Major Blog Post #7 - The Summary

Today will be my last post for the strength program I have been working on and it will be the final summary for my major project.

The ending of the semester and the major project assignment could not have been at a better time because it concluded perfectly with my team’s final max week before we begin to transition outside to now include speed and conditioning into the program.  I have truly enjoyed writing about my experience running this strength program because it allowed me to explain my thinking rather then just keep all my thoughts in my head.  Somewhat like a mind map, I was able to visualize my learning or my thinking and then make adjustments and improvements all along the way. 

To assist me throughout my project, I used Microsoft Excel, Word, Google Sheets, and Hudl.  Microsoft Excel was my bread and butter because that is where I created the program and included the day’s goal, exercises, repetitions, tempo, and volume.  I also used Excel to record my athletes’ strength gains and used a one rep max Excel that my fellow IT teacher created at St. VM to figure out the percentages of each max.  I used Word to write my thinking down.  Word has been my journal and Blogger has been the facilitator to share my experience.  I used Google Sheets to record attendance that I shared with my fellow coaches.  This was very beneficial so those who are in the building full time were able to stay on top of those athletes who had poor attendance rates. 

The last partner I used in my program was Hudl.  Hudl is mainly used for video breakdown of games but it also has a great communication feature which allowed me to send messages to my seventy plus athletes when unplanned events occurred.  As we have seen throughout my project, I spoke many times about where I had to make game time adjustments because of snow days, early releases, and other school events that effected my program’s schedule.  Hudl was a perfect answer to this problem, not only because I am not full time in the school, but it allowed me to communicate with the largest sports team in the school without the need to rely on administration to communicate messages.     

As I stated above, blogging about my major project greatly helped my thinking and problem-solving abilities.  I first established my goals of the program which were to increase my athletes’ strength (observed and analyzed through max lifts), keep and increase team/family environment (observed and analyzed through consistent attendance), and finally be an effective coach (observed and analyzed through my blogs and this summary). 

Once I created my goals, I moved to look at my athletes’ needs.  I started with a general strength program to assess these needs.  After I observed for the first few weeks I was able to understand the gaps that needed to be filled as a team and within certain athletes.  As a team, we needed to adapt to my style of workout.  This included my terminology for all the exercises, form for all the exercises, the warm up, transitions throughout the lift, and the cool-down and closure of the lift.  This gap was bridged through reps and more experience with me as their coach.  I then was able to look for more individualized gaps for my athletes.  Some were flexibility needs, overall strength needs, advanced athletes, and less experienced athletes.  Observing and blogging all this allowed me to create more effective and individualized workouts. 

Finally, I implemented my program and evolved it over the course of a few months.  I was able to be quite effective in adjusting workouts for specific athletes’ needs.  I made heavier lifts for some position specific athletes like my linemen, and quicker more explosive movements for my skilled positions.  One major theme in my blog posts was, what is the best way to prepare for our max week, which occurred every four weeks.  Writing down my thinking allowed me to experiment on the preparation.  At first, I tried lighter, strength band workouts to prepare and then after me maxed I was able to analyze that method.  For our second max prep, I tried heavier, slower movements to build one rep strength.  After, I analyzed my findings.  For this last max prep, I looked back at all my findings and recorded numbers and implemented a preparation that included aspects of both of the previous preparations.  With no surprise, we had the biggest numbers recorded using this method.  Without this blogging experience, I do not know if I would have been able to organize my thinking to evolve my program as effectively as I was able to.  I hope everyone that followed me throughout my journey enjoyed my writings and picked up something that they will be able to use in whatever their future career may be.  Thanks for reading!

-Coach K