Programming for Athletes at a Large School

HorizontalTaylor with Team.

By Joseph Taylor, MS, CSCS, RSCC, USAW-L3

Joseph Taylor is the Head Strength and Conditioning Coach at Friendswood High School in Texas and a private Youth and Collegiate S&C Coach through his business, Type II Performance. Coach Taylor is in his seventh year as a full-time high school S&C coach, and has a BS in Kinesiology from Sam Houston State University and a MS in Exercise and Health Sciences from University of Houston Clear-Lake.

Taylor and his staff train more than 600 different athletes in a given week. Without the proper planning, the Friendswood athletes would not train properly, and there would be potential for serious injuries.  In this article, Coach Taylor explains his philosophy on programming and the systems he has created to train his athletes in the most efficient way possible.

How do you develop overall programming that meets the needs of all of your athletes and doesn’t conflict with classes, practices and other school-related activities?

All strength and conditioning programs that are implemented with our teams are written with the demands of the athlete’s sport and the time of year (off-season, pre-season, in-season, post-season) in mind. As an athlete moves throughout this continuum, the volume of work required for their sport typically increases. For example, an athlete in the off-season portion of their yearly calendar will typically spend far less time practicing their sport. In addition, these practices are usually focused on skill development and small-sided games, lending itself to far less physiological stress. As they move into pre-season, the quantity, duration, and intensity of their sport practices will increase. As the in-season phase begins, practices usually become consistent, but more volume and intensity is added via scrimmages and games. Stress does not exist in a vacuum, so the strength and conditioning coach must program with the demands of practice and games in mind. In terms of volume, as practice/competition volume increases, there must be an inverse relationship in the weight room.

In Texas, we have an athletic period (school time dedicated to an athlete’s sport). This allows us to program without worrying about interfering with academic classes. Lastly, we work with the sport coach to schedule weight room sessions around their practices and games, and try to avoid interfering with the athlete’s readiness as little as possible.

How do you develop training programs that can both equally address all of your athletes’ needs and also take care of their individual needs?

More than 600 individual athletes from 17 different programs come through the Friendswood weight room in a week. Most sessions involve two or three different sports training in the same weight room. With that in mind, I have to be creative and efficient when trying to meet individual needs.

Most of our programs are fairly basic. Teenage athletes need a basic and balanced program. In any given workout, our athletes will perform a power movement (Olympic lift, hex bar jump, plyo or MD Ball), a squat, a hinge, a push and a pull. The volume accumulated from these movements is always tracked. We are always sure to program a balanced training period by examining push:pull and squat:hinge volume ratios to prevent development of imbalance. We also will almost always incorporate single and double leg movements for lower body and vertical and horizontal movements for pushes and pulls.

It is my belief that young people need lots of basics–both in terms of athlete development and sport-skill development–and it is the job of the sport coach via practice to work on sports skills, not the strength & conditioning coach. However, it would be ignorant to completely ignore the demands certain sports put on specific anatomical structures. We accommodate athletes sport needs by leaving spaces in the basic programming for “sport-specific” accessory movements.

With this concept in mind, we implement dedicated neck training for football, soccer and wrestling; rotator cuff work for baseball, softball and volleyball; and ankle work for basketball. Lastly, we have some athletes in our programs who are “strong enough” to play their sport. Athletes who can front squat at least 1.75x their bodyweight (or back squat 2x their bodyweight) perform extra sets of our power movement for the day and reduce the number of sets on their lower-body squat movements. 

Here’s a specific example. A group may be prescribed 5 x 3 in the power snatch and 8 x 3 in the back squat. There may be a few athletes in the group who are “strong enough.” A quick adjustment for those athletes is to shift that volume to the ‘power’ movement and away from the back squat. That athlete could perform two-three extra sets on the power snatch and cut two-three sets off the squat. This can be done with any Olympic lift, ballistic lift, plyometric or MD ball movement where the practitioner beliefs the stress required to continue to gain strength adaptations is not worth the time investment needed to illicit that change.

How do handle the scheduling of in-season athletes vs. out-of-season athletes?

Athletes are in the weight room during the assigned period for their sport. Typically, off-season athletes work out during the athletic period and in-season athletes work out after practice.

 

Are you or a staff member at all of the workout sessions?  How do handle this when you have such a large number of athletes to manage.

There is almost always a strength and conditioning coach from our school present at these sessions. I am lucky enough to have a dedicated assistant S&C coach, allowing us to cover all workout periods.

Yes, our weight room has 14 double-sided racks. This allows for 28 work stations. I do not like having more than three athletes to a station, but will make an exception and go with four in rare instances. This puts our maximum number of athletes at 86, although sometimes it gets close to 100. When this happens, we just put four athletes to a station for a few groups and keep an eye out for any potential problems.

How to maintain a good flow for an athlete’s training when having to handle so many athletes on a daily basis?

The best-made program is useless unless the coach truly understands how to optimize their space. As an example, there will almost always be a barbell exercise with a secondary movement away from the rack. This ensures that athletes have room to execute their exercises. You will go through a long period of trial and error until you finally find the correct exercise pairings These pairings are facility dependent. For instance, in our field house weight room, we only have pull-up bars inside the racks. This means that if I want to pair a chin-up or pull-up with another exercise, that exercise cannot take place inside the rack.

Experience in your weight room allows you to eventually avoid most mistakes by properly spacing out the open areas. Strength and conditioning coaches have to be flexible and adjust on the fly when a mistake is made in the program that limits the efficiency of the activities.

What kind of platform and programming do you use to meet your needs?

We use a program called Strength Tracker. Workouts are input into the platform which then generates cards for the athletes. We group athletes by strength (typically bench press and front squat estimated 1 rep maxes) and print 1 card for each group each week. We utilize many different kinds of set and rep schemes depending on the time of year.

The best overall description of our programming would be a conjugate tier system. We are almost always working multiple qualities at once throughout the year (power, strength, hypertrophy), and workouts are created with that in mind. Exercise order is important to ensure that all of these qualities are able to be attained in a single workout.

Do you post results from each session as a way to help motivate your athletes when they are not working out at the same time?  What other motivational tactics do you use, and why are they different from a coach who doesn’t train as many athletes?

We assess strength qualities every eight weeks and athletes receive a report card. Their sport coach receives an email synopsis of each athlete’s growth as well as a snapshot of the team’s growth as a whole.

We have a record board for boys and girls that is updated with the top 10 measurements all time and for that period. We also assess vertical jump and broad jump numbers every 4-8 weeks.

For speed training, we subscribe to the Tony Holler “Record-Rank-Publish” mantra. Anytime we perform a speed session, we use Dashr laser timers to record data and then print the results and post them outside the weight room. I don’t think any of these concepts are particularly unique, but with as many athletes as we serve, an established data collection, analysis and publication procedure must be established. I consider myself quite handy with Microsoft excel and google sheets, and I utilize those tools daily to create and maintain databases for tracking athlete progress.

Click here to read this tweet thread from Coach Taylor for more detail on how he programs the training for more than 600 athlete at Friendswood ISD.

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