The ladies came together gathering around the central pillar in our weight room to receive feedback from our strength & conditioning staff regarding the outcome of their mission.  They circled up standing shoulder to shoulder while their hands were still covered in chalk and sweat still pouring down their faces.  They look eagerly towards us awaiting to receive their mission outcome.  We make it a habit to debrief the team and the individual leader for every session (or evolution) we lead our athletes through.  In this session, Whitney stood proudly in front of her teammates having lead her squad through the 60 minutes of challenging feats of strength & power.

“Give it up to Whitney for having the courage to lead the team today”, I command.  The teammates hoot and holler while applauding and acknowledging Whitney’s trial of fire through our leadership program.

“Let’s Debrief.  Whitney, give your teammates one thing they did well today and one thing they need to improve on before our next session.” I said.  She turned to her teammates and commented that her squad did a great job communicating coaching cues to each other while navigating through a new lift, consisting of new exercises.  I nod my head while listening to her.

Whitney then addressed that the team needed to do a better job at hustling from one exercise to another.  I paused as I listened to the words Whitney was saying.   “Their were moments where I was coaching you to jog from one side of the weight room to the other and not every single athlete was responding”.

I affirmed her statement by nodding along as she was recalling the tough and physically challenging 60 minute session.  I held a long pause, to draw the team’s focus, before moving along.  “Teammates!  Give your team leader one thing she did well today and one thing she needs to improve on before her next opportunity to lead.” I asked the team.

The teammates were quick to respond on Whitney’s ability to to “see the room” and offer vigorous partner coaching to every single one of them.  Tonya, one of Whitney’s teammates, quickly added “Although I wasn’t Whitney’s partner during this lift, she was always pushing me to do better; even while she was struggling through an exercise, her focus was on improving her teammates.”

“Tonya, You’re absolutely right” I said.  I scanned the team and made individual eye contact for a few moments with every athlete.  “What’s one thing she can improve on before her next leading opportunity?” I inquired.  The team fell silent and soon after, the eye contact strayed.

“If you’re too afraid of hurting someone’s feelings, you’ll never be confident in your ability to lead” I said.  I attempted to get the ball rolling by addressing our fundamental strength & conditioning belief.

‘”Whitney, you’re responsibility is to make sure our teammates accomplish the mission.  Your mission today was to ensure every athlete abide by our four weight room standards.  You identified that several of your teammates did not respond to you coaching.  Their response falls upon your ability to lead; as its your sole responsibility to complete the mission.”

She responded with an affirming nod and continued to listen.

“Use my staff to help communicate your message.  If you see teammates not responding to your command, confront the teammate to walk in lock-stop.  I promise you that I’ll back you 100% during the session.” She again nodded understandingly.

I asked the rest of my staff to contribute their feedback regarding what they witnessed during the lift.  In an instructed and educated manner, they sandwich their responses to the team of athletes.  They start by reinforcing  or praising a few positive elements of the session.  Our staff then follows the positive reinforcement with future-oriented instruction that identifies elements of the lift where the athlete could improve.  My team then encourages them with motivational praise ergo conveying our confidence in their ability to perform the skill correctly.

“What are we saying today” I enthusiastically command as I reach my clutched fist into the middle of the circle.  “Shocks on three”, Whitney responded.  In a violent eruption Whitney yells out “one, two, three” .  The team roars will a loud and defining “SHOCKS!” 

It’s all in a days work, and coincidentally, it all transpires in final moments of each session.  I believe these last 5 minutes allow for the greatest growth of an athlete.  Perhaps, more importantly, it allows for the greatest opportunity for the growth of a leader.

It was a particularly gloomy day in Wichita, Kansas but that didn’t stop the hustling of our Wichita State athletes from flying through the weight room like a precision strike missile set upon it’s destination.  I love days that this.  The atmosphere in the weight room was perfect; one part fantastic momentum from a great weekend sweep; another part great senior leadership; and equal parts of both competitive & hungry freshman and sophomores eager to move up the depth charts.  This makes for a great environment to train and an even better one to coach under.

