All posts tagged Women’s Basketball

Trap bar Deadlifts

Our facility didn’t have any hex-bars that allowed us to do any trapbar deadlifts but having just purchased two of them for our weight room; I’ve really been blown away by the progressions that this one piece of equipment has allowed for our programming.  We picked up the bars from PerformBetter.com.  Beyond simply the bilateral stance deadlift, we’ve been using it as a progression variation for bilateral RDLs as well.

What I like about the trap-bar deadlift variation is that the trap-bar tends to evenly distribute the load between knee extension and hip extension.  A recent study by Swinton et al. (2011) found the following:

“Across the submaximal loads, significantly greater peak force, peak velocity and peak power values were produced during the HBD compared to during the SBD (p < 0.05). The results demonstrate that the choice of barbell used to perform the deadlift has a significant effect on a range of kinematic and kinetic variables. The enhanced mechanical stimulus obtained with the hexagonal barbell suggests that in general the HBD is a more effective exercise than the SBD.”

The important take away from this study is that with submaximal loads, the hex-bar deadlift produced greater peak force, velocity and power than the conventional straight bar deadlift, with a significantly decreased loading on the axial spine.  Not only is the hex-bar deadlift a safer lift, but it also produced equal if not better results.

Goblet Squats

Why do I like goblet squats so much?  I like it because when you put an athlete in the goblet squat position, the body naturally teaches the system as a whole what to do.  Dan John turned me on to this exercise and since then, I’ve been programming it into our athletes’ earlier phases of progressions.  I’ve found that programming the goblet squat tends to make the athlete “squat better”.   When athletes squat in this position, I’ve found that the torso is more erect, the hips have a tendency to sit further back into the hinge position, the knees gently track outward preventing collapse, and the centered load distribution pulls the athlete into a deeper squat.  I absolutely favor the lift as a beginning phase progression for athletes who’ve progressed from bodyweight variations to loaded implements like lunging, squatting, single-leg squatting, etc.

Medicine Ball Throws

We’ve been doing more medicine ball throws in our summer off-season training phases than we have throughout this last year of training athletes.  This is one thing that I will continue during our pre-season training phases as well.  Developing rotational power without the use of a Keiser can be difficult.  However, with using weighted medicine balls, we’ve been able to introduce explosive upper and lower body rotational movements with ease.

TRX Suspension Trainers

How can you not invest $150 some dollars into a piece of equipment that offers so many different ways of doing conventional exercises?  When I first arrived at Wichita State, we didn’t have a single TRX down in the weight room and that was one of the first pieces of equipment I purchased.  Don’t peg me a complete suspension-bodyweight guy; but for the amount of different things you can do with the TRX, you’d be crazy not to pick one up.

We’ve been using the TRX for different rollout progressions, anti-extension core development, anti-lateral flexion core development, bodyweight rowing progressions, and as implement for teaching hip hinges and single leg deadlifts.   In the future we’ll also use it as a progression for our more advances rollout bodysaw variations and different single-leg RFESS/Lunging patterns.

Sleds/Prowler

I love our two new prowlers and will continue to emphasize sled work for our metabolic conditioning and also our speed work.  For most of our team sports, we’ve been using the sleds as a way to improve the ability to put force into the ground.  If acceleration is a factor of Newton’s Third Law, then using the sleds in short distance “bursts”, should help us develop short duration, high intensity acceleration.  The sleds also help our athletes to work on proper body angels, knee and foot positions for proper foot strikes, and power into the ground.We also have been using our sleds in combination with our plyometric and medicine ball work to develop a baseline aerobic conditioning session made up of several modalities done at an anaerobic tempo.  Confusing?  What we’ve tried to do is tri-set our anaerobic power development in a 15 minute block to create a portion of our workout that forces the athlete’s heart rate response to be elevated.  This 15 minute window during our power work also acts as a baseline aerobic conditioner despite programming proper rest-to-work intervals for our anaerobic work in order to prevent the compromise of our power development.

Conclusion

That’s all gang!  I wanted to quickly give a rundown of the five things I have really been excited about during our summer programming at Wichita State University.  Our athletes have been training incredibly hard to prepare for our upcoming seasons.  The women’s basketball team has been ferociously training for our Italy trip and will carry on that mentality and mindset in preparation for October.