Folks, not every exercise needs a name.
As an athlete, part of the appeal of working with a coach is that you don’t have to think about the next exercise in your training session. My job as a coach is to watch you move while performing your sport, see where your execution falls apart, then identify if we can fix that thing with an exercise or a drill.
The ideal outcome of any drill I assign is that you practice the skill that needs to be fixed in the context of your sporting movement, then can perform the sporting movement with the issue all figured out.
How Does My Coach Select Exercises?
I watch an athlete accelerating as they take off downfield to make a play. Both knees are bent throughout each step and the athlete stays a little bit folded over at the hips. Three to five steps later, the athlete hasn’t gained much speed yet they are already attempting top speed mechanics. Without appropriate acceleration, those top speed mechanics tend to be sloppy.
When I see those sloppy mechanics – heel-first landings, flexed knee during stance, knee crossover just before toe-off – maybe I stand the athlete with their hands on a wall and have them march with an exaggerated knee lift. Yes, that exercise has a name: the wall march. It addresses acceleration posture.
An alternative exercise I might prescribe would be to have that athlete stand upright single-legged with their knee higher than the hip and toe cocked up. This has a name too, just holding the position: I call it the Hard Z in my book Fast Kids Don’t Train Slow.
But here’s the point: whether we do the marching drill or the hard Z or a bit of skipping and bounding or I have the athlete run with a sled or run up a hill…whatever it is, the name doesn’t matter. Other than trying to write the exercise down inside of a spreadsheet the name is irrelevant. The name is just like an organized dresser drawer. The exercise name is just a box that I put the solution into so that a particular athlete can find it later in case they need it.
The great challenge of becoming a full-time coach (or, in my case, not trying to be a full-time coach) is that, in order to reach athletes that I don’t have the time or resources to see every single day, I have to describe the work I want them to do in a way they can interpret in my absence. I have to have names for exercises.
The Importance Of Context In Exercise Selection
I emailed the following training prescription to an athlete once:
- wall march (aggressive) 3 x 15 sec
- bound + speed bound 2 x 20yd + 20yd
lunge-to-skip for height 2 x 40yd - push-up start shuttle 3 x 40 yd o&b
That one athlete had all the context necessary to execute this session.
They can read the shorthand and interpret the exercises into motor patterns.
They know the exercises because they’ve seen the demo videos, they’ve heard me describe the focal points, and they’ve heard why each was selected for their particular technical problem, which they also have a unique attachment to and awareness of. That one athlete gets it.
But when this email got forwarded to a teammate, the new athlete only saw a list of esoteric running exercises. They might reasonably believe I’m just another speed drill guy or that my training approach is full of gimmicks.
It turns out you could say that about any expert coach if you lack the context.
Greg Everett is the author of Olympic Weightlifting: The Complete Guide. He quite literally wrote the book on Olympic weightlifting technique while expanding his remote coaching practice. Greg is a real giver in the sport of weightlifting. He created an exercise library with over 500 videos so new athletes just discovering his material would have a way to figure out the corrective exercises in the book’s training programs were.
I read reviews of the book that suggested new athletes “did all the drills but didn’t get much better at the snatch and clean & jerk.” I’d say they got caught up in the little variations meant to help coaches solve specific technical problems, missed the forest for the trees, and forgot to just work hard on the snatch and clean & jerk!
Most exercises don’t need names because most exercise variations aren’t special. There are only a few basic exercises that matter. John McCallum’s The Complete Keys To Progress (a great resource even 60 years later!) covered nearly everything you need to understand in the weight room with 25 lifts.
So What Exercises Should I Choose?
If you’re training on your own with sensible exercises, it doesn’t matter what variant you use. Let’s say you train the overhead press to make your shoulders stronger.
The overhead press is an excellent lift when you do it standing. It is an excellent lift done seated or half-kneeling. It is an excellent lift done with one dumbbell, two kettlebells, a barbell, or a sandbag. The overhead press is excellent done as a handstand pushup. Your goal is to put more weight overhead. Remember that when you’re making slight modifications to any exercise.
It’s okay to modify an exercise. If you’re training the press standing with a barbell, but your wrist hurts, switch to a dumbbell. If your ankle is injured, sit down. If you’re just getting bored, grab a sandbag.
But Am I Doing This Exercise Right?
Don’t ask for a form check unless you’re worried you’re going to hurt yourself. If you are moving heavy weight overhead or running as fast as you can, if you are putting an honest effort toward an exercise relevant to your sport, and if your form isn’t getting you hurt…it doesn’t matter what exercise you do.
It doesn’t matter how you do it.
It certainly doesn’t matter what that exercise is called somewhere out on the internet by some joker like me.
Not every exercise needs a name. But every deficiency you have in performance is probably well-served by a carefully selected exercise.