workout program Archives - Smith Performance Center

Optimizing Your Strength Training: Understanding the Importance of Deload Weeks At Smith Performance Center

Craig Smith November 17, 2023

In the realm of physical fitness, the drive to push our limits often overshadows the significance of rest and recovery. Enter the concept of “Deloading” — a strategic and essential practice that can be a game-changer in your strength training regimen. As we engage in rigorous workouts and demanding physical activities, our bodies undergo stress, breaking down muscles and tissues. Yet, it’s during periods of rest that our bodies repair, adapt, and ultimately grow stronger in response to these stresses. The Deload week, a planned phase of reduced training volume, intensity, or frequency, serves as a pivotal component of a well-structured training program. Its purpose is simple yet profound: to allow the body the necessary time and space to recover, prevent overtraining, and boost overall performance. Understanding when, why, and how to implement a Deload week can significantly impact your training outcomes, ensuring sustained progress, and minimizing the risk of

The 4 Primary Goals In Strength Training When Struggling With An Injury or Pain

Craig Smith November 7, 2023

Goal setting is one of the most important, yet tricky aspects of training. Our team believes that goals are secondary to developing habits and systems that you can do day in and day out. We call this an exercise habit and it is a critical aspect of becoming an exerciser. However, goals can help to shape your training, increase motivation, and improve decision-making during the course of workouts. When you are returning from an injury or dealing with a particularly irritating pain, we believe your goal is very specific. You need to exercise without your body feeling terrible. While this sounds obvious, one of the most common training mistakes our coaches see clients make is too much focus on performance while ignoring a recurring injury or pain. If you have pain during your running, biking, lifting, etc., you will not achieve performance goals. We strongly believe there are 4 goals

The 4 Unique Training Variables Used By Our Team To Improve Workout Success

Craig Smith October 12, 2023

Creating a single, hard workout is easy. Creating a series of workouts that improve your overall fitness is not. Creating a true program that builds your skill set, builds your confidence, and adjusts for soreness or an emerging injury is extremely difficult. In the same vein, it is not hard to develop a physical therapy exercise list that targets a single problem, like glute inhibition. It is much harder to progress post-injury using strength training when we need to push the edge of the tissue capacity. Programming a workout needs to consider numerous, modifiable variables. Remember a modifiable variable is anything you can change in the workout to optimize the training session and the overall programming scheme. At a minimum, you need to consider intensity, sets and reps, rest intervals, frequency of workouts, and supersets. The minimum however does not optimize your workout and sometimes these are not the most

The 5 Common Modifiable Variables For Programming A Great Workout and Program

Craig Smith September 28, 2023

There are numerous modifiable variables in an exercise program that you can use to improve your workout experience, increase effectiveness, and make the workout more fun. A Modifiable Variable is anything you can manipulate in a workout program (which is literally everything) to change the challenge. It includes exercise choice, movement patterns, exercise pool, alternative exercises available, sets, reps, intensity, rest breaks, prep exercises, warm-up, exercise order, recovery activity, support exercises based on body response, and workout frequency. Our Team believes the most important initial modifiable variable is exercise choice, which is often not used well. This is one of the reasons we start with a movement assessment. But all of these variables are important and have a huge impact on your experience and the likelihood of success with developing an exercise habit. Our team targets these variables beginning in activity progression and it remains a critical aspect of training

The 6 Functional Exercises Tested During a Movement Assessment

Craig Smith May 2, 2023

A mistake in exercise programming that our team encounters is a heavy emphasis on variety in exercise, instead of movement pattern mastery. Our team does not focus on an endless array of exercises. The focus is on building depth in foundational movement patterns. These patterns make up every movement you perform when lifting. If these foundational movements are missing, advanced exercises will be wasted on poor form. You need to own the basic movements first. During the movement assessment, the 6 foundational movement patterns are assessed with 6 functional exercises from each movement pattern category. The movement assessment is where our strength coaches determine what may cause issues in your program: accountability, rehab standard, location/time, coaching need, and comfort level. The 6 functional exercises help our coaches determine your coaching need, if you have a tissue capacity issue (rehab standard), your comfort level with free weights, and what is the

The 8 Reasons All HHP Clients Go Through a Movement Assessment

Craig Smith April 12, 2023

The Smith Performance Center team wants to be the best in the world at helping clients who want to maintain an active lifestyle. If you search the internet, this seems like a simple problem to solve. Just do this exercise or make sure to have protein after a workout. Problem solved. This has not been our experience. There is an entire area of research devoted to what behaviors keep people moving and what makes them stop. Keeping people active is not simple and there are numerous reasons why a person will stop. The purpose of the movement assessment is to figure out issues that will stop you from moving. There are clues in your history, how you move, how you hurt, and how you think that will help guide us. Here are the 8 reasons we do the movement assessment: Figure out what may lead to failure Determine the right

The Principle of Progression in Strength Training

Craig Smith October 10, 2020

Milo of Croton, a wrestling, bull-carrying, 20 pounds of meat-eating, 10 liters of wine-drinking man from Greece, is the definition of progression. Most people know the story of Milo, even if they don’t know his name. Milo carried a bull around on his shoulders. Chuze and LA Fitness were not around in ancient Greece so the Greeks created their own strength training methods. Milo intuited the importance of planned, progressive training. As a boy, he picked up a young calf and carried it around on his shoulders (because, why not?). The next day, he carried the calf again, and again the next day, and the next, and continued for FOUR years. The calf grew into a massive bull; Milo grew as well (#gainz). The daily training allowed Milo to pick up a full-grown bull, a mythical feat of strength. Our point? Progressive training regimens produce benefits that are hard to

Setting the Core

Craig Smith November 9, 2017

The basics of the plank that we use in our strength training methodology

Tuck Jump Assessment for Physical Therapy

Craig Smith September 25, 2017

A review of our publications and the impact on physical therapy, injury screening, and protocol In the last few months, some of our research efforts in physical therapy, strength training, and injury screening have been published by the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research and the International Journal of Sports Physical Therapy along with a commentary in the Journal of Sports Science and Medicine. The publications were focused on jumping test performance and the underlying methods. These tests are useful in a full rehabilitation program to determine readiness for activity, however, even the best tests have limitations that need to be understood. There is no such thing as a perfect test but we can use a variety of tests to gain a more complete perspective. After a publication, it’s fun to look back at the results and figure out how to use them to improve the outcomes at Smith Performance

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Tag: workout program

Optimizing Your Strength Training: Understanding the Importance of Deload Weeks At Smith Performance Center

The 4 Primary Goals In Strength Training When Struggling With An Injury or Pain

The 4 Unique Training Variables Used By Our Team To Improve Workout Success

The 5 Common Modifiable Variables For Programming A Great Workout and Program

The 6 Functional Exercises Tested During a Movement Assessment

The 8 Reasons All HHP Clients Go Through a Movement Assessment

The Principle of Progression in Strength Training

Setting the Core

Tuck Jump Assessment for Physical Therapy

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