In my honest opinion… no – and here’s why:
Whether you’re a sports coach, a gym-based personal trainer, or an outdoor adventure specialist, strength training is likely to be a part of what you do.
But if you’re doing it the traditional way, it’s likely to be minimally effective and it’ll be hit-and-miss whether your clients actually enjoy it in relation to their performance goals or not.
And in fact, it might even be hindering your clients’ performance!
How?
Because traditional strength training only uses a handful of supposedly ‘functional’ movements (involve all the joints) and success is measured in terms of how much external load (or weight) you can control throughout the movement.
These movements and this load are applied in exactly the same way every time, which makes people GREAT at coping with lifting weights in those exact same ways… but that’s hardly functional, is it?
As a Certified SMARTT® Coach, you already know that repetition is toxic to our bodies, and in the case of strength training, it creates stiffness around the joints much more quickly.
At first, this can be seen as being helpful, but there comes a point when the stiffness is too much, the joints lose their range of motion and that’s when the injuries start to happen.
And this stiffness actually gets in the way of our clients’ performance goals as their bodies lose the ability to move in the ways they need to for their chosen sport or activity.
The trouble is, the benefits of strength training are well known – and just to be clear, I’m not disagreeing with them – the problem comes when traditional, non-varied strength training is applied to a body that struggles to move without restriction in the first place.
It’s like applying putting a new paint job on a family saloon car and expecting it to become a race car!
If we TRULY want to help our clients get stronger in ALL areas of life (but especially their sporting performance) we must first IDENTIFY what the underlying movement restrictions are and use our Applied Variety of Movement knowledge to help unwind it.
And that’s exactly what you’ve been doing on your SMARTT® Coach journey so far…
At Level 1, you learned how to identify the postures and behaviours of underlying movement restrictions
At Level 2, you learned how to apply variety of movement to remove the movement restrictions around the joints of the body
At Level 3, you’ll learn how to identify the three underlying movement restrictions that impact mulitple joints at once – and how to use strength training to not only unwind them, but how to help prevent them manifesting again in the first place.
At Level 4, you’ll learn how specific injury conditions develop and what you can do to help reverse engineer someone out of pain, no matter how long they’ve been struggling wth it (without ever dealing with the pain itself)
And at Level 5, you’ll learn how to build a team of coaches and other professionals around you so that you can all work collaboratively, yet stay in your own skill set – without the risk of overlap of treading an anyone’s toes!
SMARTT® Coaching isn’t about using random movements for the sake of it, or ticking the strength training “box” (or any other box for that matter).
It isn’t about hoping that the traditional ways of doing things will be some amount of help to our clients before they start becoming a problem.
SMARTT® Coaching is about understanding what the body (and mind) is struggling with and doing everything we can to remove those obstacles so that our clients’ wonderfully capable human bodies can do what they do best – in the way that they know how.
And strength training is no different.
Yes, strength training is really beneficial when it comes to preventing injuries AND improving performance, but how beneficial it really is, comes down to you and how you apply it.
If you’re a sports coach who wants to do everything humanly possible to help your participants get better results, avoid injury and supercharge your coaching value, then I’d like to invite you to check out mostmotion.com/courses where you can discover more about how to get started on your own SMARTT® Coach journey!