Random Thoughts

Here is a very random post that has 10 different thoughts that have been going through my head recently.

1) Everything goes back to the autonomic nervous system, its the ultimate governor of the body. More focus should be put on maximizing the autonomic nervous system as opposed to maximizing weight room numbers.

2) Charlie Weingroff recently said that “If strength and conditioning is done properly, we don’t need physical therapy.” Interesting thought. Charlie also said that physical therapist and strength coaches should be doing the same thing, as the laws of the body are always the same. As usual his thought process is hard to disagree with.

3) Do more push ups. It’s amazing how many people can’t perform a proper push up. They are also an awesome exercise that may be superior to bench pressing in a many ways.

4) I had the chance to attend the taping of Mike Boyle’s upcoming Functional Strength Coach 6.0 DVD in December. In the talk, Coach Boyle shared his strength standards which I found interesting. 1RM Bench press = 1RM chin up = 1RM hang clean = 1RM rear foot elevated split squat.

5) In many cases, most strength coaches are just looking for ways to justify what it is that they do, instead of figuring out what is the best thing to do. These are two totally different things.

6) Passion + determination = grit. Grit determines how successful you are going to be.

7) As strength and conditioning professionals, our #1 job is to keep athletes healthy. It doesn’t matter how big, fast, and powerful you make them if they aren’t healthy enough to compete.

8) Not enough people make enough use of the most powerful but inexpensive two-word reward – “thank you”.

9) Recently there have been a lot of videos of 1-leg Olympic lifts. At first this seemed a little stupid to me, but when you think about it, if we feel that 1-leg plyo’s are important, and we feel 1-leg strength exercises are important, why would we think 1-leg Olympic lifts aren’t important?

10) As a team sport strength coach, you need to individualize as much as possible if you want to have the biggest impact you possibly can. Everyone shouldn’t be on the same exact program. Break the team down into smaller groups if need be.

As I said, these are some random thoughts that have been going through my head the last couple weeks/months. Hopefully it makes you think and you can take something away from a couple of the thoughts.

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