WHEN THE STRENGTH testing period comes around and you ask your players how much weight they will have on the bar, do you ever get blank stares?
Testing periods during the off-season provide an opportunity to establish new standards in the player’s core lifts and reestablish individual and team goals. Every off-season, you should evaluate your program and develop more effective techniques to better serve the athletes who go to battle for you.
It is unrealistic to expect individual players to track and record their progress for you during the off-season. As a result, the importance of keeping optimum individual test results cannot be overlooked.
Developing A System
Most tests are conducted utilizing core lifts and a 40-yard dash time. A core lift represents the base lifts that you build your weightlifting program around. By tracking the last lift of an executed core, you’ll have a good idea of how close your players are to achieving their goals.
For example, if one of your players is doing a set of bench presses that call for 5 repetitions at 80 percent of their maximum lift, you would record the weight and number of reps for that last set. Tracking in this manner helps to critique their progress in the weight room and maintains a consistent measuring stick for coaches. This also lets you build off-season rapport with your players and pay individual attention to their needs.
Peer Pressure Motivates
Tracking weightlifting progress also serves as a great motivational tool for weight room participation. Nothing motivates your players more than peer pressure. Teammates want to know who is lifting and who’s not.
By tracking your team’s results in the winter, spring and summer, you can account for the contribution and gains of the entire roster. If you post results every week, you’ll be amazed at how quickly the blank spaces are filled with data. With peer pressure and careful documentation, there’s never a doubt as to where commitment is in a program.
Tracking also places accountability on your athletes to keep working hard. It will also evoke extra involvement from the position coaches and anyone else assigned to weight room supervision. It’s a fun way to keep everyone involved and maintaining a positive attitude toward your training program.
Simple, Easy To Do
With a computer, template, 31/2-inch floppy disk and a printer, you can become as creative as you need to be in keeping records for your training program.
You’ll get a lot of pleasure out of asking your players to add 5 pounds each week to their maximum lifts instead of waiting until the spring testing period.
The chart details how we track our training program. Height and weight as well as position are left blank and filled in during the spring testing period in case of unforeseen changes to the roster.
You may notice that nobody had credit for Monday. That particular day was a snow day and due to terrible weather conditions, our weight room was closed. You’ll also see that there is a pretty even split between squats and cleans and that’s because our lifting schedule is broken up into separate sessions for linemen and skill positions.
There are blank copies of this chart on the Gridiron Strategies Web site at www.gridironstrategies.com. Feel free to print out copies to use to track the progress of your squad’s weight training.