Attack The Rack

In the mid 2000’s in the United States, I was fortunate to be a fly on the wall during a speed training and strength training session of a top University’s American football team.

In the gym, all the players where doing the same exercise (squats) and mid way through the session the Strength Coach pulled the players into a huddle, gave them a short motivational speech along the lines of “what ever weight you’ve got on the bar, add another 5-10 pounds and attack the rack!!!”

Then on queue his assistant coach blasted ‘Eye of the Tiger’ – the song from the Rocky movies – through the gyms speakers. The players did as told and bent their bodies out of shape under more loading at the expense of squat technique while I stood there wondering ‘what the heck did I just witness?’

The coach glowingly shared the increase in the teams’ squat testing results from his time employed at this University. Forget the fact, he’d changed the parameters of squat testing from a traditional barbell back squat to a ‘safety’ bar squat… It appears only numbers mattered.

It was a wonderful lesson in biases in testing and more isn’t necessary better when it comes to weight on the bar. Unless the sport is Olympic weightlifting, Powerlifting or Strongman competition and even then it only matters periodically.

For some additional context, this squat session took place immediately after a 6am indoor speed track session in early March in Boston. It was freezing, snowing in fact. The warm up for the speed session at 6am commenced with multiple sets of single leg bounds for distance. It came as no surprise 1/3 of the squad was in the ‘rehab’ group… The lesson here is so simple it’s still missed by much of the training world.

The warm up is done to prepare your body for the training session ahead. Best it be progressive. General to specific. Slow to fast. Low intensity to increasing intensity. Light loads to increasing loads. Low body temperature to increased body temperature. The opportunity cost of neglecting this long term is enormous.

Reminds me of the Zen saying – ‘You should sit in meditation for 20 minutes a day. Unless you’re too busy, then you should sit for an hour’. The same guidelines could be applied to warming up.

Later that day, at another University, while talking shop with the Strength Coach responsible to the Ice Hockey program, two things stuck out. Both of them being the focus on equipment. Firstly, we were standing in a multi million dollar purpose built training facility. Secondly because kettlebells were beginning to trend then, his discussion focused around the mechanics of various movements. What struck me was his repeated focus on equipment.

It was a wonderful lesson in the grass is not always greener on the other side. In the mid 2000’s many Australian’s looked to the USA in awe of the equipment options available and standing there in one of the highest funded training venues in the USA at that time, apparently it still wasn’t enough…

It’s been more than 15 years since these experiences and I’m incredibly grateful these coaches were open to chatting, exchanging with us (I was with two other coaches, one from the US and the other from Canada) and observing them and their athletes in action.

These experiences – along with countless others – over the years have been helpful lessons in discernment. How easy and convenient it would have been to blindly model what I’d was witnessed. Qualifying it with ‘these are the latest methods from the United States’ and rinse and repeat here in Australia.

Some of the greatest lessons we get are from engaging in different sports, in different cultures and in different countries. It’s each of our responsibility to discern the useful from the redundant.

Oh and please don’t make a habit of ‘attacking the rack’…