TOP 2 Mistakes most young fitness pros make with their programming

TOP 2 Mistakes most young fitness pros make with their programming

 

                After 3 years of running a mentor program for fitness pros, 6 years of being an adjunct professor at a college for Athletic Training majors, 6 years of being a preceptor for 3 colleges Athletic Training programs, and 16 years in the fitness industry; I have seen my fair share of programming.  There are many mistakes that beginner fitness pros make, as they should because they are new, and with this blog I would like to talk about the top 2 that I see all the time.

1)      Planes of Motion.  I cannot stress enough how important it is the train your athletes/clients in ALL three planes of motion. When I give my college students an assignment to write a program for an athlete, I always get the same exercises ; squat, bench press, leg press, shoulder press, clean, sit ups.  What do all those have in common? Sagittal plane dominate exercises.  Fitness pros seem to be stuck in the flexion dominate world and only measure progress by increase in weight lifted in these exercises.  In my experience, this type of training leads to many of the injuries we see on the field. Athletes train all off season in only one plane of motion and then are expected to play a sport that requires 3D motion.  As educators and mentors, we must stress the importance of multi directional training. At FLO every session with our athletes has at least two frontal plane exercises and lots of transverse plane exercises. We have seen some amazing results lately with our clients using the TRX Rip Trainer to do Anti-Rotation movements. Our athlete’s stability has increase tremendously.

One of the main reasons I have noticed, is that many fitness pros don’t train in other planes of motion because there must be a decrease in load. Athletes tend to want to lift heavy and keep doing more and more weight. However, when it comes to loading in the frontal and transverse planes, you do NOT need heavy load to get great results. At FLO we have some strong guys who have a very hard time doing Ultimate Sandbag Rotational Lunges or Lateral Front Loaded Lunges  with a 20lbs bag.

 

2)      Lack of Unilateral Exercises.  Once again, I believe the reason for lacking in these movements is the fact that you must decrease load in order to perform them. It is much harder to do a rear foot elevated squat with heavy weight than it is to do a back squat. It is very rare that I see people add single leg exercises or single are exercises to a training program.  In my experience with training youth athletes, they have the hardest time doing anything on one leg. They have minimal core stability and very little glute activation. So whenever possible, we get our athletes doing single leg exercises.  There is a ton of research on unilateral training but I will let you go out and do the research on your own. The point of this blog is only to shed light on the lack of use in programming.

 

I am a firm believer in learning by doing and making mistakes. Many young fitness pros will make tons of mistakes, just like I have and many of my friends have. We all have to start somewhere. The purpose of this blog is not to bash those who are starting out; our goal is to aid you in your journey. We would like to shorten your learning curve, so that you may produce the best results in shorter time. So be sure to train your clients in all three planes of motion and add single leg/arm exercises whenever possible.

If you would like a sample of our training sessions at FLO, email us at flofitness@gmail.com