Baseball vs. Football/Parent Issue

I think you handled it well. I get the same thing sometimes from kids and/or parents who are involved in baseball. Alot of baseball (& hoops) purests still think liftring will not help thier sports. I have always tried to explain it to kids and parents like this: In baseball you need to be explosive. Pitching is an explosive motion and you throw with the legs as well as the arm. If you legs are strong and powerful and you have good technique you will add velocity to the ball. A batter generates power with his hips when he hits the ball. Then he has to generate power to run explosively between the bases. Cleans help develop this power. Same with squats etc.

The athlete's dad has a legitimate complaint. Cleans can be brutal on the wrists in the "catch" position and on the decent, unless the bar is simply "dropped" it is also brutal on the shoulders. Injury may not occur, but the chance is there, no doubt.

If you must do cleans, the solution is to perform "high pulls" without the catch and then just drop the bar (bumper plates are needed here). Even without the catch, you are still developing strength-speed as long as the hips are used in popping the bar up.

These are some of the reasons that led me to drop the clean altogether. For pitcher's, an injured shoulder/wrist can be a career killer. Not saying it would happen, but this is probably where the kid's dad is coming from.

Jimbo

I agree, Jimbo.

I guess another way to view the situation is at least you have the kid for 2 sports. Do you think the father will pull his son from football based on how you react to this?

Pitchers are a rare bread and they only get worse at the college level in terms of selective workouts.

Coach Con

Coach -

As far as the off-season program goes, what I have learned from posters on this site (especially groundchuck and Jimbo Hale) is that there really isn't any such thing as a "sports specific" program. Strength, size, and speed are all general qualities that most, if not all, athletes need to be successful.

Therefore, as weight room coaches, we should not have a baseball, football, basketball, etc, etc program. Our programs should simply improve size, strength, and speed. It is up to the individual coaches to take the athletes who we help to get bigger, stronger, and faster in the weightroom and teach them their specific sport out on the athletic fields or courts.

Maybe I am vastly oversimplifying things here?

I think it is important to understand that certain sports or certain positions within a sport do, indeed, require different things. But Coach Dertz is right in that building that "foundation" of strength and mass is the first step. With high school kids, this is usually the ONLY step. The absolute number one goal when training athletes is to keep them injury free. It is a tough position to be in for a strength coach because athletes always run the risk of getting injured no matter how strong they are. When you have 200-280 lb. athletes running around at full speed, chances are someone will take a shot from a "weird" angle and get injured. The problem is that when a team goes through a rash of injuries, it is usually the strength program that gets blamed.

But, as I said, protecting the athletes from injury is rule number one, so it is important NOT to put any athletes into a situation where they can get hurt...especially in the weightroom. As for the clean debate, there are many great coaches that are well-versed in the oly lifts but there are many more that are NOT well-versed. I think it is important to teach what you know, rather than go with what others are doing. Think of it as a English Lit. teacher who is asked to teach Calculus. They may know a little and enough to get through the class, but can they really TEACH calculus? Can they prepare a student for college level calculus classes? Probably not. The same goes for coaches and oly lifts. They may know the what, why and how, but can they really TEACH it, is the question.

Coach Horn and Coach Dertz, I know you guys are somewhat new to the S&C world, but both of you are learning very fast and will soon be top-notch HS strength coaches, I have no doubt about this! As you get deeper into this, you will see that many so called "gurus" are full of crap. Some of these guys are even at the professional level. It's these "gurus" that make a good S&C coach's job hard b/c they fill the parent's heads with all this "functional swiss ball" crap and how it will make their son a pro. They flash there CSCS certificate in their face and throw a few "fancy scientific words" out there so that the parents (or athletes) are hooked. In the private industry, most facilities are more about money than anything else. What parent (or kid) WOULDN'T want a trainer telling them their kid can be an all pro? At the professional and major college level, there are alot of coaches with egos a mile wide that think they have all the answers and NO ONE can teach them anything. I am sorry for any athlete that has a coach like this.

My point in that rant, is that you have to be your own coach...read and listen to EVERYTHING with a critical eye and ear. Just because they are a strength coach on the professional level doesn't mean they are a good strength coach. I've heard a couple "BIG TIME" strength coaches speak and afterwards wondered how someone so dumb got so high up the ladder. I think you can learn something from everyone, so it is good to go out and see what others are doing. But the bottom line is that you go with what works for YOU...not what works for LSU or USC or Nebraska, etc.

That being said, in the meantime learn as much as you can so that when approached by a concerned parent or athelete, you can back your philosophies up. After all, you must know WHY you are doing what youre doing and HOW it will benefit the athletes. If you don't know this, then either drop what you are doing or better yet, go out and learn the Why and How. Reading Zatsiorsky and Siff will be a great start. Get started on learning the human anatomy like the back of your hand and then get started on kinesiology. Then get a grip on basic orthopedics. Learning about this stuff will keep your athletes safe in the weightroom and give them less chance of being injured on the field or court.

Have a blessed day, Coaches.

Jimbo

Ditto for me Coach Hale!
Thanks!

Overhand throwing puts more stress on the shoulder than a hang clean. The hang clean will develop the athlete's posterior chain (calves, hams, glutes, lower back) and hips which will aid his throwing. It also requires rythmn, timing and balance which can only help athletic ability. OL (olympic lifts) will also help with flexibility and grip strength.

One thing we had to do at our school this year was convince athlete's that they are not lifting for 'football' or 'baseball' or 'soccer'. They are lifting to become a better athlete. All of these sports require athletes to play with their feet on the ground and ground based, multiple joint exercises will allow them to push off the ground with more force; hence=faster and more explosive athletes.