The biggest issue right now is the aging workforce plus the hot labor market, plus the compounding effect of employee injury. Employee injuries compound when employees are asked to step in for injured ones, increasing their physical workloads and MSK injury risk. This piece will cover industrial athletes, ensuring their safety, CoachMePlus, and everything in between:

What Is an Industrial Athlete

An industrial athlete is defined as a frontline worker who uses their bodies to perform their primary job function. These individuals are also defined as occupational athletes. Operating at top physical condition is crucial to employee productivity, delivery, and quality of work, similar to pro athletes.

The Hidden Cost of Workplace Injuries

You’re already aware that injuries (especially of your occupational athletes) are terrible news for your overall business, productivity, and bottom line. What you may not be aware of is how frequently they occur, the externalities, and the enormous extent of the damage. 

Here are a few statistics and studies to put the cost of workplace injuries into perspective:

• In 2020, there were 1,176,340 cases of injury in the private sector that caused loss of work which was 32.4 percent higher than in 2019.
• 65,000,000 days of work were missed in 2020 due to work related injuries
• Overexertion and bodily reaction to stress are leading causes of workplace injuries 
• The average cost per medically consulted injury is $44,000 (per the above statistics)
• The incidence rate for total recordable cases in the private sector was 2.7 cases per 100 full-time equivalent workers

In the age of labor shortages, mass resignation, and a competitive labor market, an injury–or two–of your key occupation athletes can easily turn into a productivity nightmare. And the cost of worker’s compensation is just scratching the surface. Within a few weeks, it can threaten the continuity (and morale) of your operation, send your HR department on a frantic four month-search for a replacement, and blow your legal costs out of proportion.

Your occupational athletes put their bodies in the line; hence, their chances of getting injured and yours of paying a hefty price increase significantly. 

Don’t Be a Victim of the Status Quo for Industrial Athletes

Fortunately, technology has come a long way from the 70s. Systems such as CoachMePlus are a testament to this. While many workplace injuries can be unavoidable and hard to place, musculoskeletal injuries are easy to identify. They could be significantly reduced and mitigated using a system such as CoachMePlus, which means taking the 2nd largest cause of injury out of the equation.

When unavoidable injuries happen, CoachMePlus will centralize your reports for insurance and worker’s comp to show the many ways your company has worked to protect employees.

CoachMePlus’ Vision for Your Industrial Athletes and the Power of Automation

CoachMePlus started as an athlete management system used by over 220 professional and NCAA sports teams to track, augment and visualize athlete performance. However, the utilities of a system such as CoachMePlus blur industry lines. As you’ll see, it’s finding a unique application in creating effective programs, health and performance tracking, and training of occupational athletes.

The CoachMePlus vision is to empower your industrial athletes through automation and bring all aspects of your industrial athletes within reach under a single dashboard. This covers everything from automating the training and productivity tracking to injury prevention and recovery of your industrial athletes.

1. Track Workers through Wellness Questionnaires

Tracking the wellness of your employees through questionnaires is employee safety 101. However, using patched-together spreadsheets, dusty files, and sticky notes is not feasible in this day and age. After injuries accurate documentation is required for any insurance claim. By having a centralized platform to pull this information, any number of people can input information to be reported on. This is what inspired CoachMePlus to usher employers into an era of paperless, intelligent, and comprehensive self-reporting through automated wellness questionnaires.

With such a system, employees won’t need to queue to return a questionnaire. The digital questionnaires by CoachMePlus are customized and designed to increase compliance while decreasing apathy. This is achieved by allowing them to fill them from any point of convenience and without duress of time.

2. Monitor Workers through Wearable Device Data

Although questionnaires are an effective means of getting feedback from your employees, waiting an entire day to give a report is counterintuitive. Many people don’t have the memory to report something that happened 7 hours ago. Besides, everybody wants to go home at the end of the day, so one more thing is just going to be rushed. This necessitates the need for proactive feedback that is convenient to your occupational athletes and gives more detailed insight.

Wearable devices are an excellent source of proactive data. By integrating with any wearable device, we are able to stay data agnostic. They can help you track and visualize the health vitals of your industrial employees at all times of the day, bringing an end to the era of guesswork and intuition. This data comes into the app and can send automatic data alerts when workers hit an unsafe level. 

3. Develop Pain and Soreness Trends

Are all your athletes developing back problems when operating a specific machine or shoulder soreness when performing a certain activity? There’s a chance that most of your workplace injuries are preventable. Maybe they follow a pattern, have a similar buildup of symptoms, and are caused by the same set of conditions. Nevertheless, the truth is that you’ll never get to know (and utilize) such crucial information until you invest in a system that revolutionizes the visibility of your industrial athletes.

CoachMePlus is one such system. It will help you develop pain and soreness trends, enable you to demystify your workplace injuries, and leverage data-based decision-making in your workflow planning.

4. Monitor the Hydration of Your Employees 

One insightful study discovered that dehydration of as little as 3% body loss can have the same effect on a worker as having 0.08 blood alcohol content.  With these comes slow reaction times and poor cognitive function that may lead to an injury. Subsequently, workplace injuries are lowest in cold months and highest in hot months when dehydration is highest. 

That’s why making fluids available to workers and encouraging them to drink it often is a simple safety measure. With that, CoachMePlus will make worrying about dehydration employees a thing of the past through alerts and reminders. It also makes tracking of dehydration patterns possible by pre and post-shift weighing. By identifying the amount of water weight lost during a shift, CoachMePlus can recommend what to drink to get your hydration back on track. For example, if your athlete is tired because of their inconsistent or non-existent hydration, the CoachMePlus system can automatically propose drinking a particular amount of water frequently.

5. Automatically Assign Fitness and Recovery Programs

The CoachMePlus system can automate diagnosis, find the prognosis, and assign recovery programs for your industrial athletes from input data. Most solutions are just a pdf. Wouldn’t the ideal solution be to assign personalized programming tailored to the individual just link in the pro’s. Any test, alert, or program can be automated so the worker gets the exact programming and resources they need exactly when they need them.

The system can also track sleeping patterns and their relation to fatigue and eating habits. It also assigns recovery programs to help your occupational athletes mitigate their symptoms. In addition, you can use the CoachMePlus system to automate the delivery of any existing programs for your athletes.

