-Tex McQuilkin
To succeed in sport, coordination, strength, and power must be enhanced. It's that simple. The challenge becomes finding the most optimal way to enhance coordination, strength and power, haha.
We could pull out what the latest research shows for each of these traits and mash a program together. Another option is connecting with experienced strength coaches and finding out exactly what they did for their athletes to succeed. These would be great places to start, but you will need to realize, the program you follow does not matter if you're missing the PURPOSE!
Start with coordination then strength and power will follow. There is no better time to enhance coordination than the Warm Up!
Think about training, sport practice, and everything else an athlete will do to prepare for competition. The one constant, whether you are working skill, strength, speed, practice, or Game Day, is that the athlete must WARM UP! This screams opportunity to empower performance every day. With athletes getting pulled in so many different directions, understanding the deep meaning behind WHY we warm up is crucial for unlocking athletic potential.
Let's breakdown four focuses you should bring everyday to your athlete's warm up. Remember: It’s more than just getting work done. It’s getting work done well.
1. Biomechanical Efficiency
Simply put, body control. Sport and fitness are filled with leverage, the relative strengths of the different muscle groups, and coordination that orchestrates movement patterns. Athletes coming to you will have different limb and torso lengths that make them unique. While a coach cannot alter muscle origin and insertion points or muscle fiber lay out, they can teach athletes to use what have. The warm up is a low-stress opportunity to start to connect the mind to the body specific for each individual.
Having athletes consciously listen to your movement instructions and apply the directions attacks the limiting factor know as biomechanical efficiency by addressing cooperation among different muscle groups. As athletes accumulate reps with challenging warm up movements, agonist and antagonist muscles begin to work together. Tension will dissipate and the athlete's economy of movement will increase. Half-assing the warm up will make coaching much more difficult for you and take away from accelerated coordination development.
2. Neurological Efficiency
This is the skill, efficiency, and intensity with which an athlete recruits fibers in muscle groups to produce a movement pattern accurately and powerfully.
All movement is controlled by the nervous system and neuromuscular processes. This limiting factor affects everything from force reduction and preventing injury to being explosive. A fundamental element to athletics is developed during the warm up if athletes are moving with intent. The co-operation between muscle fibers within the same group is directly connected to the trained ability to produce strength and power. Just going through the motions will not progress a high level of coordination long-term and fail to prime the athlete to fire during the first sets or reps in the sporting arena short-term.
The Power Athlete Methodology - Level One course dives deeper into this limiting factor. You’ll learn why 1RM’s are never true for novice athletes and why assigning relative percentages will not work to foster athleticism.
3. Primal Proficiency
“Practice doesn’t make perfect. Perfect Practice makes perfect.”
Programming is a major buzz word in the S&C world, and for the most part, is how coaches are judged. Whether it's CrossFit, college/high school level, or garage training with your buddies, the question every gym roughneck ponders is, "what program are you on?", "what's their programming like?", and for the Power Athlete Nation, "What are you training for?" Planning and writing programs is a large part of an S&C coach's job, possibly the most critical part. Every movement, progression, and goal needs to be written with a purpose and plan in mind, including the warm up. But the job does not end there, shouldn't the real work as a coach begin once you've written the program?
What is often overlooked or missing in these programming conversations is the application of said program. The bridge that connects effectiveness and application? Execution.
Improper execution of movements will dramatically decrease recovery, create imbalances, and decrease the transfer of training to the sporting arena. The "perfectly-written" program quickly becomes a mechanism for poor performance (and injury) if an athlete moves poorly. So where does the warm up come into effectiveness, application and execution?
How Power Athlete crafts warm ups factors in education of the big 5 lifts (Squat, Deadlift, Lunge, Step Up, and Power Clean) by chunking out pieces of these movements to master and attack individual limitations before the addition of external resistance or other forms of stress. Practicing each component during daily warm ups provides the opportunity to master and combine each chunk until competent in the full Primal movement pattern. How do you measure progress, though? Weights and times are valuable tools, but not nearly as valuable as your assessment of an athlete’s quality of movement!
4. Psychological Factors
Athletic performance depends greatly on a combination of psychological factors like motivation, attitudes towards winning and losing, concentration, and the ability to control emotions while executing.
Physical preparation for athletics will never compensate for psychological weaknesses under the high stress environment of competition. We talked about this in Power Coach: Self-Esteem. These psychological barriers are tools that can teach an athlete how to navigate high stress situations, using self-esteem and fear as motivation.
An athlete can be their own biggest limiting factor. Using the warm up to practice controlling the mental processes of concentration, focus, and regulating emotion will prepare them for success in higher stress situations. Physical abilities and mental processing systems work hand in hand on Game Day. Use the warm up to break a mental sweat, not just get your chili hot.
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