Strength Training Is Ambiguous

I had the great honor to speak with James “The Thinker” Smith on Sunday night. First off, very nice guy. What a source of knowledge as well. Here are some of the key points to our conversation:

Strength training can mean but doesn’t have to be weight training. Weight training is a form of strength training. Read that again if it doesn’t make sense at first glance. The whole goal of training athletes is to improve their performance in their chosen sport or game. You must always think of how you are going to accomplish this. Sometimes, weights are not what is called for. I had some of my guys do a contrast speed day last night and the only ‘weight room’ stuff they did was a superset of TRX rows and walking parking lot lunges at the end. Again, what is going to make them better?

The more advanced an athlete is skill wise (talent), the less they are going to need and be able to handle in the weight room. Their central nervous systems are so advanced that they will simply not require a ton of work to get an adaptation. On the flip side, too much can fry them a lot quicker than it would a lesser athlete. This is why at the professional level of sport, you don’t see as much heavy lifting or lifting in general going on.

You have to think of the CNS as a cup of water. At the beginning of the workout (hopefully), your cup should be full. I say full because it depends on your recovery and recuperation methods up until this point. Actually, you can think of this as a two way cup. If you put any too much of one component in and then try to fit too much of another in, the cup will overflow and this will not be good. If this happens, you did not create a positive adaptation. As well, you only have some much in the CNS tank going into a training session. Once that cup is empty, it is empty. Again, many strength coaches spend 99% of their time on strength work. That is going to leave them 1% for the rest of the skills they may need to work on, including, power, strength endurance, core, flexibility, coordinated movements and so on.

I have about 5 pages of notes from the other night and I am a smarter coach for speaking with Coach Smith. Learn from the best!

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