6. Scale Personalized Intervention

Given that each business operates under a unique set of circumstances, your AMS should reflect your needs. Designing alerts that are important to keeping your workers safe, and reminders to drink fluids, take breaks, or log information will bolster your safety programs. Each employee can have different reminders or objectives, since risks and work expectations are different from employees depending on health risks and roles at the company. 

CoachMePlus enables maximum customization of its alerting and notification, visibility, and automation. Thus, allowing you to better meet your individual industry needs.

Above all that, the CoachMePlus system acts as a bridge between your occupational athletes and their coaches, trainers, and health practitioners. It can scale consultations between your workforce and their practitioners without having to go through the corporate bureaucracy.

Such a system makes driving interventions at scale less of a hassle, more efficient, and effective.

7. Alerts and Notifications

Real-time alerts and notifications are a crucial aspect of your industrial athlete management. They help take the guesswork out of maintaining safety standards and gaining visibility for your key employees. CoachMePlus can be programmed to automatically alert the worker and manager when certain risk factors are present. That can be anything from time working without a break, hydration factors, or movement screens. 

The alerts and notifications from CoachMePlus will help you track movements and safety patterns, nutrition, and hydration. In addition, the custom alerts feature also allows you to customize your alerts to track when workers are at highest risk for MSK injuries. Notifications can immediately be sent to the manager so an intervention can take place to protect the worker. 

What’s Next?

CoachMePlus supports workers safety and wellness. Companies have clear data to show interventions taken to protect their employees. The workers have information available to improve their day-to-day personal abilities (like hydration and pre-work movement). By making a safer and more supported workplace, your employees will face lower turn-over, and have more productive shifts. 

Using an Athlete Management System will reduce costs both directly and indirectly. With fewer insurance and worker comp claims, you will save money (obviously). In 2020 the average cost per employee workplace injury was $1100 and $44,000 for a medically consulted injury. But with less turn-over due to injury, you will save time and money on training costs, hiring, and your workers will improve productivity when their physical needs are being met. 

For more information on how to get CoachMePlus implemented into your workplace, contact us today, and our team will be more than willing to help. 

The post Workplace Safety and Injury Prevention in Industrial Athletes appeared first on CoachMePlus.

We live in an increasingly digital world where information is on everything. This includes sports performance coaching, which is more readily available than ever before. However, that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s always accurate or up-to-date. As a coach, you want to work with the best possible information available to support your athletes and their development. The first step is getting the best sports performance coaching software in place.

Sports Performance Coaching requires a nuanced and complex array of skills, with a talented coach bringing out the best in athletes. It takes a special kind of personality to be effective at this role. It requires someone who can relate well to the athlete and a coach that understands individual strengths and weaknesses. The demands for high-quality coaching are high in this field. This article will show you how CoachMePlus can support you by providing key insights into how to maximize your coaching by maximizing your data.

Why Use CoachMePlus for Sports Performance Coaching?

Sports performance coaches are an integral part of the athlete’s success and well-being. In addition to helping athletes with their physical training, a performance coach can also provide mental support, motivation, and encouragement.

Performance coaches can help athletes through difficult times, such as injuries or losing streaks. They can also help athletes stay focused on their long-term goals instead of getting distracted by short-term successes and failures. Supporting this personal growth and development is one of the major roles in coaching when working with youth athletes.

The main goal of a performance coach is to help athletes achieve their maximum potential. To do this, they must first understand their client’s goals before they can help them achieve them. For example, if an athlete’s goal is to make it into the Olympics, but they have never been able to make it past regionals, a coach might have to develop new strategies for improving their chances at regionals before they could hope to make it into the Olympics.

CoachMePlus is a platform designed for ease of use, to help sports performance coaches provide their clients with the best individualized training experience possible. Thus, you can get started right away and not worry about missing out on any of your valuable time. With CoachMePlus, you can:

Centralize Data – Performance Tracking/Visualization

CoachMePlus is the perfect solution for the modern coach. With our advanced data tracking and visualization tools, you can centralize and share your athletes’ performance data with your team. This allows you to quickly see how each athlete is performing over time and make adjustments as needed. When your coaching data is centralized, you can:

Get off Paper or Excel

By centralizing your data, you can easily and quickly track all of your performance metrics in one place. This allows you to stay on top of your numbers and make sure that they’re improving. It also gives you a better idea of what’s working and what isn’t to ensure that you’re doing everything possible to keep improving.

Have the Same Data for Every Coach

With CoachMePlus, you can centralize data from every coach in one place. That means all of your coaches can access the same information and use it in their unique ways. (That being said, we also have permissions that can limit which coaches can see and interact with each athlete, or other limitations that fit your business and privacy needs.)

By pulling data in from several coaches, it is easier to visualize what’s happening with your players. This will help you understand where they are excelling, where they need improvement, or if there is a potential for injury.

Optimize Time

There is no doubt that maximizing your time is vital to the success of any business. With the increase in demand for sports performance coaching, many coaches want to maximize their time by focusing on the things that will help them make more money. One way to do this is by centralizing data so that it can be analyzed and used to make better decisions about how to train athletes. This will allow you to optimize your time by ensuring you spend it in the most effective way possible.

 Report With Ease

With CoachMePlus, you can get all of your data in one place and easily share it with your athletes, parents, and other coaches. This means that you don’t have to spend hours looking for the information you need. Indeed, you can simply look at the dashboard and see everything at once.

CoachMePlus also makes it easy to visualize your data so that you can quickly learn what’s working and what needs improvement. You can even create custom reports if there are specific numbers that you want to track on an ongoing basis.

Share Progress With Athletes/Parents With  Sports Performance Coaching Software

Athletes and parents love to see their progress! With CoachMePlus, you can easily share the numbers with them so they can see how they are doing and what they need to work on next time through the app, or download and email the reports.

Proof of Program Efficacy

Because CoachMePlus lets you input all kinds of information into a single database, you can easily track the efficacy of your program by comparing metrics over time. You’ll be able to see how effective each type of exercise or nutrition regimen is at improving performance and helping athletes reach their goals.

Year over Year Reporting

CoachMePlus is a cloud-based software that provides a holistic view of your athlete’s performance and progress. YoY reporting helps to identify how much the athlete has improved from one year to another by comparing their results for the same period. This makes it easier for coaches to identify weaknesses in their athletes’ games and make necessary adjustments.