This atmosphere is akin to having a freshly hand-washed 2011 Ferrari, turbo charged, and eager for top speed drive.  The road conditions are perfect with freshly paved cement and a straight away stretch that begs for putting the pedal to the metal.  What a great day for cutting loose and opening the speed up.

Stephanie was one of my more gifted athletes; she was one of the most talented athletes I’ve worked with.   On the court, she was a complete show stopper; dominant, aggressive and eager to put the team first.  I cannot reiterate the capabilities and talents Stephanie had.  My job is to help her realize how dominant she really is.

Stephanie had only one downfall to her game; herself.  The session was coming to a enthusiastic finish and I noticed Stephanie wasn’t herself throughout the lift.  ”Steph!” I said questioning. “Let’s talk when you finish foam-rolling”.  She nodded.  Moments later, Stephanie came into my office with her workout card in hand and sat down in front of my desk.

As I commonly do, I motioned for her workout card and she slid it across my desk.  I sat bewildered as I read through her latest lifting session.  After drawing comparisons from her previous six weeks of lifts, I noticed that Stephanie didn’t attempt to progress in either weight or reps during this last lift.

“Stephanie, is there any confusion about what my expectations are?” I said sternly.  She looked back at me and repeated “The team looks up to me during the sessions because I am their go-to on the court”. She added, “I don’t want to fail in front of them so I didn’t add weight to my lifts today.  I don’t want them to see me struggle, or possibly worse, fail.”

I handed the workout card back to Stephanie and added to the conversation “Steph, you’re an amazing athlete capable of so much more; I wouldn’t tell you otherwise if I didn’t believe in these words with full conviction” I said.  ”You are a top speed Ferrari but are deathly afraid to take it above 35 MPHs.  Believe in yourself.  Believe in your preparation” I added.

“You’re teammates are counting on you to push yourself to your full potential and any failure to do so hurts the team” I said.  ”I know you were trying to protect the team by securing their confidence in you, but in reality, you’ve cheated yourself an opportunity to let it rip”, I said.

Stephanie gathered her belongings and collected herself before leaving my office.  She responded “I understand what you mean about being capable of so much more.  My team needs me to lead and part of that means that the need to see me confident under stress.”

I nodded and I repeated our leadership creed,  ”A leader accomplishes the mission first, and protects their teammates second.  Your mission is to prepare yourself to the demands of the sport.  Do not forget what the mission is.”

The next lifting session I witnessed a transformation in Stephanie.  I want to write that I didn’t know this transformation was possible, but that would be a lie;  I knew Stephanie had more to give than what she ever believed.  After all, she’s a top speed Ferrari.   It’s up to her to continue pushing the pedal to the metal.

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As strength coaches our number one priority should be preventing injury. No matter how strong or fast we can make our athletes, it is useless if they’re sitting on the bench due to an injury. I know there are many facets that we cannot control once the athlete is in the game. However, there are a number of things we can do in our training environment to “better the chances” that our athlete won’t get injured during their competition. Even more, each year one out of 100 high school female athletes and one of 10 college female athletes experiences an ACL injury. This is crazy, isn’t it? At our training facility we have a majority of the female teams and to personally think that one out of every ten women who walk through our door will have an ACL injury – outrageous.

Based on the data provided by the NCAA, we know that approximately 2,000 female athletes are expected to tear their ACL. What the means is that generally females have 8x the chance of ACL injuries compared to men. You might be asking, how the hell is this happening? Beside all the physiological differences between men & women, one of the biggest components may be the lack of hamstring strength. The NCAA also cited that an ACL surgery costs the university approximately $25,000 to repair. Can you imagine that? Not only does the athlete lose their playing season, a possible scholarship, but in a matter of a second we could cost a university $25,000. (1,2) Damn.

