As a strength and conditioning coach of 34 years at the collegiate and professional levels, I am a firm believer in hard work. I have said many times that there is no substitute for hard work. Longtime football coach Tom Coughlin, who I have had the privilege to coach under for 21 years, often told our team, “Nothing of value in life comes easy. If it’s worth something, a price must be paid for it.”
If being successful as a student athlete or coach is of high value, then the price of hard work must be paid to achieve it. The student must read and study to advance his knowledge. The athlete must wisely push her body to levels she never thought she could go. The coach must spend hours researching and planning how to help his athletes reach their fullest potential. Hard work helps individuals overcome limitations.
Hard work, executed with wisdom
While I believe in hard work, it must be executed with wisdom. Too much volume or too many sets at excessive loads will break the body down, resulting in an overtrained athlete. The program must be designed to systematically challenge the athletes physically and mentally, yet provide adequate recovery.
Let me make one thing clear. Athletes throwing up after a workout is not indicative of hard work. It doesn’t take a skilled coach to create a workout that would cause athletes to vomit. Excessive high-intensity volume with little recovery will easily cause men and women to upchuck whatever they have sitting in their gut.
Train hard without overtraining
A couple of points to consider when designing a program to train your athletes hard without overtraining them:
- Vary volume and intensity. Create a cycle with a variation of volume and intensity that will challenge your athletes, but not crush them.
- Protect technique. The loads and reps should not be such that they cannot be completed with good exercise technique. Yes, there will be some workouts that they fail at, but they must be few and far between.
- Plan a variation week. Consider making every fourth week of the cycle a variation week that includes different exercises with low volume and moderate loads.
- Keep it fresh. Use different exercises that accomplish the same goal. These adjustments keep the workouts fresh for the athletes rather than doing the same old routine week after week.
Outperform, don’t just outwork
Hard work is an important element of training. Make sure it is applied to get the best out of your athletes. Remember this: your goal should not be to outwork your opponent; it should be to outperform your opponent. Design your program so that your athletes will be the most finely tuned athletes on the day of competition.
Jerry Palmieri has coached strength and conditioning for 34 years at the collegiate and professional levels, 21 of them under Tom Coughlin. He wrote this article for Coach Joseph Hanson and Team Florida Northeast.