First Day of Training

Good Morning China!

Well, I was wrong about the good night’s rest. I woke up at 3:00 am. Since I was wide awake I tried to answer all my emails. I don’t have wi-fi in my room so I have to get on line through the TV. It takes 30 minutes to get hooked up just to get on.

I waited until 6:00 am and went down to the gym in the hotel and got in a little cardio work on the treadmill and some light weight work with the dumbbells. It’s good to break a sweat and hopefully I’ll be able to sleep better tonight.

We were given the morning off to relax and get settled. This afternoon I have to teach strength training to some coaches and PT’s. Bob Sharrett, our video guy, had helped me put together a training DVD of some of the lifts we do at CES. I will leave it for the coaches to have and use with their teams. The actual lifting programs are completely different and I don’t have enough time or space to go in depth with the periodization training that each team does throughout the year.

This afternoon I gave a three hour lecture. The first hour was a PowerPoint presentation broken down into different strength topics. It answered basic questions like: what is strength? what is the difference between absolute and dynamic strength, what are the component’s of muscle tissue? what is the SAID principle? how many muscles are in the body? (650 in case you didn’t know), what are the benefits of strength training? what are the steps in developing a beginner weight training program? what is the procedure for setting up a super circuit? and so on and so on!

My translator was not so good today only because the training words we use were foreign to her. I had about 10 coaches and PT’s in this class. Most of them are college graduates however, most have never studied strength and sports performance and don’t really have a grasp on how to train and use strength training for sports rehab.

The second part of the PowerPoint was general training principles: the principles of specificity and the SAID principles (specific adaptations to imposed demands (workload), the overload principles, 8 principles of resistance exercise training: exercise R.O.M, exercise speed, breathing, rest between sets, recommended sets, increasing weight load, exercise intensity, and muscle balance. I also went over basic lifts, what joints were used and what muscles are being developed with the movement. This section was a little harder for the Chinese to assimilate.

The last section was more training terminology with terms like: Delorme – Watkins system, the Berger system, progressive resistance, super sets, pyramid training, giant sets, periodization training models, speed – strength, circuit training and a few other systems. The classroom lecture was a little laborious for the coaches but not so much for the PT’s.

The classroom lecture was about one hour. The second phase of my presentation today was watching a 30 minute DVD of each exercise that we routinely do at CES in Atlanta. We had shot most of the lifts last week prior to me leaving for Beijing. Bob Sharrett had edited the DVD into more of an instructional video with different angles, slow motion, and some other side effects. It’s always better to see and demonstrate than to just read about it. This lasted about 45 minutes.

The last section for the day was a practical session. I took the group into the gym and started from the head to the toes showing exercises, techniques, proper hand placement, spotting, breathing, program design (sets, reps) dumbbell exercises, Olympic movements, cleans, snatchs, push – jerks, compound movements, and rehab exercises. This session took about one and a half hours. I think this session was really the most productive for the group. I finished around 5:30 pm and then headed back to the hotel for dinner and hopefully some much needed sleep.