Secret training sauce
Here goes... I'm going to lay out for you the secret sauce of how we produce HUGE athletic improvements at STS.
- Consistency
You have to show up to train if you want to make progress athletically. I know this seems like a given but this is the single most important part to becoming a better athlete. Show up to train! Don't miss sessions. Give a quality, focused effort when you come to the gym every time.
- Incrementally progress strength exercises
When I say strength exercises I am talking about a specific short list of lifts. Front and back squats, overhead press, deadlift, bench press, pull ups, push ups, dips, and all sorts of trunk strengthening work.
If you as an athlete do not have the ability to complete and excel in these movements, you really don't have the physical base to access even mildly more progressive forms of training. If you're reading this and don't really know where to start, think about how much more athletic you'd be if you simply learned how to do the above exercises...
- Learn the olympic lifts
Straight up, there are no better tools for developing explosiveness and athleticism that you can do in a gym setting than the snatch, clean, jerk and their variations. If you can learn these and get good at them, you will have become more athletic in your sport. Yes, they're challenging to learn...but that's the point. Because of the massive amount of full body coordination they require to perform correctly, they develop a massive amount of full body body coordination that you can use in your sport.
I get it, there's other simpler exercises you can learn to develop explosiveness. None of them develop the same natural athleticism and mental toughness that it takes to stare down a heavy barbell and make it move fast with great technique.
- Jump, throw, and sprint
Jumping, throwing, and sprinting trains the elastic, twitchy properties that our muscles and nervous system provides. A lot of athleticism comes down to not just how much muscle and strength you have but how quickly you can recruit that brawn. Jumping, throwing, and sprinting trains our body to activate muscles quickly. This is exactly the type of physical adaptation that will make all that raw strength transfer into sport skills.
- GPP, trunk work, loaded carries
This is the part of of training that fills in all the gaps.
General physical preparedness (conditioning) makes it so the athlete has the general work capacity to excel through training, practices, and games. If you're out of shape, none of this stuff matters too much.
Trunk work refers to all 360 degrees of the athlete's trunk. When that gets stronger, everything gets better because the body is able to transfer force through its seperate parts more efficiently. When we get stronger through our midsection, lifts go up, conditioning gets better, injury resilience improves. This often gets overlooked.
Loaded carries help "knit" our body together. They require quite a bit of conditioning, trunk, and often grip strength. Squeezing all of those little muscles to support and move with an awkard object makes the athlete more resilient serves as a very natural kind of trunk training.
That's it. These are the things we focus on at STS to develop championshipa thletes.
Best of luck with your training today!