elitefts™ Sunday Edition

I hope everyone out there enjoys my title. This is one of the new philosophies that I live by. If you've met me or read anything I've written, you'll know that I have many philosophies and theories. This one is adapted from two different books that I read recently. Again, if you know me, you know that the books I read truly run the gamut of subjects. I recently discovered that Facebook has an area where you can add books that you've read. To me, this may be the greatest thing that has ever been done on Facebook. I've started adding my reading list, so if this article interests you, please visit my Facebook page and steal my book ideas.

Be a five

Where would I ever get the idea that being a five is better than being, say, a seven and a half? I work all day with college athletes and it isn't unusual for a male athlete to describe his girlfriend with a number. The conversation usually goes something like this: "Hey, Ham (yes, Hamer is too long to say), I got a new girl. You've seen her around. She has brown hair, she's about five feet seven inches, and she's a nine."

Then, from the other side of the room: "Nah, man, she isn't a nine. First time I saw her I thought she was, but she's really like a seven and a half." At this point, I generally make these guys start some sort of lifting.

As you can see from the above example, we love to quantify things in our culture. Even strength coaches quantify things. How do we quantify our results? We use the functional movement screen, the max effort, the vertical jump, or any other of the hundreds of tests out there. However, as we all know, tests are only good at telling us one thing—how good we are at the test we just performed.

So why be a five? OK, let me get to the point of all this. I stole this from Bob Lutz. If you don't know who Bob Lutz is (and you probably should), he was a marine and vice chairman and executive vice president at BMW. He was also at the executive level or higher at Ford, Chrysler, GM, and Excide. Bob has also penned two books—Car Guys Vs Bean Counters and Icons and Idiots. Both deal with being a leader and finding ways to excel within the culture of where you work or reside.

In the book Icons and Idiots, Bob talks about leaving Ford in the 80s to go work for Chrysler. While at Ford, he was involved in creating a new car they called the Taurus. When Bob left for Ford, the Taurus wasn't quite on the showroom floors yet. In his first meeting at Chrysler, his new boss, Lee Iacocca, told him that he wasn't sure what Ford was doing with this new car, the Taurus. It was testing out terribly and was only a five on a zero to ten scale while the newest K cars were testing out at seven and a half. For those of you younger readers or people from the moon, the Ford Taurus went on to be one of the bestselling American cars for years. It sold so well that when Ford ended its production run, they were forced to bring it back just one year later. On the other hand, the K car was quite possibly the ugliest car of all time.

While Lee Iacocca was very good at what he did, this was one of the major slips of his career. Bob knew that when you ask 100 people, "what do you think about car A on a zero to ten scale," the answer shouldn't be seven. It should either be ten or one. In other words, you want people to be passionate about the car. Some people will hate it and others will love it.

A great example from the world of strength is CrossFit. Love it or hate it, CrossFit has thousands of followers and is frequently on ESPN. Powerlifting isn't. If you asked your average person who trains what he thinks about CrossFit, there would be many ones and tens. If you asked your average person who trains what he thinks about powerlifting (which I'm partial to so don't get mad), I bet there would be more sevens. Which of these two is growing faster?

Now on to the weight room...as we all know and as has been discussed more times than we can count, you can't please everyone. Currently, in my job, I oversee the strength and conditioning of six teams. Within those teams, there are approximately 300 athletes. This doesn't include the six head coaches, about 20–25 assistant coaches, six athletic trainers, and a myriad of administrators. On top of this, I oversee my two paid staff members (who have more teams that I indirectly oversee), about 3–7 interns, and a few student workers. This adds up to about 400–500 people I have to deal with each week. How do you think I score out with them? Well, luckily, I can tell you as I try to quantify this (try being the key word).

With the athletes, we quantify our results each and every day through training. However, as with most schools, when the athletes complete their four years, we give them an exit interview. This is great because you get to find out whether or not your athletes respect you after spending four years with you. Remember, you won't win all the battles, and some kids will never like or respect you, but look at the scores (as close as your administrators will let you). Did your athletes believe that you had the best intentions for them, or were you just the dude screaming at the end of the hall? The athletes should always be the easy part of our job. I heard a wise strength coach once say that you will know if the athletes respect you when you see them in the grocery store. Do they walk the other way or come up and say hello (I apologize because I forget who said this)?

Dealing with coaches and the administration can be a different story. How do we quantify what we do with them? I'll tell you how I've failed and maybe someone will comment and give us some better ideas. I say this because I've tried to quantify this for years with terrible results. For the first three years of my current job, I sent a questionnaire to every person in the athletic department asking for feedback on strength and conditioning. Other than people saying "Wow, what a great idea," I received nothing. After three years, I gave up on this.

My second attempt was to invite everyone to our strength chalk talks. We covered many topics and discussed articles. I even asked the coaches, athletic trainers, and other athletic department staff to bring topics or articles that interested them to our talks. Again, I didn't have any luck. This isn't in any way an insult to them. This is human nature. I just haven't been able to find what they want. Once I do (or one of you shows me how to), I'll be able to get some feedback and score how they feel our department is doing.

Remember, perception is reality. Often, as strength professionals, we spend twelve hours a day working and think that we did a great job. But if your coaches, administration, and the rest of the athletic department either doesn't know that or doesn't agree, you'll have a problem.

Now that you can see how to quantify what we do as strength coaches and how doing so can be deceiving, figure out how to best score your own department and job for that matter. In our profession, it isn't always easy. We can't score ourselves based on wins and losses or even on injury rates (we all know that sometimes we're lucky and other times unlucky). What we can do is find where our weaknesses are as professionals and where the weaknesses are in our programs and attack those weaknesses.