Strength & Conditioning Part 3: New Ideas on S&C

So since writing my posts on S&C I have come up with some thoughts I want to share regarding how I can incorporate adding OLY lifts in to my program at my current HS.
First I want to state that technically Push press is viewed as an OLY/explosive movement and we do it, that is because I feel it is the easiest to learn and we can do it in our squat racks that we have in our weight room.

Secondly, I want to note that I will not use the other Oly lifts right away in my program, we need to improve our strength first.  Asking a weak kid to lift weight explosively is pointless.  Explosive lifts are built to train power, Power is defined by the amount of time needed to do work.  Oly lifts are Power lifts in which bar speed and the speed of the lift is the most important.  I need a couple months to build a foundation of strength in the kids I have.  Once they have built some strength, then we can begin to work on them learning how to transfer strength into power by getting faster at the muscular contractions used to execute a clean, snatch, or jerk.  if a kid has no strength, they have nothing from which to explode.

Now, in my earlier post I said Olys were impossible at this school because of resources, but after some thought (not sure how it slipped my mind originally) I have realized how my kids can do explosive Oly movements…

DUMBBELLS!!!

I have done some training with only dumbbells myself in the past.  I have a ton of them at my school, and we have a lot of room outside of our weight room on the blacktop we can use.  With dumbbells we wont need Rubber flooring because we wont be bouncing anything or dropping anything.  Everything will be done 1 Arm at a time, which ties into the unilateral training (1 arm at a time) I discussed in a previous post.  The 1 arm clean and snatch movements, I feel, are easier to perform and teach and can only be done by moving explosively.

So when we get to Spring I will incorporate 1 Oly lift per day to my menu using  dumbbells.  There are some videos on youtube you can watch people doing cleans, snatch, jerk, and push press using kettlebells…
Well Dumbbells are the poor man’s kettlebell

1 Arm DB Snatch

1 Arm DB Clean

I need to start incorporating these lifts into my personal workouts very soon.
Maybe the explosive movements will attract some lovely ladies at the gym 😉

Especially if i wear my usual workout gear…