PATRICK WARD'S BLOG

1. Buying into the system is important. It doesn’t matter if you are training one client or a team of 20. The athletes (or clients), the coaches and the parents have to buy into what you are doing if you ever want to make some progress. I was talking with a friend who coach’s high school football and he proposed that the 12 and 13-year old boys start lifting this year to prepare for next year. This was met with some resentment from the other coaches, who felt that the 12-13 year old boys were “to young” to lift. This is nonsense! At 12-13 years old, those boys need to begin learning proper movement patterns and working on developing some base levels of strength and conditioning. My friends idea was to have those kids start learning body weight squats, lunges, push ups, and pull ups…the basics!! You don’t need to load them up with a whole bunch of weight at that age. You just need to allow them a platform to learn!

2. Being a strength coach doesn’t just take place in the gym. You need to get out and work with your athletes on the field, track or court. You need to observe practice and see what they do and HOW they do it. Knowing this will help you make modifications to your program, which can help improve the players’ abilities.

3. Speaking of being out of the weight room – I spent yesterday morning on the driving range with golf pro Tim Schrader of Kinetic Golf Systems. I had a great time talking to Tim about his ideas on the golf swing and making people not just better golfers, but better people! Tim is really into the power of the mind and visualizing everything. He took a little red basket and put it out about 30 yards on the driving range. Stared at it and visualized his shot and believed 100% that every time he hit the ball it would go into the basket. Every single shot he took was right around the basket and it was amazing when he was even sinking them. He then took it a step further and grabbed a left-handed club and did the same thing! It was awesome! He is a really passionate and dynamic guy and one of the first golf coaches I have spoken with who actually talks about the biomechanics of the swing and ground reaction force and things of that nature.

4. One more week to go and then I will be doing some more continuing education. I am taking another class in Neuromuscular Therapy (a type of soft tissue modality). This one is on the Cranium and Cervical region and it is put on by the NMT Center (http://nmtcenter.com/). I am really excited! Hooray for education!!

5. Online coaching and consulting is available for anyone interested. I got some really great feed back from a high school football player that I helped out this year:

Patrick has been awesome directing me in the right way to go about training for football this season. I was at a loss for what to do to get ready in the off-season and he set up workouts that worked and were easy to understand. I can tell a great difference from the workouts he set up for me from the ones in previous years, that I just did by my own knowledge.

In my 4 seasons of football 2 out of 4 seasons I suffered injuries that basically ruined my season and this most recent season I can say without a doubt has been the best.

At the start of the season I could immediately see a difference - I was better conditioned than all of my teammates, I had greater strength and endurance, and was just overall way more prepared than anyone on the team. There are two more games left this season and I have been injury free and have dominated opponents with huge size advantages. With proper training I have gained injury prevention, strength, speed, and agility and I am at the best I have ever been thanks to Patrick.

It is really not a good idea to train without the help of someone else. Over-training is very easy to do and you can mess your body up and ruin your season. Instead, get help from someone that knows what they are talking about like Patrick. I did and knowing that I trained correctly and seeing the results on the field was a great feeling.

--Mark Cole-High school athlete

If interested, just shoot me an email: Patrick@optimumsportsperformance.com

Have a great weekend everyone!

Patrick

Posted by Patrick Ward on Friday, November 14, 2008 at 12:42 PM | Permalink