Three Years

We’re three years in! We just crossed the threshold on being open for three years and it feels like we just opened. The time since we broke ground to now literally feels like we’ve just started. It doesn’t feel real that we’ve been at this for as long as we have. Everyday I wake up excited to help people get a little better each day. I get excited about the small technical changes and the opportunities to developer stronger relationships with each athlete that walks through our doors. It truly is a priveledge to coach this community of athletes.

What is the most important lesson I learned this year?

I learned that I need to collaborate more with my athletes. One of our main pillars in our mission statement is Building confident people. I can give people program that I know will work but if people don’t trust that it’ll work then it won’t work for them. So I learned after Master’s Nationals in Baton Rouge that I needed to talk to the athletes to discuss a game plan. And that plan looks different for many competing athletes. What works for one athlete may not work for another and most often times doesn’t.

When I reorganized the business almost two years ago now I decided to go to a team programming model to lighten my workload (for a better work life balance). That worked for me, but it didn’t work for everyone else. So I opted for the collaboration model. The collaboration model earns more buy in from the athletes to go for weight when I ask them to. It also shows them that we’re on this journey together. This model is ever evolving and may change, but right now this is where we’re seeing the most success.

What is one new thing that I’ve tried this year?

I listened to a lot of the coaches that I trust and respect in the Weightlifting world and one of the biggest areas I was ignoring was data tracking. I reached out to three athletes this past year to see if they’d be interested in tracking tonnage of their lifts. Getting the tracker started was not easy but once the process was started it seemed to provide valuable data. Even though I thought I had a decent pulse on the amount of work being done, this tracker has really opened my eyes to opportunities in programming that weren’t being utilized before. My goal for the new year is to plot significant moments for all three athletes and draw coorelations to their tonnage in each lift

Since we’ve only done this with three athletes so far I don’t feel confident publishing our findings just yet.