Training

As practitioners, we should aspire to embody evidence-based practice in our coaching. Originating from the medical field, evidence-based practice can be envisioned as a three-legged stool, with each leg representing a pillar of the evidence-based model

Interestingly, individuals who regularly perform moderate amounts of exercise tend to acquire less infections compared to sedentary individuals, on average. So, this isn’t to say that regular exercise negatively affects immune function.

For powerlifting training, it is common for coaches to prescribe “top sets” followed by “back off” sets. For example, a top set could be a set of 1 repetition at RPE 8 (2 repetitions in reserve). This could be followed by back off sets such as 4 sets of 6 repetitions at 75% of the lifter’s 1 repetition maximum (1RM).

More than 25% of people aged 65 years and older will fall each year. Falls are the most common cause of both traumatic brain injury and fractures in older adults and are the leading cause of unintentional death for this population. Falls ,and a fear of falling, can diminish a person’s ability to lead a full and independent life, or worse, continue living at all. Although 1 in every 4 older adults falls each year, falling is not a part of normal aging. As a medical provider we have a large body of knowledge and skills to reduce these risks and help return the power to the patient/client to reduce their risk of falls.1,2 The key word here is power, which to some may already resonate from your physics 101 course in college. Power is, simply put, the rate at which work is performed. So, does that mean you should do a task at a faster rate to increase your power? Well the answer is: yes and no.

It’s hard to get too in-depth in 2,000 words, but hopefully that goes to show you that athlete monitoring isn’t some complicated affair. To recap the process of implementing an athlete monitoring program, get a handle on your athletes’ training load, the responses to that load, and the variability of the data you’re collecting. Use these data to answer questions posed by your coaching staff or to satisfy your own curiosity. From there, you can steer the development of your athlete monitoring program via both sport-specific and context-specific factors. Regardless of your chosen methods, keep your eyes on the ultimate prize: improving your athletes’ performance and keeping them healthy.

“Am I properly progressing my training and how do I know?” “What exactly is the principle of overload and how does it apply to me?” Proper answers to questions like these are critical to a productive training process absent of or limited in the occurrence of injury. Although more writing on this is sure to follow, I’d like to start by clearly defining some terms and discussing the difference between external and internal training load to help begin to answer these and related questions in future posts. So, this post is meant to be a concise overview that provides some key operational definitions and brings attention to the difference between external and internal training load in order to get us started. I’ll then conclude with some practical variables to consider monitoring to help you start putting these concepts to work for you.

When training for hypertrophy it has been commonly understood that 8-12 reps is the best rep range. There has been a ton of research over the years that suggests this, and logically it makes sense. This rep range promotes the two main drivers of hypertrophy, mechanical tension and metabolic stress. Because of this, anything less than 60% of 1RM has been seen as less than optimal.

Have you ever wondered how often you should change up your routine or exercise selection to maximize results? Practically, being able to identify when better results can be obtained through a different training strategy is critical to the optimal training process.

As powerlifting has grown in popularity and competitiveness, lifters have naturally looked for training advantages. Over the last few years, increasing training frequency has been one of the most popular ways to try to improve results. I’ve been training powerlifters for around 6 years now, and I can tell you without a doubt, that there is not a one size fits all training frequency for each lifter. There isn’t even an optimal training frequency that fits an individual lifter all the time. However, we can determine that training each lift more than once per week is almost always better than training once per week.