How Failure Helped Us Grow As Athletic Performance Coaches
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As I was transitioning from training elite military units and personal training powerlifters, to high school and college athletes, I had to do my research. A lot of research. Even though I was definitely qualified to train elite athletes, I just was not confident in training younger athletes. I read as many books and articles as I could find and attended clinics all over the country. I reached out to many private and college strength coaches who I had met at these clinics or stumbled across when researching training articles. Many responded and were an integral part of creating our basic foundational programming for our athletes.
After my first year of training, my confidence grew and I found that I could use much of the same programming I used with military units and powerlifting teams, with our athletes. Our athletes were getting stronger. It felt great. Why would I need to adjust what I am doing?
A couple years later I had an athlete who was diagnosed with spondylosis; any kind of loaded squat or loaded pull would send sharp pains in the low back. Of course I knew how to approach this. I was this great young strength coach and I knew exactly how I was going to attack this. I had the athlete just lower the weight and changed up the foot placements. With a little help from luck, and of course because I was this great strength coach, the pain went away. However, a few weeks later it came back. I lowered the weight and readjusted again. This went on for a few months until I was at a loss. This was a freshman athlete who we knew was going to be a big time player one day (they ended up a D1 All-American and Pro athlete) so I couldn't risk injury. However, I needed them to get stronger and continue working out so they could progress. So I went back to reading and researching. For months, I researched for hours each day until I finally found a possibility of the issue. This was the start of what we eventually referred to as the “ABF Way.”
Up until this point I had been blindly, partly because of my ignorance and partly because of my pride, having athletes go through lifts as they were starting in the NFL. Not too long after we found out about this athlete's spondy, other issues started popping up with more athletes. Nothing big, but just nagging little things that hindered them from going up weight on some lifts. I'm not quite sure if these issues were there before and I just didn't see them or if they were just being "covered up" by our training and had finally hit their threshold. This was the beginning of a new philosophy of training and our foundational approach to athletic performance. In order to do this, I needed help!
Help. That is something that is tough to swallow for many people, especially coaches. At this point in my career I had to develop...humility. This is something that I had never really thought about in regards to my job as a coach. I needed help to get to the place I strived to be as a sport performance coach. It is okay to say that you were wrong. I was wrong. I didn't do it deliberately. I didn't intend to have my athletes suffer from nagging injuries, but it happened. What I was doing in the weight room was wrong. This is something that many coaches experience. None of us, whether it is on the field, court or in the gym, set out to be wrong. We are doing the best we can with the knowledge we have. My biggest step in this process was to change where I was getting my knowledge. As I mentioned, up until this point, most of my sources were from the power-lifting and military units. What else did I really need to learn? I had been doing it for a decade with great success. I knew this stuff. At this point I needed something new. I needed something out of my box.
A humble person recognizes their limitations and welcomes correction and critique. We are human and learning how to take criticism is no different than learning how to throw a ball. It takes practice. Over the next couple of years I researched topics outside of my typical area and stumbled across some of the best resources in the business. I attended Physical Therapy seminars, spent time working with strength coaches that were physical therapists, I shadowed different college strength coaches and reached out to dozens more. What I found was that I needed to train my athletes like humans first, before loading them with complex movements and exercises. Just because they play volleyball, soccer, basketball or football, doesn't mean that they can automatically jump in and train like a seasoned veteran. They had to be developed. They had to be developed in the weight room, just like they needed to be developed on the field and court.
We had to start small and then add a little more, then a little more. It was tough at first because I stopped doing the big lifts that we had made a staple in our program. I had to learn progressions and learn how to strengthen the athlete from the inside out instead of the opposite like so many coaches do. I had to focus on technique instead of the weight. Over a decade later, we still train this way and it is what has made us standout. It is why our athletes have been the best in the area, reached their ultimate potential and went on to become elite champions. It is why our athletes step into college as a freshman and are better trained and prepared than most of the upperclassmen. We finally got back to those big lifts (well most, not all), but we ensure that our athletes are prepared to perform those lifts, by performing progressions and regressions of the big lifts. This is where we started “training like an athlete.”
Today, we train each athlete individually. We access them for 1-2 weeks and cater their training program to help them reach their highest potential. In doing so, we have had over 200 of our athletes commit to playing college sports, over 75 were all-state selections all while winning 10 state championships, 2 runner-ups and 2 third place finishes. Start building your foundation to become the best athlete you can be today and reach your highest athletic performance now.