Access Wellness Report (Ease of Client Use)

Sports Performance Coaches can easily track their clients’ progress with the Wellness Report feature in CoachMePlus. The Wellness Report allows you to see your clients’ past performance and visualize their progress in an easy-to-read chart that breaks down metrics like weight, heart rate, and calories burned.

You can also use the Wellness Report to track client goals to set up a plan that helps your clients reach those goals. This is especially useful if you have multiple clients working toward similar goals and need to be on the same schedule.

Operate a Hybrid/Remote Setup

There are many reasons to use CoachMePlus for sports performance coaching. The most important is the fact that it’s a hybrid platform. That means you’ll be able to use CoachMePlus from anywhere!

You can work with your clients from wherever you want—from the comfort of your own home or even on the go. You can meet with them in person if you want. However, if you need to travel for work or pleasure, that’s no problem.

As a remote coach, it’s important to have a platform that allows you to stay connected with your clients. With CoachMePlus, you’ll never have to worry about missing out on an opportunity because of distance or location. As a hybrid platform, CoachMePlus allows you to:

Train From Anywhere

With the CoachMePlus platform, you can work with your clients and trainees from anywhere. You can even help other coaches and trainers looking to improve their skills.

Not Lose Progress on Vacation/Travel

You can keep track of your clients’ progress while they travel. You don’t have to worry about losing any momentum—or worse, losing your client’s trust—because you couldn’t get your workouts to them.

Handle More Clients

With CoachMePlus, you can build a robust online coaching business and take on more clients than ever before. You can even have multiple coaches working for your company. This means you don’t have to spend all your time in the office. You can be more flexible with your schedule and work anywhere, even from a beach!

Further Outreach

Sports performance coaches can now contact more athletes and help them improve their performance with less time, effort, and money spent. This makes it easier for coaches to build their businesses and make a living through coaching without spending so much time on travel or other expenses.

Drive Revenue With Sports Performance Coaching

CoachMePlus is a hybrid platform that combines the best of online and in-person coaching. It’s a great fit for sports performance coaches who need to drive revenue by charging clients and have limited time to meet with them in person.

With CoachMePlus, you can schedule your sessions and communicate with your clients through the platform. This means you can see your clients on their schedule, not yours, which means more time for actual coaching and less time spent scheduling meetings.

It’s also easy to integrate with other apps to help you run your business even better! You can use CoachMePlus as an integrated system that includes Consumer wearables, VBT, S&C information and more. 

Advance Your Sports Performance Coaching With CoachMePlus

CoachMePlus is easy to learn. Training sessions are easy to plan, track, and report. When a coach uses CoachMePlus, they can easily see where athletes may be falling short of their goals and make targeted training tweaks to optimize progress.

CoachMePlus suite optimizes sports performance and development so that coaches who need it most can focus on their athletes’ growth rather than the nuts and bolts of their business. If you are a sports performance coach and want to provide clients with the best service possible, try out CoachMePlus. We would love to help you succeed!

The post How CoachMePlus Can Help You Optimize Sports Performance Coaching | CoachMePlus appeared first on CoachMePlus.

What is Block Periodization?

Block Periodization, also known as the annual approach, is a planning structure that focuses on long-term growth instead of maximizing short term gains. It uses Macro, Meso, and Micro training cycles to prepare an athlete for peak performance and growth. The macrocycle is the overall year long goal. The meso cycles and micro cycles help you focus on the development of the designated skills. For example, with a sport like a division 1 basketball team this would be 9-10 months where a trainer works actively with athletes. The cycles would include training off-season, pre-season, and in-season, with a break during the postseason where the athlete focuses on active rest.

In an ideal world, the athlete would have no injuries and would have a successful year. However, when an injury occurs, it helps to have smaller goals that you can adjust to meet the yearlong goal despite injury or other problems. 

In a group or team setting like basketball where there is a movement to position-less gameplay, Block Periodization can be used by assigning the same blueprint to the whole team, but giving modifications to certain players. For example, a taller player would have a different lever arm and the amount of work is greater because it has a longer distance to travel. So the players worked with the same exercises in the same cycle, but with different expectations. In football, once you start the offseason, you would have GPP for all the athletes with a goal to prepare for the upcoming season. Once the season begins, cycles change drastically based on position. Their needs for peak performance vary.

Macrocycles Goals

• Offseason – Hypertrophy, Muscle Endurance and Aerobic Capacity
• Preseason – Elevate Performance capacity, Strength & Power (force)
• In Season – Maintain Strength and Power
• Postseason – Active Rest

Your goal is to increasing your expression of power and rate of force development. Improving your strength is how to have an increase in power.

Rate of force development (trying to be explosive with force movements)

Expression of power – how well you can use the strength you have been building. How you are applying the strength. If you don’t have a strength base, you will have some power, but are you maximizing your expression of power? 

Mesocycle/block (4-6 weeks)

• Accumulation – High Volume, Lower Intensity/Specificity 
• Realization – Explore adaptations at a lower intensity to deload and peak

Microcycles/ Periods(1-2 weeks)

• Preparation
• Competition or testing
• Transition or recovery

Training Day (1 day – the actual workout)

• Technique & Execution
• Safety – RPE awareness, Injury status, etc.

Offseason & Preseason

Strength coaches are looking to get a certain baseline in the offseason. At the end of a season, it is helpful to have an assessment to plan for the offseason goals. This allows coaches to guide athletes on where they can focus on their own. The baseline of a freshman with no lifting experience versus a 5th year senior will look different. Once you begin preseason training, the baseline defined in off season guides how to increase hypotrophy, muscle endurance, and aerobic capacity. 

Throughout the year the circuits and daily workouts see carry-over as the goal is to continue to build throughout the season. For example, you will see similar exercise with different variations and different accessory lifts. However, no matter where in the year you are, the workouts will make sense as a full experience. (The exception will be during the post season when your coaches are promoting active rest.) During the offseason the goal is general physical preparedness (GPP), improving ability across all areas of fitness. As the players begin the preseason, and the season progresses the workouts will begin to become more sport and position focused. 

In CMP you can quickly modify a circuit you have already built and assigned to a whole team. This can be to reflect different intensity, power metrics, or modify and customize variables or components for each athlete’s need. 

Who Benefits from Block Periodization 

Teams with clear macrocycles can obviously benefit from the Block Periodization style. However, individual clients also benefit. Many trainers work in blocks to build a client to where they want to be, even if it is a wedding, race, or special event they are preparing for. 

