Monday, August 23, 2010

Workout of the Day:
TESTING DAY – Please follow prescription and report scores. We will be using this data going forward to track our athletes’ progress.

Strength Testing
Five or Six sets of:
Bench Press @ 20X1 tempo
Rest 3 minutes between sets
(use this time effectively to work on hip mobility or glute activation exercises – your coaches can help give you some suggestions)

Perform the following reps and percentages:
* Set 1 – 50% of possible 1-RM x 3 reps
* Set 2 – 75% of possible 1-RM x 2 reps
* Set 3 – 85% of possible 1-RM x 1 rep
* Set 4 – 90-95% of possible 1-RM x 1 rep
* Set 5 – Test 1-RM
* Set 6 (optional) – Exceed Set 5 weight

Conditioning Test
For time:
50 Burpees

Some of the Invictus Relay for Life Team

What’s With the Testing?
Written by C.J. Martin

Some of you might have questions regarding why we are testing, and what we plan to do with this information. The answer is simple – we found a better way to monitor the performances of our group coaching athletes.

This is not a novel concept. We have always tested our athletes. All of the athletes who trained for competitions last Winter and Spring went through some testing (whether they knew it or not) at the beginning of each training cycle. All of my individual program design clients go through some manner of testing at various points in their training cycles. And lastly, all of our group coaching clients have gone through different testing periods by way of max effort lifts and benchmark workouts.

The primary differences between these groups has been how records of those tests have been kept. With the clients for whom I design programs, it’s really simple, they upload their results and I have access to all of their workouts and results. The same was true of the Invictus team and individual competitors. The groups, on the other hand, are a bit more tricky. Each time we would have a benchmark workout I would take a snapshot of the whiteboard, and then we would upload those scores to our databases. The problem was, I had databases of the group results, but no easy way to access exactly how a particular individual in our group sessions had performed in various benchmarks over the past year or more.  Now we do.

I won’t bore you all with the details of how this works, but basically we now have electronic files of all of our athletes.  When they sign in for a session on a test day, we will be notified that they were present for the testing and will have the opportunity to document their results of the tests given on that day. We can then pull up their athlete profile at any time and track their progress on various tests for as long as they have been members of Invictus.  So now with just a few quick keystrokes I can see if you’re getting consistently stronger and faster on the various tests that we set up. Cool, huh?

But why is this important? Simple, we want to see everyone progress. If I am unable to pull individual files and efficiently monitor the progress they have made, it is much more difficult to adjust the program or learn how we can be better as coaches. On the other hand, if I can see trends through individual athletes – for example, if their strength progress is outpacing their progress in speed lifts – then it will inform how the program is altered to maximize your performance.

So, my plea to you is this, make every effort to get in on a testing day, then follow the prescriptions and report your results accurately. If you do that, I will give you my very best effort to create a program that benefits (almost) everyone. If you feel like you’re not progressing at the rate of your peers, that’s the time to schedule a 20 minute chat and we can sit down and look at your actual results, discuss your perceptions and the best methods to getting you to where you want to be.