“When you are passionate, you always have your destination in sight and you are not distracted by obstacles. Because you love what you are pursuing, things like rejection and setbacks will not hinder you in your pursuit. You believe that nothing can stop you!”
One of the biggest signs of a great coach is one that can get results despite the lack of equipment and space. Being a personal trainer in NYC, we’re constantly battling for space and figure out efficient ways to elicit results.
Think about, most sports performance coaches at a high caliber D1 school will have pretty much unlimited space and equipment, even private performance training facilities have a a turf, track, racks, prowlers, etc… While in NYC some gyms do have them, you have to navigate around other personal trainers and their clients. This poses a big problem from both injury stand point and consistency (for programming), as it varies when it’s packed in the personal training gym or not.
Real Life
One of my former colleagues is in this exact type of predicament. He was at a big facility where whatever he needed to get done he was able to accomplish, but now at the new facility he’s rented out he has to share space with other fitness members with VERY little open space (think typical commercial gym).
Game Plan
We had to change his mindset a bit, instead of the typical dynamic warm up where you’re using 30-40yards he now has to be a bit more creative. So we suggested that he do a ground warm up and break down the warm up like so: with a group of 9 athletes the performance coach may have to split 3 into a ground routine, 3 with band stretches, and the other 3 with standing stationary movements (wall slides, arm circles, leg swings etc…) and keep rotating until they’ve accomplished all movements.
Example ground warm up routine:
This is one of many situations. The point is to be creative and adjust based on your athletes or training clients needs and space.
Strength and Speed
Every performance training coach needs to hit strength and speed movements with their athletes. Generally, the typical set up is some type of speed and plyometric movements using the turf, bands, sleds, and then putting the movement into effect on the turf or track. Then we’ll hit the weights. As we stated it’s a bit difficult for trainers in Manhattan, amongst others, to accomplish this with such little space and in such a crowded area.
Our suggestion, while it’s not the best situation, you may need to use machines to accomplish your goals, at least until this blizzard is done with! For instance, do a treadmill push in place of the prowler:
You can also still do stationary movements such as:
- Wall drills- acceleration and top speed leg drills.
- Harness leans- think wall drill but the harness is holding you up.
- Half kneeling arm action.
For strength, you may have to make modifications to keep the pace up and to accommodate others. Meaning, if the program states for the athlete to do bench press and rows 4×12/12, this may pose a problem as the row machine is on the other side of the gym. So alternatively you may have to use bands and double them up for a stronger resistance. If you have a bigger group with minimal equipment you may need to add in other pre-hab movements to keep the guys moving and focused.
Example: group of 5 athletes program calls for bench and row, but there is only one bench open at the gym and others are waiting so you’ll have to move a generally fast pace.
- Athlete 1 on the bench
- Athlete 2 on rows
- Athlete 3 on deck for rows- resting cheering on etc…
- Athlete 4 wall slides
- Athlete 5 external rotation
As the athletes finish they’ll move on to the next movement, i.e. bench to external rotation to wall slides, and so on.
Conditioning
Just like everything stated above, you’ll have to think outside of the box a bit. Places like New York City, where everything is condensed will not have options as we did in Carolina to push or pull cars or heavy medicine balls to toss. So the NYC personal trainer may have to use barbells, dumbbells, and even machines to get the ticker going. Machines get so much negatively publicity by the fitness field that personal trainers and coaches hate to use them. Unfortunately our situation isn’t optimal so we have to use what we have. Here are some simple examples to use for conditioning:
Barbell Complex
- Thrusters
- Power Clean to Front Squat to Jerk
- Lunges- squat – row – press
Dumbbell Complex
- Dumbbell Swing
- Dumbbell Swing + Farmers walk
- Dumbbell thrusters + farmers walk
Machines
- Elliptical with handles- put up the resistance and blast it through for intervals- despite what you may think if done right this will get the ticker going.
- Treadmill pushes
- Sprints
Conclusion
In the end the point is to be creative but still effective. It may not be THE most optimal but you have to make due with the situation you’re in. Joe DeFranco didn’t start off in a 10,000 sq ft facility, he started off training athletes out on the fields and in small 300 square ft facility. The point being is to focus on the objective – get results- and not worry about what X coach does at X facility. They are not in your situation and you’re not in theres.
Stay strong,
Team Fusion Trained
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