As seen on http://optimumsportsperformance.com/blog/?p=1839 | February 14, 2011
The first snow fall each winter is always bitter sweet time for me. The great thing is that it’s time to take the kids outside and go sledding but ends my weekly training sessions at the local high school football field. As I am all for training hard in the elements, 20 inches of snow doesn’t lend itself well to tempo runs and bear crawls. Thus when the snow falls I have to train predominantly inside and get creative with my training routines.
One of my training secrets (if you really want to call it that) was including these outdoor training sessions for as long as the weather allowed year after year. As a speed and power athlete particularly with football, it’s easy to get caught up in the “get big” phase of lifting and neglect those elements of training that actually tie everything together and refine movement. I have been around one too many athletes who showed high levels of strength in the weight room, but never seemed to put it together when it came to actual movement in sport. Also the idea of blocking out phases of training to concentrate on just getting strong at the expense of all other abilities just never felt right. I can remember the sluggish feeling of restarting speed training one particular spring, after I believed that I needed to concentrate a training “block” on building my strength levels. I was hell bent on raising my power clean ten pounds up from a personal best from the summer before. The reality was that a ten pound increase to an already impressive clean and lack of movement training during that particular time period yielded zero results.