Keeping Things Fresh

To add to Nick's post last week, motivating athletes can be challenging, and part of this challenge includes keeping the workouts fresh and challenging and yet still sport specific and purposeful. Not only do the athlete's need to give 100% to truly benefit from the training, they must also buy into the philosophy and planning of the trainer.

A few methods we use at U-District to keep workouts fresh include:

- Making drills into competitions, and challenging our athletes to beat their own personal records as well as records set by other athletes that train at U-District.

- Format the workout as a circuit so that the athlete is constantly working, yet the exercises continuously change.

- Add a sport specific aspect to an exercise, for example doing sit-up headers for soccer, balance passes for basketball and volleyball, ladder drills with shooting for both basketball or soccer, etc.

Mixing things up in a workout, creating competition, and introducing little variations to certain exercises are a good way to keep athletes challenged and focused.

Motivating

As a coach working with athletes of all ages, skill levels, genders, and sports the one thing that I have found to be the most challenging is motivation. Motivating athletes can seem like a losing battle most of the time depending on the athlete, unless you are able to figure out what motivates them to compete in the first place. A great man once told me, “you can coach and teach them all you know but it won’t make a difference unless you can motivate them.” I took what he said and I looked back at some of my more memorable coaches and he was right to a great extent, the coaches that stood out the most were the ones that were able motivate not just individuals but entire teams. Motivated teams are usually winning teams and motivating coaches can influence their players on the field as well as in life.
-Nick C.

Love to run

I love to run but, it hasn't always been that way. After years of forcing myself to run because I knew it was great exercise, I have finally found the joy of running. What helped me love to run was making a game out of it, whether it be picking other runners to pass, or keeping a pace until the next phone pole, it made things more fun. Challenge your athlete's to be creative with their workouts, for example, the next time you send them out on a run see if they can blaze their own trail rather than following the road or track.