I am fortunate and blessed to be teaching the Weight Training courses all day long at Leesburg High School.  This is my 18th year at LHS.  I am in the Weight Room every day balancing a curriculum between regular students, my Weightlifters, and athletes from other sports.  I write the training programs for each daily, and I never take a “cookie-cutter” approach when writing our training plans.

In addition to writing the training plans for each type of student and student-athlete, I also take on the responsibility of maintaining our facility.  Our weight room has constantly been updated over the years through fundraisers from our Weightlifting team and help from our Booster club.  What you see in our weight room at LHS is a direct result of the fundraising efforts of the Weightlifting teams, and Booster help, over the years.  I am proud of what we have built, and more importantly, so are all of my student-athletes.

Daily cleaning is performed by myself.  That includes: sweeping sand off the floors several times a day, cleaning of bars/ benches/ dumbbells/ and other training equipment, maintaining our racks and attachments, and all other details in providing a safe and clean training experience for my athletes and students.

The responsibility I take most pride in is with teaching technique.  I approach training in three phases: teach them how to lift; teach them how to train; and teach them how to compete.  All three phases fit anyone regardless if they are involved in a sport or not.

Everyone, regardless of athletic affiliation, learn how to lift in my classes.  “Keeping the lifter safe” is of the utmost importance.  Each student and athlete alike is taught how to perform movements for numerous exercises.  Teaching them how to fail a lift is covered intensely as well.  Anyone who has trained extensively understands the importance of not only knowing to perform exercises correctly, but also in how to protect yourself (and those around you) in failing a lift.

The second phase, teaching them how to train, is a product of programming.  While the subject itself is a very deep and complex subject, I keep things simplistic in an attempt for the student and athlete to better absorb the material for a life-long activity.  I will cover multiple approaches to periodizations with the ultimate goal of giving the student and the athlete enough knowledge to understand how to train for any goals they have in their adult lives to continue with this life-long activity.

The third phase, teaching them how to compete, fits both the regular student who just enjoys “weight training” and the athlete who obviously competes against other teams.  For the regular student, they are ultimately learning to compete with themselves.  They are taught how to find the smaller victories aside from the pigeon-holed mindset of only obtaining new 1RM.  There are numerous manners to monitor your success of competing with yourself.  Body composition improvement, absolute strength improvements, strength endurance improvements, bar speed improvements, better body control, better coordination, and the list goes on.  In essence, there should be something we can celebrate as an improvement as often as possible.  I personally, try to find something to say to each student and athlete regarding an improvement I notice each week.   The athlete is easier to teach how to compete.  They naturally have that tendency in them already, so it is really about building their work capacity in a manner that fits their needs for their sport.

The biggest thing for me daily, which isn’t written in my contract, is to help all of my students and student-athletes find their motivation.  Whether it is extrinsic and intrinsic in nature, everyone has a motivation.  I feel I have been very successful in finding motivations over the years and helping to bring out the best version of all the people I have worked with.  It is something I pride myself on.  No matter how tough or easier the training was for that day, I try to find a way to make all of them smile.  Being successful at any school is challenging, but being successful at a Title 1 school has a lot of issues I think many don’t deal with on the regular like we do at LHS.  I don’t shy away from this challenge, and I never will.  I love where I am, and I love what I do.  I find a major sense of accomplishment in helping and guiding my people to experience success, motivations, and self-confidence when many of them were desperate to discover these things about themselves.