By Michael Longmeyer
In the dynamic environment of a weight room, competition serves as a powerful catalyst for enhancing athlete and student performance and results. When students/athletes engage in friendly rivalry, it not only fosters a sense of camaraderie but also motivates individuals to push their limits and achieve their personal best. This competitive atmosphere encourages goal-setting and accountability, as athletes and students strive to improve their strength, endurance, and technique. As they witness their peers’ progress, they become inspired to overcome challenges and embrace a growth mindset, leading to increased effort and dedication. Ultimately, the infusion of competition in weight training not only enhances physical abilities, but also cultivates resilience and determination among athletes/students, setting the stage for long-term success both inside and outside the gym.
In this Q&A article, Michael Longmeyer, the Strength and Speed Coach at Manitowoc Lincoln High School in Wisconsin, provides insight and suggestions on how to develop a culture of competitiveness in your weight room.
“Competitiveness” in the weight room is a term often mentioned by strength and conditioning coaches? How do you define Competitiveness in the Weight Room?
The weight room has a wide variety of opportunities to bring out the competitive side in both athletes and students at your school. In my opinion, competitiveness starts with challenging and competing against yourself, first and foremost. Growth mindset is a buzzword that I am sure many people use, but it is a very real concept and is constantly talked about in our program. If you can compete against yourself each and every day, and try to increase “your best “on a daily basis, it opens up doors to a variety of opportunities to compete against your teammates and other teams in the weight room.
What are ways that you develop a “Culture of Competitiveness” in your weight room? What are the foundational points, and how do you begin to develop this culture? And what are things you do to sustain and advance this culture?
Testing is training, and training is testing, and kids love numbers! Our foundational method for creating a competitive culture is using technology and tracking our athletes’ training daily. We use a mixture of technology pieces throughout the season or semester to help drive home the intent of movements, as well as provide quick feedback for our athletes. The goal is to not complicate the training, but we do aim to use at least one piece of technology a day. Here are examples of the technology we use:
- Dashr: Our Dashr timing system gives us the ability to time all of our sprints, with the main use of our system being a 20- to 30-yard run-in, with a 10-yard fly to track max velocity, as well as a 5-yard run-in, with a 10-yard fly to focus more on our ability to accelerate. With the use of Dashr, we hand out speed bands to our athletes when they hit 16,17, 18, 19 or 20 MPH.
- Calibrex: This is a Velocity Based Training device that we use with our main movements, and more specifically, our dynamic effort movements (where we want our athletes to move the bar at a certain speed). You can track a handful of things with this device, but the biggest competition we see among our athletes is when they are moving the same weight on the bar; we track who can move that bar the fastest within their set.
- Teambuildr: We use this platform on a daily basis, as it is what our athletes use to track all their weights and times. With the use of TV monitors in our weight room, they can view leaderboards, live PRs, and their growth charts.
- Plyomat: Our Plyomat is a great tool to test and athletes standing vertical or approach jump and can worked into a super-set seamlessly.
Is there a fine line between having the right level of competitiveness in your strength training program vs. having too much competitiveness? What steps do you take to make sure respect is maintained at all levels (between athletes, athletes to coaches) when you develop the competitive culture?
We run Strength Training Classes during the school day, in which the class participants are made up of a mixture of our entire student body. Outside of the school day, we also have individual teams train in-season before or after school. With that being said, the level of athletes in the weight room at any given time is very diverse. The competitive level of a varsity team may look very different when compared to a third-hour Strength Training Class. However, the expectation for both is the same: To challenge yourself mentally and physically while improving your strength, speed, and power. We constantly talk about growth mindset and while everyone starts their strength training journey at a different level, they share the same the expectation to raise their ceiling daily.
