This Saturday at the
Wisconsin State NSCA meeting one of my presentations will be on Designing
Effective Workouts – It is More Than an Exercise. I guess because I have been
preparing for this talk over the past several weeks I have been more observant
sensitive to what I read and see about training and training programs. I
realize it is so easy to get caught up in the trap of the new great exercise or
the next great machine, but as I have said many times in this blog, there is so
much more to than that. First of all, do you have a plan, a plan for that
session, for the mesocyle, for the block and for the year. What are your goals?
Are those goals measurable? How will you measure them? When you get down to
selecting the actual exercises in some ways that is the easy part, does each
exercise have a specific context? Where and how does it fit into the bigger
picture? Before I will add new exercises to the menu I test them out myself.
Seldom, if ever will I see an exercise and then add it immediately to a
program. When I have done that it has been disaster.
Folks it is the same
with workouts, what works for me will not work for you. Each workout is designed
for the particular sport, the individuals I am working with and part of the
plan we are executing today. I just got an email forwarded to me from a very
prominent foreign swim coach very popular on the international lecture circuit.
It was list of his favorite training sets. I thought, how insane, none of us
have his personality, his personnel or his control. Why should we think they
would work for anyone else? Frankly that is why when I write or speak I am very
reticent to show or print workouts, because people want to copy them and apply
them, without any thought to the considerations I previously mentioned. I will
put up a couple of workouts this weekend and the audience will try furiously to
copy them. My intent will be to show context, but I am sure the audience will
be looking for the magic bullet, it is the same everywhere. Coaching is a
creative and a scientific process, just like a surgeon gets better by doing
more surgeries, the coach gets better by coaching more training sessions. ( I
am not implying that coaching is brain surgery) Just like there are failed
surgeons, there are failed coaches, probably for the same reason, they failed
to keep honing and sharpening their skills. It is work, it takes time and
practice, it does NOT happen overnight. Think and keep learning, remember it is
more than an exercise.