For any trainer’s new client, you need to look at their base. They need an alarm phase where new exercises and training are added. A new client could have a 4-6 week general preparedness block that you build off of based on how their body adjusts. 

In a sport similar to powerlifting where there are competitions throughout the year, the macrocycles tend to be more flexible since athletes need to peak throughout the year, not just for certain times of the year. Their “in-season” is all year, making the macro cycle different, but the meso and micro cycles can still be used to improve performance. An athlete hits peak performance for 7-14 days. So you will have to plan accordingly to appropriately deload to prepare for these competitions. 

Why it works

For the body to grow, it needs to experience changes. You can’t always just increased volume or just increased intensity. By changing what you adjust, you initiate the alarm phase. This is where your body is able to adjust to the new stressors. After this you must deload so your body has time to grow into the changes brought on by the alarm phase. 

Whether your training plan is through Block Periodization or not, there needs to be changes to variables with each cycle through the alarm then deload phase athletes grow. 

A major goal of Block Periodization is to avoid over-training. When you are doing the same exact exercise. You need breaks too so you don’t overwork your Central Nervous System. 

To build a person to be stronger and more powerful overall there needs to be some kind of structure. This helps keep a focus on overall wellbeing. If an athlete isn’t feeling sore, you don’t just increase intensity to make sure they “feel it”. You need to see an overall improvement, not a day to day sore-ness. This lets you go less on gut feelings and more on metric based plans. 

The way your body works is there can be times of plateauing, or even a performance decrease if there is a time of supercompensation period. A regression can happen when your body is making changes, but then you can just take off with improvement. The regression happens when your body is adapting to the changes.

CMP and Block Periodization

So with CoachMePlus you can use the same blueprint for every year. (Check out this Guide to Planning and Periodization) Once circuits and exercises have been programmed into the software, you can assign them at any time. However, you are not locked into the blueprint. Once a team’s program and larger block of workouts are assigned coaches can adjust workouts for each individual to meet their specific needs and goals. 

Even with a general template, if an injury comes up, you can change something for one specific athlete. If there are other issues you can completely scrap a workout and have an athletic trainer plan a new workout for teams without making a problem for the rest of the team. If the Strength coach made adjustments for an injury, the Athletic Trainer can look at those changes then make additional modifications or totally change something. CoachMePlus offers easy permissions assignments allowing coaches, athletic trainers, therapists (or any other person) specific permissions to see or edit programs or workouts. This allows several people to monitor and help build each athlete as they need. 

Start a CoachMePlus trial here. 

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As the director or administrator of a high school sports team, you know how beneficial sports are to students. They provide them a chance to develop essential skills that come in handy both in their studies and later in life—learning responsibility, time management, perseverance, teamwork, collaboration, etc. Additionally, physical activity helps improve their cognitive abilities and keep fit, which is crucial for their health and overall development. On the same note, high school sports provide an excellent foundation for those who desire to pursue a career in sports. 

However, running a sports program can be challenging, especially if you do not have a regular source of external funds to supplement the school’s allocated budget. 

Uniforms, equipment, travel costs to tournaments, etc., are crucial team expenses that require finances, and in most cases, the school’s budget barely covers the costs. Receiving funding for a solution like CoachMePlus can be an expense you might not even consider as a coach, so it’s time to get creative! This leaves the athletic director/administrator and coaches at crossroads, choosing which sports programs to fund with limited resources.

In this article, we give you some fundraising ideas that you should consider to get your athletic programs a much-needed financial boost. These include:

1. Support From Booster Clubs
   1. Phone Bank With Alumni
   2. Trivia Tournament
2. Game-Day Fundraisers
   1. 50/50 Raffles
   2. Game Day Reserved Parking and Car Wash
   3. Coach Stunts for Pay
3. Signing Up for Blast Fundraising or Snap! Raise
   1. Add a Fundraising Link to Your Website & Social
4. Business Sponsorships
   1. Restaurant Partnerships

Support From Booster Club 

Booster clubs come in handy when it comes to supplementing school budgets for sports programs. Athletic booster clubs are generally made from a group of parents or community members who work to fund activities beyond the school allotted budget. They assist, promote, and support athletic programs (or other clubs). When a group of parents and community members join together to support several sports clubs it makes game day fundraisers much easier to staff since the students in different sports can staff fund raisers while the other athletes are participating in games.

In addition to volunteering time, they can contribute money to finance team activities. Your school may decide to have a single booster club for better and convenient management, or you may have individual clubs for each sport and enjoy the higher parental commitment synonymous with multiple clubs. For instance, you could have the clubs raise money for specific expenditures. At the same time, the parents can help you run some of the fundraising events discussed below.  

Game-Day Fundraisers 

Game-day fundraisers are another exciting way to raise money for your sports program while engaging the community. For instance, you could sell merchandise, snacks, and beverage on a sporting day and channel the profits to the clubs’ kitty. You can easily pull this with the help of staff members, students, or even parents.

50/50 Raffles to Fund a High School Sports Team

50/50 raffles are another exciting way to raise funds during the event. To run a 50/50 raffle competition, you simply sell tickets to the attendees. Once you draw the winning ticket, you split the money collected from selling the money 50/50 between the winner and the sports program’s kitty.

Food Truck Partnership

On the same note, you could organize with local restaurants to set up a food truck during the sporting event. The partnership could involve splitting the proceeds from the food sold during the event in exchange for the exposure. 

Sports Day Car Wash or Reserved Parking

If your sporting events attract many people, you could designate a reserved parking area on the sports day and charge a fee for the spots. At the same time, you could have volunteers wash cars for attendees for pay and channel the collections to the program kitty.

Coach Stunts for Pay

This is another fun activity that you could set up to raise funds from students and faculty. During the game spectators can cast a vote for $1 for something (what color gatorade to dump on the coach at the end of the game, how many push ups they have to do, etc.) At the end of the game whichever stunt gets the most votes the coach must perform! Or, you could have a coach do one push up/lap/jump for $1 each. If 25 people pay, they have to do 25 laps! 

Getting Direct Financial Support

Phone Bank With Alumni 

Certainly, dozens of athletes have passed through your high school’s sports program. You can reach out to these past athletes and ask for financial support. Better still, you could have an annual event where the alumni come together and dine in support of the team. In addition to providing them an opportunity to reconnect, you get to receive donations to fund your activities. 

