It’s great to see the many young athletes and non-athletes alike working so hard in our summer strength and conditioning program. They show up consistently with desires of getting better and their hard work is clearly showing progress, but I think it could be more. More strength = more opportunity. Notice we didn’t say more strength = better? It’s all about how it’s applied.

I notice many young lifters (and adults) who don’t respect the negative. Controlling the eccentric (lowering) component of strength training is too often overlooked, and therefore potential positive performance results are negated.

Point in case: slow down while lowing the weight on common exercises such as upper body pushing/pressing,/upper body pulling. For the lower body exercises, such as a squat–bi-lateral or uni-lateral (double leg or single leg), try starting at a 3 count on the way down, 3-2-1-DRIVE is the mental cue… All while stabilizing the lift effectively.

Train Smart, Train Hard!

This entry was posted on Monday, August 2nd, 2010 at 10:02 AM and is filed under Athletic Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.