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Jabbawockeez & Branding

by Adam Ringler on July 16, 2009 in Coaching, Training with 1 Comment

We all have a guilty pleasures that we’re not proud of nor want others to know about. However, this is what makes life so great. It’s the hardcore powerlifter who loves teacup puppies or the yoga-vegetarian who absolutely loves listening to SlipKnot. It’s crazy & bizarre, but I love it. Now, I’d be crazy not write all of this and fail to mention what my guilty pleasure is. What kind of person would write an article about this topic and not mention his own pleasure.

Mine stems from long hours working. I wake up in the morning to hit cardio & the gym, then it’s off to class & then working 40 hours a week on top of that in the strength & conditioning department. It makes for one hell of a busy day. This is all on top of an hour or two of reading Shirley Sahrmann or McGill’s work & books. Needless to say, when I get home to my lovely fiancée, I want to shut the brain off – And this moment is precisely where my favorite guilty pleasure comes on – MTV’s America’s Best Dance Crew (ABDC) What What!!

Yesterday just so happened to be a day where I had off and I used it to watch a marathon of Season 2 with the season winners, Jabbawockeez. If you know nothing about Jabbawockeez, Google their name and you’ll find out why they won – they’re amazing. Nonetheless, while watching the first few episodes I noticed a reoccurring trend coming from the Jabbawockeez that absolutely NO OTHER crew was doing. It wasn’t a sick b-boy moves or crazy flips or anything like that. No, rather it was their entire business approach!

ABDC'S "Jabbawockeez" Branding

ABDC'S "Jabbawockeez" Branding

Once a week each crew it brought on television to battle to earn their spot to survive. Most crews dressed up in themes and battled their way through the tournament. However, Jabbawockeez did a tremendous job branding their selves right out of the gate. Whether it was a T-shirt with “Jabbawockeez” wrote on it, or their signature “White Masks”, they took advantage of the television exposure to publicly market their selves and their brand, “Jabbawockeez”. If you lined up every crew from Season 1-3, I bet you would have a hard time naming ANY crew, (unless you’re a diehard ABDC fan like myself), however, with the Jabbawockeez it is easy… Look for their signature t-shirt and white masks.

Now before you start saying “how does any of this apply to strength & conditioning or personal training?” I beg you to think about it for a moment? How much personal branding are you doing? Your Business? Hell, do you even have a logo or a name? I ask this because the Jabbawockeez won the show but EVEN IF THEY DIDN’T, their brand won through all the national exposure. Without stepping on Ryan Lee’s toes here, (Who is unremarkably probably one of the geniuses with business & marketing) think about facets of your own business and look for room and chances to “brand” yourself. Do you have T-shirts that you can hand out to clients or wear yourself? Chances are you go grocery shopping once a week, right? You have 56 opportunities to wear your personal branded t-shirt for the hour your shopping and potentially expose your business to 100+ people. People would LOVE to have 5200 chances for potential customers to view their brand. That gives you an edge! Simply Put... They Branded Their Dance Crew

What I’m saying is this. The Jabbawockeez did an amazing job on the show branding their selves. They did this while nobody else in show was doing it. Use that same philosophy and apply it to your own business. Find areas where you can brand your business and exposure new potential customers to what you’re doing. Whether it means hiring a designer to make you a company logo, a slogan, or a website – Do It! Hey, it worked for the Jabbawockeez right? They’re on tour; they are featured in magazines and Gatorade commercials. What are we featured in?

Keeping Your Athletes Focused

by Adam Ringler on July 16, 2009 in Coaching with No comments

Those who work with athletes (or even individual clients) will know this. Some time athletes don’t necessarily give you 100% of their focus and attention. It is our job as coaches to ensure that the athlete is giving their attention so that skill development can occur. But what is this skill? How can coaches approve on their ability to demand focus. This is a skill that really coaches have and what separates them from everyone else is their ability to recognize when an athlete’s focus is fading.

Lets face it, athletes are competitive by nature. This is partially why they are competing in athletes on the collegiate scale. As a coach, this is a particularly good trait to latch onto. Use their competitive fire and create an atmosphere around your training that demands and challenges their competitiveness. Pete Carroll does an excellent example of this.

“We want to make it as competitive as we can make it. That’s the priority. Our guys are so accustomed to it, they don’t know anything else.” – Pete Carroll.

So as a coach, if you start to see your athletes’ attention start to fade. Think about the workout and see if there are any elements you can change to make it more of a competition. Can you separate the team up into different groups and challenge the other team by which team coaches louder during the workout? How about running or biking on treadmills or bikes the furthest in a given time period? On the Keiser equipment, which team had greater power output? Nonetheless there are certainly elements of every workout that a good coach can make into a challenging competition that will draw out athletes attention and focus. It’s our responsibility to make sure we are doing everything we can to keep our athletes engages, training, and last but not least, safe and able to play their sport.

The Curious Case of Olympic Lifting

by Adam Ringler on July 16, 2009 in Coaching with No comments

Within the community it has become a growing topic of discussion whether or not Olympic lifts have a place within the training setting. For years now coaches have used O-lifts to develop power in their athletes but since the turn of the century, many have argued whether there is a reason for keeping them around. Some arguments have been that their not safe, others have been their hard to coach. Many say there are better exercises that develop power like Dynamic Effort squats, jump variations, and other resistance band/chain jump/lift combos. This article is designed to dispel some of the myths and to allow me to weigh in on this issue.

First, we got to look at the power and velocity developed in the O-lifts. Exercises like dynamic squats and variations of jump squats come nowhere near the O-lifts in the realm of same velocity. The true nature of Olympic Lifts are designed to be high velocity, high load lifts. Sure while the box jumps may still be high velocity, they are generally only done “safely” with low loads – ultimately ruling them out to be classified as “equal” with O-lifts.

I can understand that coaching individuals and athletes to properly Olympic lift can be difficult. However, this is a reflection of the trainer’s/coach’s ability and not the athletes. A good coach can instruct anything. Don’t blame the exercise as the reason why you cannot get the athletes to properly execute a good Olympic lift.

Ultimately, the big deal comes down to this. Everything has a place and a time. I’ve said this before on the site and I will repeat it again because I think it’s quite important. We in this profession have gotten into the habit of deducing everything down to a single “ranked & classified” entity. Because of this we often take a “this or that” approach.

What I want to emphasize is that Olympic lifting is like the “screwdriver” in your toolbox. You are not going to show up to the work site with only the screw driver; you’re going to bring your entire tool box. If coaches followed proper Olympic lifting progressions, coach & queue the hell out of the lifts, and understand their proper place & time… they become a great tool in developing power.

Is it the only tool to develop power? – Absolutely not. I’m not going to list all the ways to develop power because it would go on and on, but Olympic lifting is certainly not a bad approach. Before we as coaches try to deduce everything down to “which is better”, we must understand it’s not always a “this or that” approach, but rather a “when and where” approach.

Yet, I have a feeling that coaches will remain on the fence about this for some time still.

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