More vs Better
Big ol' tyres. Every gym should have them.
The head coach here is also an RKC, so instead of rows of weights machines as you’d find in most gyms, he has a hall full of olympic bars, bells, clubs, sledgehammers, ropes & some giant tyres outside.
Sound familiar to anyone?
A couple of my team mates on the course were the department’s assistant strength coach, Jeremy, & sports injury therapist, Sashi. I hope the students here realise how fortunate they are having guys like these looking after them.
You’ll probably know that university sports over here are a very big deal & some of the undergraduates are aiming for the mega-bucks professional ranks of the NFL, NBA & MLB. By the time they reach college they’ve already passed through high school where even at 15 & 16 years old the selection policy is geared around how much weight they can squat, deadlift or bench press.
Sadly, even an enlightened faculty like San Jose has trouble beating the ‘more is better’ mentality out of them when they first arrive, & no wonder. It’s an attitude prevalent in every fitness rag, every internet muscle forum, every knucklehead gym gorilla & – sad to say – an awful lot of personal trainers & coaches too.
The upshot is that many promising athletes are burned out & injured before their professional career has started. No-one taught them how to squat, lift or press properly (properly=most efficiently=safely); they just knew they had to lift a certain weight to make the grade, so they didn’t care how they did it.
The coaches here see all the same over-use injuries we see in the UK, but instead of adult desk workers, they’re dealing with high level athletes in their teens. You might wonder how these young bucks can be so strong & yet get injured so catastrophically. The answer is the quickest way to injury is adding strength on top of a dysfunction.
Thanks to people like Jeremy & Sashi who teach fundamentals of athletic movement first & then add strength on top, the chances of their athletes performing better & longer is greatly enhanced. Can their athletes squat, lift & press heavy? You bet.
At long last, pro teams are also starting to see the sense in looking after their multi-million dollar assets, the player. Instead of just treating injuries, big franchises in the US like the Indianapolis Colts are using movement screens to highlight potential problems, then corrective drills to change movement patterns & prevent injury.
Again, it sounds familiar, yes?
For every client who has left our studio thinking ‘I’m not sweating blood, crawling out the door or throwing up so I can’t have had a workout’, remember: we only add difficulty once the movement is right. Making movement more difficult is a cinch – just add weight or fatigue. Making movement better takes skill. As the ever-wise Pavel Tsatsouline says, too many people workout when they should be practising instead.
More is not better, more is just more.
Let’s aim for better.
