What Should I Do?

By CJ Murphy, MFS

For www.EliteFTS.com

I can’t count how many times this issue has been covered, but it’s still one of the questions that I get asked continually—on the phone, in the gym, at a meet, in emails, and in my sleep. The question comes mostly from kids who train at the gym, but it also comes from other coaches and athletes.

It usually goes something like this: “What should I do for max effort?” or “How much band tension should I use for dynamic work?” or “Should I do glute ham raises or reverse hypers?” or “Can I squat on a 20-inch box for max effort to prepare for the Strongman contest that I have coming up in two weeks?”

When I say, “I don’t know,” people usually get mad because they think that I do know. I try to explain that I can’t keep track of what every single person in the gym needs to work on nor is it my job to do so. I’m speaking, of course, about the people who train there—the regular workout crowd—not the clients or athletes. My job is to figure out what my athletes and clients need to do.

The most basic thing that everyone needs to do is work hard at what they’re doing and at least try to identify their own weaknesses so that they can be corrected. I then give people the “attributes” talk. Jim Wendler and I have had this conversation a few times, and I think we’ve come up with some good points. Let’s backtrack first and discuss what we’re talking about here before I tell you what you should do.

As strength coachers/trainers, we need to develop the attributes that are lacking in our athletes. We’re only going to cover two of them here—strength and speed. These two are our bread and butter or the protein and creatine of this article. There are others such as coaching ability and flexibility, but we’ll save those for another day.

As a coach, you need to figure out what attributes your athletes possess and what needs work. You need to figure out how to improve them and be able to apply the correct training protocols. You also need to be able to pair athletes up in a group setting to optimally use their time in the gym among ten thousand other things.

If you don’t have a coach, you need to identify these things in yourself. Just remember to check your ego at the door. Evaluate yourself accurately. You’ll probably have to train something that you’re not good at. For example, if you’re good at low box squats for one rep maxes but suck at dynamic squat day, guess what? Your speed might need work. Why are you slow? Can you engage the muscles that you need to engage to decelerate when you get near the box? Is your posterior chain weak? Is it a lack of flexibility? I don’t know. It could be one, all, or even other things that I didn’t list. Try and figure it out.

To illustrate this further, let’s say that you have a group of average 13–14-year-old boys in a football program. Some will naturally be strong, and some will naturally be fast. Once you get them in the gym, you should have an idea of who fits in each category.

As another example, take two imaginary kids on your team. One is 5’10”, weighs 185 lbs and has a six-inch vertical leap but a 275 lb bench with a 315 lb deadlift. The other kid is 5’10”, weighs 235 lbs, trips over the 50-yard line, can’t squat 135 lbs properly and has a 46-inch waist. Guess what? The first kid is lean and strong, but he’s not fast (six-inch vertical) so he needs to learn to be more explosive. The second kid is just fat, clumsy, and weak. It’s not politically correct, but it is what it is.

Spend time with the first kid developing his ability to be more explosive. With the second kid, sew his mouth shut, smack the donut out of his hand, and get him stronger before you do anything else with him. Of course, this is a gross oversimplification..

As a coach, it’s your job to see these things and correct them. As an athlete, it’s your job to look at yourself, take stock of what is what, and do what your coach says. If you don’t understand, ask. If they don’t explain it, get another coach who will work with you, not yell at you.

Here’s a separate example. A huge guy joins our training group the other day looking to do his first meet. He’s pretty strong and obviously well read and intelligent. On his first day, he did a cambered bar good morning with 500 lbs plus two chains, and it was fairly easy for him. He claimed that he had never done that before, and I believe him. As we watched him further, he had all the basics down, but he had a few technique issues. He also wanted to fix all of his problems in one workout.

Now, this is a good thing. We have someone who wants to improve and is willing to do what it takes but has 10,000 questions and needs answers to all of them now! How about this—today, let’s work on fixing one thing. When that is done, we’ll move on to the next one. As I said before, how can any one person know everything that you need to do to fix all of your problems in your first workout? Maybe Louie Simmons can figure it out, but most of us are not Louie Simmons. We’re only human.

Here’s what I told him to do in his workout—work on pushing the knees out in the squat. That’s it. He wanted more, but that was enough for him to work on. By the end of his squat training, he was pushing his knees out, but he had a few other small problems. I told him that we’d fix those in the next few training sessions. As a credit to him, he agreed. He appeared a little anxious about fixing everything and wanted to get it done. However, I think it took. We’ll see.

So what is the point here? The point is that whether you’re a lifter or a coach, identify your biggest weakness/problem and correct it. To do this, put some thought into what you need or what your athletes need. Does it matter if they don’t do a particular exercise? Not really. What matters is that they work hard at the exercise they’re doing to bring up the weak point or technical problem.

One thing we see all the time is the misapplication of dynamic training. For example, we used to have this guy who would come in to train. One week he would use two blue bands on his squat, another week he’d use chains, the next week he’d have purple bands on the bar, and so on. He’d attended several of the EliteFTS Force Production seminars and read about training and technique all the time. However, his squat and bench stayed the same for about two years. Why?

He put no thought into what he was doing. He just lifted haphazardly, regardless of what he was taught. His problem was technique. It was terrible. He was told and shown how to fix it, but he never took the advice. He had no coaching ability. He also had no rhyme or reason to his training. Just throwing bands on a bar won’t improve your squat. It might make it worse, as it did in this case.

What did we do? We tried to help for a long time, but we realized that you can lead a powerlifter to the bar, but you can’t make his total go up if he doesn’t want it to. Bad horse analogy, I know. We just let him do his own thing, and he eventually left. This might reflect poorly on my coaching skills, but it was the right thing to do in this case.

This guy’s problem wasn’t just the misapplication of dynamic training. It was that and many more other things. The dynamic training was a great example of the point of this article though.

If you or your athletes are fast but weak, do things to increase strength. If it’s the opposite, do things to increase speed. You must understand how to do these things properly too, though that’s beyond the scope of this article. Attend seminars, read, and try new training methods to see what works for you. If you want specific examples regarding how to identify and correct specific problems with specific exercises, there are literally hundreds of articles on EliteFTS to read. So if you have squatting problems, read some articles on squatting. If you have bench problems, read up on the bench. And so on. Hopefully, this has shed some light on these issues and created some discussion and thought about what needs to be done.

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