Signing Up for Blast Fundraising or Snap! Raise 

With online platforms dedicated to athlete fundraising, you can easily set up a channel to receive recurring donations from team supporters. For instance, Blast Fundraising allows you to create a team app/website, and team members can invite their family and friends who might want to donate by providing their contact details (phone and email). 

Once they receive the invite, all they need to do is click the link, choose the team member they want to support, and make the donation via their card. The app also allows you to keep the donors updated with the team’s progress by posting videos, scores, and recaps. 

Snap! Raise also works almost the same way to fund a high school sports team. You set up your account and start fundraising in a snap.

Add a Fundraising Link to Your Website & Social 

If you have an optimized website that receives substantial traffic, you can take advantage of the increased viewership to seek donations. The best way to achieve this is to embed a donation form at a conspicuous spot on the site. 

You can even build a landing page with a donation form and channel supporters to the page using social media or email by sharing the page link and inviting them to follow and donate.

Business Sponsorships 

Business sponsorship is a common practice in the sporting world. For centuries, business people and corporate organizations have been at the center of sporting activities, where they sponsor the teams, mainly for marketing reasons. You can approach local businesses, athletes’ parents, or even large corporations (if possible) for sponsorship. This is an excellent way of involving the community while benefiting mutually. 

Though finding willing sponsors and signing the agreements might be pretty involving, the move is beneficial as the additional funds allow you to fund several sports teams for competitions. And since the opportunity gives the businesses a marketing platform, finding willing partners might not be much of a challenge.  

Restaurant Partnerships

Is there a popular restaurant in your locality that would be willing to partner with you? You can approach them and request them to allow you to host a fundraiser and give you a percentage out of the profits for the exposure provided. 

To encourage community participation during the fundraiser, you could have prize giveaways, e.g., trivia contests. You may also look into popularizing the event on social media and other local community channels.

Inspired to Fund Your High School Sports Team?

This list is by no means exhaustive. There are loads of exciting ideas to fundraise for your sports program. But these are a handful of tips to get you busy during the next few seasons. Some are easy to start, like setting up a Snap! Raise account, while others require bringing other stakeholders on board to pull a successful event. Nonetheless, what counts is the end goal – raising funds to keep your sports programs running smoothly.

But perhaps the most crucial thing in all this is to have your teams pull their A-game in every sporting activity they engage in, as this encourages supporters to make donations to help them further their goals. 

At CoachMePlus, we are here to help your teams (coaches and athletes) prepare for competitions through a data-driven experience. With more than 250 teams and over 12k athletes counting us for their training, you can be certain you’re joining a winning platform. 

Interested in learning how the solution works? Reach us for a demo.

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For years, people have hammered out exercises in a familiar pattern, with the most popular being three sets of 10. As common as such aspects of strength training is, a different protocol referred to as autoregulatory progressive resistance exercise or APRE for short has started to gain popularity with experienced coaches and athletes as well as beginners.

APRE offers flexibility, leading to results that often out-pace most of the older training models. It also helps safely return athletes to previous loads and beyond after any setbacks. If you’ve been thinking of implementing APRE training, here is everything you need to know.

What Is APRE?

Autoregulatory progressive resistance exercise (APRE) refers to an auto adjustment of load. It’s a way for coaches to fully maximize their programs without having to put in extra work. The more extended response for what an APRE truly is includes an exercise program that adjusts load on the fly and moves forward by focusing on repetition limits. The program focuses on strength, hypertrophy, or endurance in athletes by using repetition maximums. Then, auto-adjusting the prescribed load or repetitions that follow.

An athlete is prescribed the total percentage and repetition schemes throughout their warm-up sets based on a repetition-max test chosen by a coach. The following loads are then adjusted accordingly to the results of those sets. Essentially after the warm-up, athletes are given an amount of weight they can add or subtract from their assigned program weight. If their warm-up shows they are underperforming from their expected maximums, they are able to reduce the weight as needed to stay safe. Further, if the athlete completes more than expected, the program can be adjusted.

When a session is complete, any newly recorded maximums can be used in future programs. Even in purely strength-based 1RM programs, an APRE approach has been shown to improve an athlete’s 1RM more over an extended period.

When Should You Use APRE?

An APRE program is an ongoing process. It is best for both the coach and athletes. This works particularly well in a group setting (like coaching a whole team). It keeps things more manageable for coaches and keeps it customized for athletes. It also allows you to work within an athlete’s limit at any given time. This way, your athletes aren’t over-straining or under-working.

Our bodies already autoregulate based on how we feel, so using APRE is taking advantage of that concept and applying it to strength training. Instead of telling an athlete to hit 70% of their 1RM from 3 weeks ago, you can work within their limit of the day, whether that is better or worse than a past assessment.

APRE is not an advisable training program for beginners and requires some foundational training. If you have an athlete who is a beginner in training, it’s better and safer to start them with more straightforward methods before advancing them to APRE.

How Does APRE Relate to 1RM?

You can use a 1RM (predicted or tested) for working sets. It is taking your current or most recent 1RM and regulating past it. 1RM is usually derived by testing an athlete’s strength before starting a new program and after they’re through with it. This allows the coach to identify if the athlete is improving their strength or not. APRE uses a lot other than 1RM and can be used with RPE. Using RPE is another tool to use in APRE, such as 3- or 5RMs, and can be used as a reference to keep track of the changes in the athlete’s muscle strength as a function of the training program.

RPE refers to the rate of perceived exertion and measures how intense an activity really is. With RPE, you can tell the effort an athlete requires to complete the prescribed volume of sets and reps. The RPE scale runs from 0 to 10, with 0 signifying no exertion. If an athlete is reporting a high RPE, auto-adjust the next set load or rep count. You can also increase their rep count based on their RPE if they are recording a low score.

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Repetitions in Reserve

An alternative tool to use in APRE is repetitions in reserve or RIR. RIR is related to RPE but is a subjective measure of an exercise where the numbers correspond to the reps an athlete has remaining in the tank. RIR allows you to be able to quantify the number of repetitions that are still achievable before failure. The RIR uses a scale similar to that of the RPE but is a more practical method of regulating daily training load. Using an RIR scale allows coaches to accurately track their athletes’ progress in terms of load and intensity, especially for advanced athletes.

