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This is a guest blog by TeamBuildr customer & renown high school strength coach Chris Morland who has been credited with creating a leading model for high school strength and conditioning at Cardinal Gibbons High School in Raleigh, North Carolina.
The purchase of the right weight room equipment for your strength and conditioning facility can be a laborious and difficult process for a strength coach or administrator. I have been involved in these decisions over the past 13 years at the college and high school levels, as I have helped equip three strength and conditioning facilities at NC State University and Cardinal Gibbons High School. Choosing the right weight room machines and equipment takes knowledge, experience and envisioning the end result. In this article I’d like to provide five principles to help coaches navigate through the process while focusing on creativity at the high school level.
The NSCA (National Strength and Conditioning Association) and the CSCCa (Collegiate Strength and Conditioning Coaches Association) include training in their certifications which focus on facility development. This knowledge is vital when designing a new facility with these steps:
Having a certified strength and conditioning coach is an essential part of developing any program.
The first step should be to consider what you coach well and what your population of athletes need. What are you trying to accomplish with your athletes? Is this going to be group focused or individual focused? Are you trying to develop strength, power, and speed? If you are a free-weight focused, keep it simple, get the necessities and don’t get carried away with buying big expensive machines that only one athlete can use at time. Sometimes it is appealing to fill up a room with stuff, but then we ask why we don’t have enough space.
A veteran coach, Wright Wayne (NC State) impressed on me how important space can be for training. With open space a coach can warm-up, cool down, do free-weight exercises, and bodyweight exercises. A strength coach can provide a great total body workout with a jump rope, two dumbbells or kettlebells, sandbags, and some bands.
This is where problem solving and creativity comes in. I am known to come up with some creative ways to train according to my volunteer assistants, student, and athletes. One story is a night I was stretching in my living room while watching TV and looked down at the laminate hardwood flooring, and realized I could cut the leftover laminate and have my athletes do slide board exercises on the linoleum at school.
During my first year and even in some recent cycles we use these boards to pattern lunges and do resistive mountain climbers (see below).
These are medium-sized inner-tubes with cable-ties on the ends, playground sand inside, and the bag weight labeled with floor tape. Our set ranges from 15-50 lbs with 5 lbs increments. The most used are from 20-30 lbs for lunges, squat jumps, and step-ups. I wish I could remember which coach gave me this idea but I made a set at NC State and Cardinal Gibbons for about $50!
(Picture with current volunteers Coach Cowick & Coach Rabideau)
These wooden boxes have cut-out holes along the bottom for weighted sit-ups and medicine ball tosses. This idea came from my first Strength Coach Javorek. Make sure you measure the height so the knee is about 90 degrees when doing step-ups. Our boxes are 16 inches and I actually got them from our theater department when they were done using them in a play!
(Picture: Chris Morland,Director of Strength and Conditioning/Teacher at Cardinal Gibbons High School, Raleigh, NC)
Stability Ball Storage is up high with this rack. This maximizes our space for our athletes or students and prevents them from playing with them as basketballs!
Tires like this one are used for flipping and pushing movements that can be done anywhere. It is important to get the appropriate sized tire. This one is 325 lbs, and I believe 250-350 lbs works well in high school, but over 400 does not! We use them in the gym like this and just outside the facility on the grass. We also like a pushing exercise as shown in this video:
I was introduced to these a couple of years ago by John Brookfield. They are shorter than regular barrels as they match up the center-of-mass better. Using these as core activation with pushing and pulling exercise for as little as 5-10 minutes can increase strength and power a lot!
Here is a video of two of our students performing a one hand push and pull:
There will always be “so-called” better equipment coming out. I helped design dip-attachments and a glute-hamstring machine but I’m not stuck on them. The best ideas come from the coach seeing the need, understanding how the body moves, and finding a way to train that movement. As a coach continues to be educated, better ways to train your athletes will arise.
In summary, as a coach one of your inevitable roles will be purchasing weight room equipment for your facility. Through the process it is important to take your time and assess the needs of the population you’re training, know your own methodology, leave enough open space, be creative, and don’t get too caught up on the equipment. If you follow these principles you can have a better experience!
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Chris Morland, MS, CSCS, SCCC, USAW
Director of Strength & Conditioning/Teacher at Cardinal Gibbons High School
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