Top 5 things incompetent strength coaches do

I see videos from other facilities all the time and they are ridiculous.  They post them because they think they look cool for parents when in fact they have no clue what they are doing.  I wish they would just stop posting videos because although most parents have no idea what they are posting is awful (nor should they as this is not what they do), all the coaches at The Spot Athletics do & it drives us crazy.

It drives us crazy to see athletes at other facilities using poor form, senseless drills, and just plain wasting their time.  We value education and see it as our privilege to help young athletes excel at their sports and yet parents send kids to these other facilities and they are wasting their young athletes potential and the parents hard earned money.

Here are the top 5 things we have seen that drive the coaches here absolutely crazy. 

1.  Anything standing on a bosu ball.  

For the love of god, no sport is played on a bosu ball.  Unless you are 90yrs old and have trouble falling you should not be standing on a bosu ball for any of your training, unless of coarse your goal is to suck, then keep it up.

2. Endless ladder drills.  

I will only say this once.  Just because they are called
speed ladders doesn't mean they make you faster.  Speed ladders unequivocally DO NOT MAKE AN ATHLETE FASTER! If you are past 12yrs old then ladders are only good as a warm up, under 12 and they help with learning body control but at no age do they make you faster.  Think about it, no sport is player with those short steps and in a controlled pattern.  Sport is the ability to solve ever changing spacial awareness problems, not take tiny steps in a predetermined pattern.

3. Light weight exercises standing on one leg

Unless you are Daniel-son and Johnny's teammate swept your leg before the finals match, you will never, ever, do this in athletic competition.  It's called training specificity.  You must train for the demands of your sport to become better at it.  Light weight, high rep work is useless for building strength, but can be used for conditioning.  Standing on one leg while doing light weight is a flat out waste of time and is the result of making stuff up to keep kids entertained.  If you want to entertain your kids, take them to a movie, if you want them to be better at their sport, bring them to The Spot Athletics.

4. Not utilizing any significant external resistance

In order for an athlete to be stronger, jump higher and faster, they must impose a load that challenge their current threshold.  Ie: if you only use med balls, kettle bells and other light implements you will never get stronger.  The number one exercise that correlates to a higher vertical jump is the good old fashioned squat.  This has been proven time and time again in studies.  So why this new trend to move away from the barbell has started I don't know.  I do hope it continues so that our athletes can continue to kick the crap out of people who think lightly weight hip thrusts with their feet on a swiss ball will do anything for them when they get on the field of play.

5. Doing the basic lifts incorrectly

I think that the reason these other places don't squat, deadlift or do the olympic lifts is because they flat out have no clue how to properly teach them.  So instead of potentially hurting a kid with some real weight that would actually help them be a better athlete, they just throw down some med balls and say "all that heavy lifting stuff isn't good for athletes."  Well here at The Spot Athletics we take pride in being some of the top technicians in the big lifts.  We do consulting for as far away as Australia on correcting people's form in the big lifts.  So when these other places finally post a video of someone doing a lift with some actual weight, what you see is so awful, we kind of wish they wouldn't have done it and leave the actual training to the experts at The Spot Athletics.