the information.
Ask Your Athletes
Daily communication is so important. This is where it’s so important to be more than some data collector. You have to sincerely care about the people you are coaching. I like to ask the following questions on a daily basis:
How did you sleep?
What have you eaten today?
How’s school? Any tests?
How’s the girlfriend or boyfriend?
How’s life?
The goal is to get them talking. Now the problem is this information is very subjective. However, I can also assess their facial expression and their body language. Together with their feedback and body language, I can get a pretty good idea of their daily readiness. I can either decide to intervene immediately, or I can choose to watch them warm up. I can then determine how much I am willing to alter their program based on all data points:
Subjective data points:
Body language
Verbal responses to readiness questions
Objective data points:
Quality of movement in warm ups
Velocity of movement
Intensity used
For example, if an athlete gets to 70% of a given movement and appears uncoordinated, is looking tired and worn in his or her body language, and answered your readiness question by explaining they were up late studying for a major exam – then that’s a good day to back off, perform some low eccentric bodybuilding, and go home to get some extra sleep and recovery. It’s that simple, but for some reason a lot of coaches struggle with communication and observance of others.
Vertical Leap or Grip Test
A vertical leap is a very common high velocity movement that is used by coaches of athletes from power driven sports like weightlifting or track and field to assess their athletes. The key is obtaining that data from athletes during peak conditions. Then test the vertical leap under the same conditions for the daily test. For example if the original data was taken after a ten-minute warm up, you will need to perform a ten minute warm up prior to the daily test.
If the athlete’s vertical leap is 10% lower than normal, the coach might consider altering the daily plan. Some coaches adjust programs if the daily marker is 5% lower than normal. It really relies on the perception that you intended during the exact period of the training plan. Once again, if 15% lower than normal, I recommend aborting the session all together by performing some low intensity bodybuilding and then going home to sleep, eat, and recover. You can do this exact measurement with a grip test as well.
These are just a few ways that you might assess the daily readiness of your athletes. The art of coaching comes into play with the actions taken from the data. Some coaches might decide to push through to incite an overreaching response. Some might have the athlete perform some bodybuilding and then go home and recover. Some might lower the volume and intensity slightly and then have the athlete continue the training session. Some coaches might have the athlete abort the session all together, go home and rest. That’s what makes a coach an artist. I just want to give all of you some more tools and skills to sharpen your game a bit. Over the next few weeks, I intend on taking this series a lot deeper. I hope that you all will come along on the ride.
Reposted with permission. Find the original article and many more on Travis Mash's website: https://www.mashelite.com
Very cool article, I especially liked your approach to athletes, it's very cool because often coaches and others perceive athletes as mere labour, and this is not the case at all. In general, in 2022, I studied in Spain, and I can say that there is a completely different approach to sportsmen than in our country, and to education as well, it's good that I was able to use the app https://edureviewer.com/spanish-learning-apps-for-adults/ in time, because without it it would be difficult to adapt to the new environment. In general, after spending a little over a year in Spain and returning home, I feel a huge difference in the approach to sports and athletes in the present.