How Does APRE Relate to Velocity-Based Training (VBT)?

Velocity-based training refers to a training method that uses technology to keep track of the movement speed during exercise. It’s a valuable tool for strength training for coaches and trainers. VBT typically uses technology such as laser optic devices, linear position transducers, and wearable accelerometers to measure movement speed during an exercise. With VBT, the coach and athlete are aware of their exercise performance. Thus, the coach provides targeted feedback such as lifting barbells quickly to achieve better and faster results.

If your goal is to move a prescribed load at a certain speed or tempo, you can adjust as needed with VBT. This can be used in explosive programs. If you are using biometrics or finding a way to increase the rate of force production, you can adjust to fit the needs.

While some training variables such as rest, frequency, and volume are easy to test, others like intensity aren’t. For instance, if two athletes with similar strength levels performed a 70% of 1-RM back squat, but only one of them lifted the bar with a high movement velocity, while the other didn’t, the subsequent intensities would not be the same.

What Is the Value of APRE Training?

1. It allows you to adjust on the fly while focusing on the big picture. You take in an immediate performance, and you can avoid pushing beyond where you should be.
2. You can add difficulty and adjust up if the athlete is having a particularly powerful day. Because you can use this to increase gains, you are able to improve more quickly and see results sooner.
3. You can push harder than planned if the athletes are able to. However, you are also able to adjust down, so there isn’t injury. In both cases, you will see improvement faster than if you were to use a rigid structure.
4. Additionally, APRE easily implements the rep schemes for the athlete and the coach. Thus, making it a time-saver for coaches who have a lot of the responsibility of developing their athletes.
5. APRE is a practical approach to regaining lost strength following a period of detraining. Sports coaches benefit the most as sometimes they have to train athletes without knowing whether they finished training or not. With such an athlete, APRE is excellent for the first 4 to 6 weeks as it helps them regain their lost strength.

How Do You Use APRE With CoachMePlus?

The best way to use APRE with CoachMePlus is in a 1RM or 3RM test during the warm-up program. This allows the program to automatically adjust the weights for the rest of the program. Right now, CM+ is able to adjust load/weight on the fly automatically in the following ways:

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1. Coach assigns a “test set” – 1RM, 3RM, 5RM, etc.
2. The following sets are assigned a percentage of the 1RM calculated from the Test set
3. The athlete then performs the test set
4. After they do the test set, the CM+ calculates that athlete “new” 1RM
5. CM+ then uses that new baseline to calculate the remainder of their working sets. Optionally, you can do more than one test set to customize your athlete’s program load further

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Autoregulatory progressive resistance exercise is a great training program best used when an athlete is coming off a layoff. This is because it offers a great way to return them back up to their previous training levels without risking injury or strain. It gives each athlete a chance to move at their own pace and not an expected rate that may be too slow or too fast for them.

If you like to learn more about how CoachMePlus can help, schedule a personalized demo with one of our experts today.

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“Not so much a ‘no pain, no gain’ culture anymore in coaching and training. It’s a lot of load monitoring and careful planning, but it also includes making adjustments on the fly.” — Michael Gallivan, ACSM.

In the 2020 Olympics, Naomi Osaka, a multiple grand slam winner, surprised the world when she said she didn’t want to participate in the most anticipated event in sport. From the outside looking in, everything looked okay. She appeared to be prepared and ready for athletic competition, and many just couldn’t understand why she would choose not to perform.

Even before the dust from the Naomi Osaka controversy had settled, four-time gold medalist Simeon Biles would shock the airwaves again. This time, by pulling out of the competition at a time when many said, “her team needed her most.”

The two instances would bring to the surface two discussions the athletic performance and coaching community has been avoiding for years—the balance between subjective wellness and objective measures of performance.

What Is Subjective Wellness?

Recent advances in human performance show that objective measures alone aren’t sufficient to evaluate and diagnose an athlete’s performance. This necessitates the need for the athlete’s own perspective of readiness, also known as subjective wellness. 

Subjective wellness is an athlete’s perception of how they feel. Perception is reality; they might not have a physical reason to underperform, but if they are mentally unfocused and encumbered by stress, mood or expect to perform badly, their performance will likely mirror those thoughts. All types of physical training induce strain on an athlete’s body. That said, there are healthy levels of strain that improve the athlete, as well as chronic unhealthy ones that are unproductive.

Coaches track an athlete’s objective and subjective performance as indicators of the strain on the athlete and whether they are over, optimum, or under training the athlete. A coach can then use this data to adjust load and workouts.

Determining Objective Wellbeing (Load and Threshold) Before Subjective Wellness Is Considered

Subjective wellness can be used to diagnose and fix problems in an athlete’s performance. However, this process is much more efficient if objective wellness (load and recovery) precedes subjective well-being. 

In layman terms, a coach or an athlete can use objective wellness to diagnose performance (find out the “if”) and subjective wellness to get to the root cause of the problem (the “why”). There is no one-size-fits-all approach for determining objective well-being. One of the most efficient ways is by determining the load as shown below:

1. Determine load (for example, you can test vertical jump twice a week.)

To develop an efficient objective measurement process, the schedule should have consistency. For example, the athlete should be tested at the same time each day of each week. This consistency helps to control for other factors such as hormonal levels and body weight that fluctuate throughout the day.

Once you find a preferable day of the week for internal load monitoring, you can then test for vertical jump and come up with a trajectory each week.

If the numbers over time are staying the same – Little or no change in numbers means the athlete’s performance is okay. Moreover, it shows consistency and that the athlete is comfortable with the level of strain during workouts and practice.

If their numbers are improving  – An improvement in numbers is great. It shows that the workouts are effective and that the athlete’s body is responding positively to the workouts. Coaches should take improvements as seriously as they handle deteriorations. The data on why an athlete is making improvements goes a long way in finding ways to further cement those habits.

If their numbers are getting worse – A worsening performance is a cause of concern for all parties. That said, load determination alone doesn’t give a clearer picture. For more insight, the coach should analyze the data from wearable devices.

Analysis of Strain Data from Wearable Devices

If the dashboard on a wearable fitness device reads high strain and low recovery scores, the coach should take a very calculated approach to the matter.

Trainers should consider steering clear of talking points that are complete, conclusive sentences like:

• “You’re not pushing yourself.”
• “Try harder.”
• “You can do better.”

