My Rant...
By Brian Grasso

A colleague of mine gave me the link to an article that was printed today in an online sports publication. The article started out discussing the tragic and unfortunate death of a young high school athlete who collapsed during a training session in his school’s weight room.
Almost immediately however, the article switched topics and started discussing the issue of weight room safety with respect to young athletes.

Below, you will find a few sections of this article that I have pasted here for you to read (you will also find my comments in blue).

Reader Beware… I am hot and angry at the content of this article and am pulling no punches with my commentary.

You can find the entire article at –
http://prepsports.tbo.com/prepsports/MGBNXOBH11E.html

"...And since most coaches are also physical education teachers, their college course work included kinesiology (the study of the mechanics of body movement), anatomy, physiology, nutrition, endocrinology, biochemistry and training in exercise methodology.  I hate to say it, but this isn't exactly rocket science,’ [said a coach]"

I bracketed the ‘said a coach’ part of that statement because I didn’t want to make this particular coach out to be the only bad guy. The fact of the matter is that there are HUNDREDS of coaches and generic personal trainers out there who feel that because they took nutrition, endocrinology, anatomy and physiology courses in college that they are qualified to train and develop young athletes... AND THIS IS SIMPLY NOT THE CASE. I cannot overstate this point enough. Training and developing athletic populations is not a matter of doing some basic weight-room workouts consisting of routines you might find in this months issue of ‘I’m a Bodybuilder Magazine’. There is a great deal of detail and finite understanding of the methodologies associated with building a young athlete. Principals of movement economy and how to teach it; flexibility paradigms including PNF patterning; systemic strength and the importance of the posterior chain... And that’s only a few of the important issues with respect to training and developing youngsters. The BEST development and conditioning coaches I know all share a common philosophy - the more I learn, the more I realize I don’t know. Folks... IT IS ROCKET SCIENCE.

"Initially we see what kids max out at,’ [said the coach]. ‘We use that as the basis to build on.''

Are they taught HOW to execute the lift properly before they are tested on a max effort??

"Coaches agree machines are safer than free weights, which require the use of spotters - in particular squats and bench pressing where they say the greatest potential for accidents exists."

I don’t even know where to start with that comment. I have written and presented so many times on the falsehood of that statement, I don’t want to risk boring you with my same old retorts... Here’s a NEW one for you... All physical action requires a constant interplay of mobility and stability (some parts of our anatomy are moving while other parts provide stability). Machines by their very concept do not allow the athlete to provide his or her own interaction of mobility and stability; not only are they pre-guided, linear and isolating from a muscular perspective, but they also deviate from our innate natural laws of movement. There is also the concern of ‘normal timing’. Normal timing refers to the temporal arrangement of the stages of a given movement. During practical or functional styles of training (don’t start thinking Swiss Ball here... I mean styles of training that have application to real life movement), muscles and muscle groups are recruited in a particular order so as to most optimally achieve the desired task (at least in a healthy, injury-free person). Static, pre-stabilized machines simply do not allow the body to go through normal timing sequences.

BOY... THAT SOUNDED A LOT LIKE ROCKET SCIENCE!

"Squats are an exercise in which the action is performed while holding a weighted barbell supported behind the head by the arms and shoulders. If the back isn't kept straight, the exercise could result in an injury."

Front squats and overhead squats aren’t performed like that! ‘If the back isn’t kept straight’... straight how??? Do you mean like straight in a vertical plain? I don’t even know if I want to try and interpret what they are trying to say. Biomechanically, the point is erroneous.

"The other is bench pressing, where an athlete lies on a bench, lowers a weighted barbell from a rack above him to his chest then extends it upward the length of his arms.  When [coach] was an assistant in Virginia some 24 years ago, he remembers a football player working on his repetitions in the bench press.  His spotter's attention was diverted and when the athlete developed a cramp, he dropped the bar, which fell on his face and crushed his teeth."

SO WE’RE SUPPOSED TO BLAME THE EXERCISE FOR THAT??? HOW ABOUT THE KID WHOSE ‘ATTENTION WAS DIVERTED’?? HE DESERVES TO GET HIS TEETH KNOCKED OUT! Also... did the coaches teach the young athletes HOW to spot effectively??

"As for certified and non-certified instructors, [coach] said there's no substitute for practical experience."

Unless of course the practical experience you’ve had was COMPLETELY wrong!

I am not defending every trainer and strength coach in the world here. I come down hard on the ‘pretenders’ of this industry who are either too lazy or too egotistical to pursue higher knowledge DAILY as a means of becoming the best professional they can be. I have never claimed to know everything... far from it. But the above information offered by those coaches is sheer garbage that every truly qualified strength coach should be offended by.

The comments made in this article also under-estimate the importance of what qualified conditioning coaches can provide for a young athlete, and completely belittle our value.

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