As a NYC personal trainer and sports performance coach for 12+ years, I’ve learned a great deal working with top coaches in the field. One of the biggest lessons I learned early in my coaching career is to understand risk vs. reward.
Most young coaches love the weight room and really focus on strength in the big lifts (squat, bench, deadlift, and even the power clean). All these are great to focus on, but how far do you push and when do you scale back? Understanding the total training impact for an athlete and personal training client is what will set you apart from other personal trainers and strength coaches. Not to mention it’ll help also elicit great results 🙂
Risk of Injury
Photo by Mark Riechers
When I talk about maximal lifting, I’m not talking about a repetition max or a technical max, where you move the bar with speed. I’m talking about a grind out set that can take up to 6+ sec to accomplish. Doing a true max lift can not only tax your body physically (joints, tendons, muscular skeletal) but also your nervous system too. A true maximal strength test is very high risk for injury and if you come out healthy, great, but the ramifications of this lift will more than likely fry you for your next training session and/or practice if you’re an athlete.
Little Benefit
In my experience there is very little benefit to truly do a max effort lift for an athlete or personal training client, aside from powerlifters and olympic weightlifters. The goal of a strength coach or personal trainer is to ensure that our clients and athletes get the most of their workout but to do so in a way that poses minimal risk. Think about it, if you’re working with a multi-million dollar athlete how do you explain to the coach and athlete that he can’t run because he blew his hamstring during a squat? Now you just took the athlete out of the very sport you were supposed to help them succeed in. If it’s a personal training client and they hurt their back, you more than likely have lost your clients trust.
Conclusion
Idalberto Arranda squatting with speed.
When training an athlete you have to take many stress variables into account, from their practice schedule, conditioning workout, weightlifting session, school, nutrition, recovery, past exercise history, and so on. Each of these aspects will take energy away from the other and if you have the athlete blow their gasket on one aspect, it’ll limit the others.
Clearly there will be a time to do some sort of strength testing but keep in mind that weighing too heavily on maximum strength can damage the athletes development, especially if the athlete needs to develop other skill sets. Which bring ups another point, over emphasizing strength is all too common when training an athlete. If the athlete has sufficient strength but can not move well on the field, hitting the weights will do little to progress their on field foot work.
When training athletes or even personal training clients, my suggestion is to utilize *technical maxes and repetition maxes. Doing so will allow the athlete or training client to get used to heavier weights via technical maxes and push themselves via repetition maxes. While some trainers may disagree with me, I always ask myself if the athlete that moves 350lbs with good speed vs. doing a max at 375lbs have that much carry over to their on field work? I doubt it.
* Technical maxes are where the athlete or personal training client are attempting heavy weights but still maintaining good form and relatively good speed on the bar. Repetition maxes can be done two fold, 1st) you can choose a weight and do as many as you can stopping short when your technique breaks. Ex: prior you tested at 255 x 8 and than when you post-test you finished 255×12. 2) You choose a rep scheme and than increase your weight until you’ve hit this limit. Ex: 3reps prior you tested at 275×3 post-test you finished with 295×3.
For a personal training client, you also have to take into account that they may not have as much rest and recovery as needed to recuperate from a true max out session. A typical NYC personal training client usually travels a great deal or is sitting down in the office for a good amount of the day. This will limit their performance to an extent and their recovery for the next session.
This same outlook needs to be taken into account when you have a summer athlete doing an internship, especially in New York City. I warn all my summer athletes that their recovery will take a bit longer since they’ll now have to juggle so many aspects of life. This can easily be very overwhelming for an NCAA athlete that isn’t used to waking up at 5am for work, getting screamed throughout the day, sitting down for 10+ hours, and than having to perform well on the field and in the weight room.
To end, all that I ask is that you communicate well with your athlete/client and always look at the risk vs. reward.
Stay strong,