A better alternative would be to ask open-ended questions from a subjective wellness perspective about what’s going on outside the workouts and practice. Topics one can touch on include sleeping patterns, eating patterns, and stress levels.

Where Subjective Wellness Comes In

Subjective wellness adds insight whenever the numbers don’t follow as expected. This doesn’t necessarily mean that the athlete is underperforming; it goes both ways. Context of the data is sometimes more important than the outcomes of the data alone.  Understanding where an athlete is within their performance helps complete the picture. 

Subjective wellness could also come in handy when there are significant improvements in performance. If this is the case, the coach can proceed to find what the athlete is doing differently (outside practice) and encourage it. A trainer should take into account how the athlete feels during load management, and adjust workouts based on stress, sleep and nutrition.

Stress 

An optimum amount of stress can help an athlete prepare, train, and perform at optimum levels. However, an unhealthy amount of stress can impact an athlete’s performance. That said, when determining load and workouts, a coach must have the stress of the athlete in mind.

Sleep

The amount, quality, and pattern of sleep have a significant effect on an athlete’s performance. A Stanford study shows that collegiate basketballers who were able to increase their sleep to 10 hours a night improved their shooting by 9%. That said, data on an athlete’s sleep comes in handy when determining both loads and training intensity. Even more crucial is when a coach is diagnosing fluctuations in performance.

Nutrition

Nutrition is another outside practice variable that has a huge vote on the performance of an athlete. That said, nutrition is a broad area. It covers everything from hydration, supplementation, portions, medications, and diet, all parameters that trainers should put under the spotlight. 

Of all external factors, the nutrition of an athlete is the most crucial for both long-term and short-term performance. Any issues that arise from improper nutrition should be identified and mitigated as quickly as possible.

2. Using wearables to monitor the metabolic rate and sprint times or other loads

Another effective approach to measuring objective well-being is leveraging data from wearables to monitor metabolic rates and sprint times continuously. Both techniques, using wearables and load determination, are crucial in monitoring objective wellness. In fact, they are equally effective, and it’s recommended that trainers use them simultaneously. 

Direct data has fewer external variables and hence allows coaches to err on the side of caution. You need both because someone may feel great despite being at a threshold or tapped out before reaching the expected limit. Both mismatched expectations must be addressed for healthy and sustained growth.

Benefits Beyond Physical Monitoring

The benefits of subjective well-being spill beyond physical monitoring and the development of better practices. Athlete subjective wellness monitoring helps make the life of an athlete better both in practice and outside the court.

Some of its benefits include:

1. Improved Motivation and Well-being

Show me a stressed athlete, and I’ll show you an underperformer. If an athlete is stressed and just going through the motions because the coach is pushing while ignoring the issues, it can lead to burnout.

However, if the coach takes the athlete’s stress and subjective well-being into account and assigns a recovery program, trust is built. The athlete feels genuine concern from the coach and is inclined to work harder for the coach in the future.

2. Self-Awareness

Humans value autonomy and the feeling of being in charge. Self-reporting raises awareness on the athlete’s part about how decisions outside of the gym can affect performance.

With self-reporting through subjective awareness, athletes can see for themselves the consequences of each action they take. An athlete can see for themselves that once they start to eat certain foods, they perform better or worse later. Similarly, if they’ve been sleeping poorly, they will notice that they can’t meet their performance expectations, further showing them that actions have consequences.

This gives them the incentive to address the actual sleep issues and concentrate on plausible causes such as caffeine intake.

3. Better Mental Health 

The mental health question in elite athletes started way before Naomi Osaka and Simone Biles came to the spotlight.

With thousands of fans, supporters, friends, and family, it’s hard for many to believe that athletes sometimes may suffer from depression, loneliness, and have deep-seated issues of their own. To make it worse, objective forms of measurement fail to identify mental health challenges athletes face.

An approach that focuses on mental health, such as subjective well-being, can help identify early signs of deterioration that may slip through the fingers of objective forms of measurement. As a result, athletes get the necessary treatment and counseling early and before it’s too late.

How to Track Subjective Wellness

As you’ve seen above, self-awareness and putting the athlete in the driver’s seat of the subjective wellness process come with several benefits. One of the best ways to track subjective wellness while at the same time offering the athlete both autonomy and self-awareness is using a wellness questionnaire for athletes.

CoachMePlus was founded with the dream of leveraging modern technology to help coaches and athletes achieve their fitness goals. For more information about objective and subjective measurement of athletes’ performance, contact us today, and our teams will be more than willing to help.

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What does an Athlete Management System do? 

Athlete Management Systems (AMS) are expanding to do more than ever before. But with all the features and integrations, it is important not to lose sight of why AMS systems can be an essential tool to any athletic or fitness organization. Athlete management systems allow coaching relationships to develop outside the traditional constraints of time and proximity. A good coach and athlete relationship is built on trust and understanding the personalized goals of the athlete. By using an AMS, coaches and athletes can develop strong relationships inside and outside of the training facility. 

Note: CoachMePlus is designed as a Human Performance Software that goes beyond an Athlete Management System. To us, a “coach” can refer to a physical therapist, strength and conditioning coach, personal trainer, athletic trainer, military leadership, or other human performance monitoring roles.

The job of an AMS is to allow coaches to communicate and monitor their athletes and provide context to the data that is being collected. Expected functions include the ability to assign workouts in an app, pull in information from wearable devices, and monitor load and progress. These functions are only useful if they are combined to add transparency into the workload and lifestyle of the athlete. Tools like Subjective Wellness Questionnaires and Load Monitoring can be used to help make on-the-fly decisions about training and recovery though the use of alerts, dashboards and reports. 

Benefits of an Athlete Management System

Save Time 

Athlete management systems streamline every step of the coaching process. From testing and programming, to analyzing and adjusting plans. When building a workout plan for an athlete, regularly scheduled set and rep progressions can easily be made into a test for updating key performance indicators such as one-rep-maximum (1RM). 

This allows workouts that are based on 1RM to automatically update with the given information to help personalize the experience for the athlete. If the same program is assigned regularly, an athlete’s workouts scales as the athlete’s strength and ability scales. This also helps when assigning workouts to groups of people; the workout is tailored to their abilities, while keeping in line the group’s goals.

