My Thoughts Monday #6: Weight Room Progressions

Many of you reading this have seen my presentations on YouTube (Case Study 1, Case Study 2, Boston) where I talk about how we program, and why we do things. The simple idea of constantly progressing and moving forward to help improve performance of the athlete is something that I have stood by for a long time, and will probably be the corner stone of all the programming I do in the future. Although there are exceptions to every rule, this one will be the one that will be least compromised by me.
I type out that so that I can show you this. This is the 1^st draft of our lifting progression for the team we have been discussing in MTM. Let’s first discuss what you are looking at. For certain headings (i.e. linear progression) there are exercises listed below (list). You go through the progression as though you are reading. You start out with the 1^st exercise in the 1^st weight column. Once you can complete said exercise with proper technique, at that resistance level, you “check the box” and move to the right. When you’ve finished the row, you then move to the next exercise. I set this up in this manner because it eliminates the “fake confusion” as to where we are moving with the “main” exercises we are using. It also shows the athlete’s where they are going, and what is needed to be accomplished to “level up” an exercise. This has seemed to be very motivational for many of the student athlete’s on this team.

I discussed the autonomy given to the student athletes’ on the upper body work in last weeks edition, so I’m not going to revisit that and bore you. If you missed it you can catch it here: MTM #5.

This then brings me to where I made a mistake and needed to redo the card after a 2^nd week. I made 2 assumptions, which caught me at the end of week 2 when it comes to the “ab” work. Assumption 1 was that the people who have been in the program, this is my first weeks of taking over the team but my past assistant follows similar progressions that I do, would know the simple ab progressions for each of the exercises (flexion, sit up, rotation). This was a big fat no. The 2^nd assumption was that the “guide” of how many reps to progress by would be enough, and they wouldn’t handle it like the other “progressions”. This again was an epic fail on my part. So, when the team comes in tomorrow they will get this. This is the updated sheet, with the ab exercise progressions in it.

In next weeks MTM I’ll post video’s up of each of the “progressions” and how we move them forward with some brief descriptions as to why we are doing this the way we are. The following will be the “footwork” work we are using (again mostly videos), followed by our results of our first evaluation.

 

Read More Here: My Thoughts Monday #6: Weight Room Progressions