So we got to ask ourselves; what are we doing to stop this (or at least lower the rate of occurrences)? I can tell you a number of things what we’re doing, but if you’re up on your literature, it should come as no surprise.

Deep Front Squat.

Let’s first take a look at what usually happens when a female athlete first steps through our doors. Most will come in being extremely quad dominant. This is no surprise as the majority of their athlete careers they were probably running & jumping, kicking and all other sorts of knee dominant movements. This is great that they’re extremely strong through their quads, but whenever we tested their hamstring strength in relation to their quad strength, they’re hamstring was extremely significantly weaker.

As we know through research, the balance of power and recruitment between the quads and hamstrings is one of the most important factors of knee stability in sport. As I already stated the ratio of Q/H (Quad to Hamstring) in female athletes tend to favor more quadriceps strength than hamstrings. The difference between men & women is that women tend to be more quad dominant meaning on knee dominant exercises, females tend to engage the hamstrings first which increases stress on the ACL (1,2,3,4,5).

So the article is named, “Let’s Get Our Female Athletes Squatting Again”. With that said, now is time to start discussing what we’re doing to try to increase hamstring strength and improve that Q/H ratio. With our athletes it’s important to ensure that we’re doing everything we can to get better hamstring and glute activation and work. Whether it is the glute/ham, bodyweight hamstring negatives, leg curls, Romanian deadlifts, glute bridges, swiss-ball hamstring curls, mini-band adduction/abduction walks, etc. We make sure to use them ALL.

However, when we approach “selling” the squat to female athletes, there always seems to be some hesitation. “I don’t want my butt to get bigger”, “I don’t want to look like those women bodybuilders”,
“I only want to look toned”. Whatever the excuse may be, it’s our job to sell the squat like its the million dollar cure that is going to change their world. How can we do that? Proper queuing, coaching, psychology.

Deep Back Squat

Now at this point you might be following me and the article but is wondering about “Why Squats”. I know there are 100 ways to skin a cat and certainly a squat is merely “one tool in our toolbox”, but based on the photos provided, look at how much total muscle activation/work the squat accomplishes. The way we instruct squats is a wide stance (as research has shown to get better glute work) with intense verbal queuing to sit back, sit back, sit back (to engage more hamstring). If we’re looking for even more glute work we’ll throw a mini-band around the knees to get more RNT (Reactive Neuromuscular Training) which will slightly adduct the knees into a valgus position “queuing” the the glute med to “turn on” to abduct those knees into neutral alignment, essentially flipping the switch that allows for more glute med work.

So that is it folks. I will by no mean say that I’m an expert at this. I have probably bastardized so many concepts that it isn’t funny. However, I will say I know simply enough to be dangerous. All joking aside, whether my research, writing skills, or communication capability lacks a bit, I can say that since we focused heavily on improving the posterior chain in our female athletes, our ACL injury rate has decreased dramatically. Like I said in the beginning, it’s our job to make sure we’re doing everything we can to prevent injury in our athletes. Whether you want to include squats in your program is ultimately up to you, but you cannot neglect adding posterior chain exercises in your programming to prevent ACL injuries.

1. Adams, Erik, M.D., Ph.D., An Increased Risk of ACL Rupture in Female Athletes. Midwest Institute of Sports Medicine, Epidemiology, 2002.

2. Griffen, Letha Y., M.D., Better Understanding of ACL Injury Prevention. The NCAA News, October 2000.

3. Boden, Barry, M.D., Letha Griffin, M.D., Ph.D. and William Garrett Jr., M.D., Ph.D., Etiology and Prevention of Non-contact ACL Injury. The Physician and Sportsmedicine, v28, 4, April 2000.

4. Courdes, Laura, For Women, ACL Tears All Too Common. The DePauw.com, December 1999.

5. Mannie, Ken and Tim Wakeham, Strength Training for Female Athletes. Coach and Athletic Director, v70, 5, December 2000.

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

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! 

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?

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.

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.