[This article was originally written for the Get Up! newsletter in 2017.]

[2017/03/28]

Due to the fun factor of Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram, I think it is a real possibility we as strength coaches have gone from “back corner of the athletics complex” savants to front & center personalities. Dan has written about the dark days when basketball players ran screaming from weight rooms in an attempt to “save” their jump shot…my concern is about the soccer performance coaches who think power cleans will fix all problems.

Actually, that’s the very issue at stake here: the power clean has long been hailed as the King of Exercises. Have we forgotten the context, though?

I handle speed, strength, endurance, and resilience development for club and semi-professional ultimate (frisbee) players throughout Texas. These athletes are playing in a fringe sport which is only just beginning to notice the impact of recruiting. Most of them never played a prior sport or come from cross country and swimming. They do not have diverse movement backgrounds, generally have poor flexibility, and have selected a sport which involves sprinting, changing direction, hard stops, and deliberate (!) full-body falls onto the ground.

Basically, it is a sport with rugby’s physical demands matched with players of novice athletic skills. So when building speed and strength, starting in 2015, I tried the things I know from rugby and football to work.

Two years later, I’ve tossed out just about all the sacred cows of S&C…

While listening to Vern Gambetta, Nick Garcia, and Martin Bissinger discuss the state of sports performance recently, I chuckled when Vern referred to the NSCA as the “National Power Clean Association.” All three coaches described at length how teaching the O lifts had proven unproductive outside of impact sports but are being forced into S&C curricula worldwide. (In a recent job posting for a fitness director for the Texas Department of Public Safety, which conditions State Troopers among other things, USAW Level 1 was listed as a required credential.) While speaking to Stu McMillan, sprints coach at ALTIS, at a workshop recently, he described how his athletes were succeeding just with loaded squat drops — basically the catch component of an O lift, but with a barbell on the traps.

Coaches at the top of the game seem to be shying away from the King of Exercises. I don’t consider myself at the top of the game, but in this one case with ultimate players, I may have gotten it right.

Athletes who see me learn to roll, hinge, march with a stick overhead, hop on two feet, and hold a strong plank. That, plus farmer’s carries, bear crawls, and bodyweight lunges produced nearly injury-free seasons for three different teams. (One of those teams only interacted with me via email. This isn’t coaching brilliance; it is just dummy-proof training.) About thirteen players who have worked with me long-term, in-person have also learned to sumo deadlift, two-hand swing a kettlebell, goblet squat, and push sleds.

Other than those exercises and enormous emphasis on sprinting correctly (wall marches, mini-hurdle runs, and timed sprints, no more), we’ve dropped everything.

We gave up dumbbell snatches because players couldn’t resist twisting the loaded shoulder. We gave up Turkish get-ups because their upper backs have bizarre compensations from the throwing skills. We generally don’t box jump, front squat, or back squat because many players can’t sense their hips in space. And we killed the King early because players misunderstood how to grip the bar, extension without necessarily jumping, timing, and mechanics of the catch. Not to mention the nine of ten athletes in one session who said, “Coach, my wrist hurts when I throw now.” That was a mission-critical failure on my part.

Now in my third year with this sport, I have met many individuals with the capacity to learn all of those exercises. For some, we even spent a few sessions learning them and connecting them to simpler patterning exercises. But for most, giving up strength & conditioning staples has been the key to seeing these athletes getting better.

Players throughout ultimate are plagued with shin splints and foot issues from running too often. I have had one reported case of shin splints and one separate reported case of plantar fasciitis, while looking at an average 0.15 second improvement in 10m fly times, from the 120 athletes I have seen since 2015. Players from other teams spoke to me at Nationals about their elbow and shoulder pain from cleans, bench presses, and front squats. No players who trained at ATX Speed have had elbow or shoulder pain from training. I got an email recently from a woman who put in four months’ work improving her power clean but couldn’t get her vertical jump to improve. While ATX Speed athletes have only progressed from “okay” jumps to a handful of “pretty good” ones, they collectively haven’t done a clean in over a year.

Outside of athletics and football, for a long time, doing the O lifts was as contrarian as you could get. As the strength & conditioning field has exploded — both in terms of new hires/interns at colleges or in professional sports and in terms of internet heroes with “all the training answers to your sport needs,” as I saw in a tagline recently — new/young/trendy coaches calling themselves unconventional may be looking cool but losing sight of our purpose.

I think my role is to reduce the likelihood of injuries and help athletes perform better on the field. It was hard to do, but to have the most impact on ultimate players, I had to kill the King, along with lots of his friends.

It’s funny actually…an athlete of mine was traveling recently and dropped into a gym to train with other ultimate players. They had platforms, barbells, boxes; all the cool S&C toys. He was scheduled to do a few wall marches, split squats, and kettlebell swings. As he tells it, he had to train in the back corner of the gym.

Most S&C coaches probably deserve more attention than they receive. They probably shouldn’t be forced to the back corner of the gym. But, in an age of Instagram heroes and quick fixes, maybe that’s just where we belong if what we’re doing really works.