Youth Training Programs

Attached are your training & nutritional protocols for next week, they are identical to last week. Your goal is to improve each workout by a minimum of 1% each day.  This 1% can be achieved by warming up correctly, hitting your pre-workout nutrition, taking the time to stretch properly, etc.

What Motivates You?

When you stop and evaluate all of the efforts that are put into your health, wellness and performance – have you asked yourself why you are doing it?  This question is intended to help you re-focus and clarify the reasons why you put so many resources into your weekly training efforts.  Think about the elements you have to balance per week: sleeping, eating, sport specific training, cross training, soft tissue and flexibility, mental development, family, social, professional, etc.  You put a tremendous amount of effort into making sure all of this is organized and implemented in the most productive manner possible with the goal of achieving optimum performance – by why?

In the psychology world, we refer to this concept as your Volition: why are you so motivated to be the best you can be?  It is easy to busy with the day to day activities and lose clarity as to what the ultimate goal is and more importantly – why.  When you have this kind of laser focus, you will handle difficulty situations as they arise both during training and racing.  Here is an example what happened to one of my top endurance athletes.  She was competing in a half ironman race (1.2 mile swim – 56 mile bike – 13.1 mile run); she was on the run and ran through the first two miles faster than our goal pace.  At mile two her belly began to cramp up and then her legs making her fast pace difficult to maintain for the remaining 11 miles.  However,  she was so mentally focused on her goal (to average a 9:00 minute mile) that she immediately moved to plan B – walk and run as quickly as she could.  And as you can imagine, she finished the run with an average pace of 9:00 minute mile.  The key to her achievement was having clear focus on her personal goal and then implementing one of three strategies she had outlined PRIOR to the start of the event.

So today, stop and review your goals and objectives and ask yourself if your day to day activities are lined up to make your training objectives in place to make your goals a reality?  Minor adjustments in your daily schedule will provide you the opportunity to put the highest quality of effort into your training efforts making your personal goals obtainable.  Once you begin a workout, ask yourself what is the purpose of this workout (intensity and duration wise)?   When you are finished with your workout, ask yourself why are you so motivated to put this much effort into every day’s workloads?  If you answer yourself with definitive clarity, then you know that your personal carrot is truly what  is important to you.

Training with clarity and focus, another tool for Work Smart, Not Hard and Avoid Overtraining!

Yours in sport & health,

-Coach Robb, Coaches and Staff

Thought for the week:

“Self-respect is the fruit of discipline; and the send of dignity grows with the ability to say no to oneself.
-Abraham Joshua Heschel, 20th Century Theologian