MAKE A HEALTHY HEART ONE OF YOUR OBJECTIVES IN COACHING YOUR ATHLETES
by Bill Utsey, Director of Athletics, Greenville County Schools, Greenville SC

It has been my experience in the coaching profession that coaches are so motivated to win that they forget some of the main reasons sports began and exists for young people, especially teenagers and high school athletes. Historically speaking, interscholastic sports were started because of the social, mental, and physical results that could be had by participation.

The purpose of this article is the renewal of one of these objectives by asking coaches to make fitness, in particular cardiovascular fitness, one of your objectives. Although some sports such as cross country demand this, more often than not the goal of a healthy level of cardiovascular fitness gets pushed to the side in many sports. The pressure to win forces many coaches to forget that one of the reasons their sport exists is to do just this! This article will show coaches how to re-birth this objective in all phases of their coaching regardless of the sport.

A healthy heart and cardiovascular system should always be one of your objectives regardless of the sport. All competitive sports require a minimum level of cardio health in order to be effective. This is true even for sports such as golf, baseball, and softball. Therefore, all coaches should make a healthy heart and a minimum level of cardiovascular fitness one of their objectives for their athletes.

You can make a healthy heart one of your objectives easily and without much fanfare. This can be done in a number of ways without your athletes even knowing you are doing so in your practices and in your off-season and pre-season conditioning programs. Think, all of you physical education teacher-coaches! What does the science tell us about increasing cardiovascular fitness? Now, get creative and apply these principles in organizing your practices and off-season strength and conditioning programs.

The basic fitness principle used to improve cardiovascular fitness level is to get your athletes’ heart rates up and keep them up for longer periods of time. This simple principle will improve your athletes’ heart and vascular fitness to levels that meet the historical reason for your sports’ existence and increase your players’ stamina and fitness levels. Meeting this goal will also have a direct impact upon all the other goals and objectives from strength gains to skill levels. So, how can we do this?

In your in-season practices:

• Start your practices with something that is cardiovascular demanding. The old school coach’s concept of doing a lap before the start of practice was not such a bad idea. Try this, do 20 to 30 forty-yard sprints (all at ½ to ¾ speeds) and emphasize form and technique on each. Keep the rest intervals short. This is a terrific warm-up that teaches skill and, at the same time, cardio fitness is being incorporated because rest intervals are very short.
• Move away from the use of traditional static stretching to a warm-up routine that includes lots of dynamic stretching. Dynamic stretching demands work which, of course, demands oxygen and higher heart rates.
• Eliminate the length of lines (which causes longer rest intervals between repetitions) by having more lines with fewer players in each line.
• Eliminate lines in drills and exercises that can be done all together. Example: if doing dynamic stretching exercises, instead of lines with the first person in each line going and then the next, have the entire team do them at one time (by spacing the entire team out over a space and have them all move at one time in the same direction).

Please notice all of the above items encourage more work (increased heart rate), eliminate rest intervals, increase the quantity of repetitions, and minimize your athletes “standing around” or “waiting” time (causing the heart rate to drop below optimal training levels).

In your individual skill drills:

• Once again, use more lines with fewer players in each line. Or, if possible, all players do the skill at once upon command.
• Organize your drills in a circuit with all players going from station to station to practice the skill.
• Invest in more balls and have each player with a ball or one ball for two players.
• In drills requiring balls or implements, have those without, do something that is cardio demanding. A basketball coach may want to do a two-ball dribbling drill taking all the balls for only half of the team…having this half go through two-ball drills while the other half does a rope jumping routine, then swapping groups after the drill.
• Add a fitness item at the end of each rep of a specific skill drill (such as 10 fingertip push-ups or 25 crunches at the end of a drill before getting back in line).
• Make your drills more comprehensive and complex by incorporating more than one specific skill within the same drill.

In group or team drills:

• Don’t allow one team or back-up players to stand around too long without incorporating them into the drill. Organize your drills so that the second team (or group), and 3rd team (or group), runs plays or executes the skill. A really good coach can get this done in a manner that allows two or three different teams (or groups) to run a play in the same amount of time that it takes one team to run a single play before they are ready to run a second play.
• If you only have one team with some back-up players, have these back-up players rotate with the starters at a predetermined rate (1 for 1 or 1 for 3, etc.).

There are plenty of things you can do if you use your creative skills with the objective of keeping your players’ heart rates up and keeping it up for longer periods of time (this is not to mention the obvious objective of having your players do more repetitions of the skill you want them to learn!). You will find out that this is a win-win for you and your players. Not only will you see and they experience stronger hearts and vascular systems, they will be more intense at practice, do more reps of the skill you are working on, and will get better and feel more a part of your team.

In your strength and conditioning program: There are two things that I would suggest that a coach consider in his/her off-season conditioning program that can significantly increase the intensity of your players’ workouts.

• Have your players do their supplementary lifts immediately after doing their major lift. Example: If doing their squat, have the athlete that just finishes immediately go to the hamstring curl machine and do a set of curls. They then return to the squat station and take their turn spotting while waiting for his/her turn for the second set.
• Many coaches do their running, agilities, and plyometrics after doing the strength workout. Change this by doing any running, plyometrics, or agilities before they begin to lift. Doing so gets the heart rate up for the entire strength portion of the workout. Note: There is lots of research that supports greater strength and conditioning gains are had when heart rate is accelerated throughout the workout.

In preparing for this article, I went online and quickly found two quotes that support the above suggestions:

“First, get on a solid training program that targets the goals that you want to achieve and you are more likely to achieve those goals.” (Mike Mahler; http://www.bodybuilding.com/fun/mahler79.htm)

This quote states strongly that if you do not make a healthy heart (cardiovascular fitness) one of your objectives, you will not achieve it.

“A more productive alternative to jogging or cycling a couple of miles would be to perform multiple anaerobic activities with short rest intervals over a prolonged period of time. For example, performing a GPP (general physical preparedness) workout that consists of bodyweight calisthenics (jumping jacks, bodyweight squats, squat thrusts, etc.), movement skills (power skipping, side shuffling, back pedaling, etc.) and mobility drills, is far superior to linear, slow, long-distance running.” (Elliott Hulse, “So, how exactly do you build super STRONG and FAST football players?” http://www.criticalbench.com/football-strength-training-workout.htm )

This quote from Elliott Hulse, and the contents of the article it came from, supports the concept of increasing cardio fitness levels by shortening rest intervals and incorporating additional exercises or skill sets within a workout or practice set.

The reader is encouraged to do his/her own research with the idea of finding out what science and facts are out there that support the contents of the above. Always base what you do on what the science says about conditioning and motor learning. At the same time, make sure your practice and workout planning process starts with some good strategic planning…what are your values, what is it that you want to accomplish, what is your goal, and what are the objectives to reach this goal. I strongly encourage you to keep a healthy heart and vascular system as one of your objectives. Remember, this was one of the reasons sports programs were started.

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