We involve the use of our “Ship’s Bell” to develop a competitive culture where everyone feels respected between all levels. The Ship Bell is our mascot, which stems from our city’s rich history of building submarines during World War II. When an athlete achieves a personal record during a training session, they walk over to the bell, ring the bell, and then everyone stops in the room and claps for that athlete. Whether there are 10 or 70 kids in the weight room, the feeling of receiving this type of acknowledgement is a satisfying feeling, not only for the athlete but for me as the coach. The smile on our athletes’ faces tells me they appreciate it as well! It is a sign of mutual respect, because it can be the 500-pound squatters clapping for an inexperienced lifter who just squatted 135 pounds for the first time, or vice versa.
What exercises or challenges/competitions do you use to build your culture?
We do a wide variety of different things throughout the semester to keep our students and athletes engaged and promote a competitive environment in the weight room. However, these challenges and competitions cannot take place until we have an organized daily structure in which our expectations and routines are clear and fit the flow of our weight room.
Our daily structure is as follows. At Lincoln HS, we utilize an 84-minute block period with our Strength Training Classes during the day. Students enter into the weight room and once the bell rings, they follow 10 minutes of information about the workout for the day, with the help of guidance shown on a television monitor. During that 10 minutes, students first complete their mobility circuit, which is a series of movements that work to address the strengthening of what we see as key areas of weakness for our athletes (Ankles/Soleus, Hips, Shoulders and Core). This takes about five minutes of the 10-minute period, and then students can start logging into Teambuildr and setting their rack up for our first movement of the day. Once the 10-minute mark hits, we meet by the TV to go through the workout, explain sets and reps, and answer any questions athletes and students may have. Following the explanation of the workout, we move into our dynamic warm-up/plyometrics and then they move into their lift.
For sport-specific teams that come in before or after school, the overall outline is very similar, just shorter in duration. Teams have racks assigned to them for the season. So when they enter the weight room, they know to grab a tablet, go to Teambuildr, and if their session starts at 3:45, they need to be set up by 3:45 because we will be meeting by the TV to explain the lift and then go into our dynamic warm-up before starting the session.
Once the expectations and routines are established, we look for our students and athletes to hold their teammates and classmates accountable for these expectations in order to create the culture and standard we want in our weight room.
In theory, we have daily challenges or competitions built into our workout that are both inter- and intra-personal. Something as simple as grouping three competitive athletes together will create a competition for that day. We also start a lot of our classes with “energizers” after our dynamic warm-up. This can something as simple as ankle tag, leg wrestling, or plank arm wrestling, and it gets the competitive juices flowing in the room before we move into our lift. We also use TV monitors around the room to broadcast live PRs via Teambuildr as well as the “Ship’s Bell” celebration mentioned earlier.
With the use of technology, we record, rank and publish all of our sprint times. And we hold competition in different events throughout the school year, such as our March Madness Sprint Tournament, or we will track the percent increase of a lift from the start of a phase to the end of a phase and use a white board outside of the weight room to post these increases. These stats are a useful motivator for incoming classes to see, as it provides them with the number they are striving to beat as a class. Finally, last school year we started our “Strength and Speed Bands” program. High school kids will work relentlessly to earn a silicon wristband that reads 20 MPH on it, or our Tri-Colored Band which means they have hit the highest weight standard for our Big 3 lifts.
What team-building exercises do you use?
Last year, we began a school-wide, team-building competition called the “Team of the Month/Team of the Year” competition. Fall, Winter, and Spring team compete against each other throughout the year in three main areas: growth in our key performance indicators, Teambuildr completion percentage, and a character component (on-time, work ethic, dress, etc.). I did not offer a special prize for the winning teams as incentive, but they they did receive recognition on social media and outside of our weight room. Offering the winners a prize as added motivation is definitely in the plans for this year!
Michael Longmeyer is in his second year as Strength and Speed Coach at Manitowoc Lincoln High School in Wisconsin, and is also a physical education teacher at the school. He received a Bachelor of Science degree in Physical Education from the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, and earned his Master’s in Applied Exercises Science with a Strength and Conditioning Concentration from Concordia University Chicago.