With an athlete management system there is less paperwork to process. There is no need for endless excel documents. This allows coaches to focus on the important parts of human performance improvement. (Gyms, clubs, and personal trainers specifically can Monetize Online Training Services with a system like this.)

Improve Communication

Good relationships are built on good communication. CoachMePlus offers in-app messaging to groups or to individuals. File sharing between coaches and athletes is very simple too. Store photos, videos, and other important content with the Athlete and Coach Library, the perfect repository for teams needing file sharing to be embedded and streamlined. With all this data flowing back and forth, you don’t need to worry about privacy challenges. CoachMePlus allows coaches to manage permissions for their organization and athletes so they can access a personalized experience on any mobile device.

Plan

The calendar features include a full workout builder with all programming tools you would expect to include videos and instruction, allowing you to design an entire training plan that’s easy for any athlete—no matter their sport or skill level. You can easily build and assign personalized workouts across your team in just minutes thanks to our simple-to-use interface. 

Track

The need to import any human performance data set is a burden that every team needs to solve, and we designed a universal importer for teams of all sizes. Coaches can quickly upload different types of training or fitness related datasets with ease, which means they’ll have less time on the sideline recovering from training injuries so they can focus more heavily on coaching their athletes. 

Analyze

Engage athletes with live dashboards showing real-time performance information. Coaches can view real-time performance data and fitness levels, compliance, and training readiness. 

Training assessment – not just strength-based assessments, but also functional movement screening tools, sleep, mood, stress, and wellness questionnaires. With so much information out available to coaches, assessing how individuals have performed over time has never been easier.

Assess the quality of your training sessions through a variety of metrics, including heart rate, sets, reps, intensity, training load, and more. Track progression towards set goals to make sure your athletes are improving and ready for intense competition.

Who can benefit from having an Athlete Management System?

Gym Owners

AMS systems give people the ability to coach remotely or implement a hybrid in-person/online training program. CoachMePlus allows you to communicate with your members through their mobile devices and track their fitness progress. Both the members and gym owners benefit from the ease and transparency in workout programs. Trainers save time, increase retention rates, and provide accurate data about progress. Read More 

Strength and Conditioning Coaches

Human Performance Software helps coaches maximize the potential of the full team of athletes. Coaches can assign workouts based on position, or to each player individually. Professional sports teams like the Chicago Bulls, Nashville Predators and the Buffalo Bills have all benefited from Athlete Management Systems. Many high school and university coaches have used our software to manage individual and team growth. AMS systems provide coaching staff with transparency on progress and potential recovery or performance issues with players. Read more 

Physical Therapists

Therapists can help with many aspects of life including injury prevention, range of motion, rehabilitative care programming, recovery programming, ergonomics, and more. An athlete management system can be used for patients that may be experiencing pain or discomfort or rehabilitating after an injury. The body needs a balance between mobility and stability to avoid injury and physical therapists use athlete management systems to assess movements and improvement. 

Military

Monitoring warriors’ readiness is just as important during peacetime and training periods. Success relies on proper preparation, so it’s vital that commanders receive the information they need to make decisions about what is best suited for their own command. It’s crucial that evaluations be tailored to each unique command because different requirements can greatly affect performance metrics like strength or physical fitness levels when evaluating them against other units in a larger force structure. Evaluate your unit by taking into account all aspects such as skills learned throughout activities, injury rates from both combat-related injuries and noncombat related incidents, fatigue levels among troops who must balance both military and family roles simultaneously. Read More

Workplace Management / Industrial

The aging US workforce will require employers to implement programs that reduce the cost of musculoskeletal (MSK) injuries. Current options are inefficient and lack 1:1 coaching, which can lead to a high rate of failure in driving interventions at scale for MSK conditions such as low back pain, shoulder mobility or other overuse related injuries. More testing technology options have become available as wearables become more commonplace. Our platform provides a future-proof position as practitioners update hardwares and technology as it evolves.  As these factors change, it is crucial for providers who want to enter their practice field be up-to-date on recent innovations so they provide patients with improved care outcomes while also reducing costs associated with treating overuse and role-specific injury issues.

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It is important to assess both objective and subjective measures when returning an athlete to full participation in their sport following an injury. Objective measures from tests give us data to determine limb symmetry, while subjective measures are primarily gathered by watching the athlete go through sport-specific movements, looking for hitches and abnormalities.

One should not rely solely on one kind of measure as each type has its limitations. Objective measures are executed in a controlled environment and only include basic movements. The ability to transfer those objective measures into a sport-specific workout/test that can be subjectively viewed by a knowledgeable sport-performance/medicine individual is just as important. An athlete can seem ready to return from an objective standpoint, but if they are not comfortable with certain movements or exercises in real-life application then we would be putting them at a disadvantage for a successful return to play.  

Objective Measures

Some objective measures we check before returning athletes to play are limb girth symmetry, range of motion, force plate data, one-leg hop testing, and single limb strength testing.  

Limb Girth & Range of Motion

The easiest, and probably most accurate, measures we can take is girth and range of motion.  Simply take the measurements of a body part (after swelling of an injury has dissipated) at multiple points of a limb and compare them bilaterally. Do the same through passive and active range of motions in each limb. This will uncover any deficits in muscle mass and range of motion that need to be addressed.

Force Plates

Force plates are a tool that can look at multiple data points like force, load (concentric/eccentric) and ground contact time when determining the readiness of an athlete to return to play. Utilizing a two-leg jump test and comparing the data between limbs equips us to analyze whether the athlete is favoring one side versus having symmetric results. We can then assess what kind of lifts/movements would help the athlete with any deficits moving forward. If there is a discrepancy between sides, the athlete must complete corrective exercises before they can progress to large-type lifts and exercises.

Hop & Strength Tests

Single leg hop and strength testing gives us measurable data to look at specific exercises to which we can again compare bilaterally. An athlete will perform reps to failure from a single-leg leg press on a Pro-Shuttle at 70-75% RM with the unaffected leg, and then repeat on the affected limb. 1-leg hop testing is done for time and distance, and with a lateral component, then it is compared bilaterally. Address limitations and deficits through exercise prescription and repeated trials.

As we run objective testing, we are looking for bilateral symmetry of at least 92-94% before we return an athlete to full participation. If an athlete produces results below the desired percentage, they will focus on improving these metrics before moving forward. Exercises will be specific to an athlete’s particular needs, whether that be increased strength, hypertrophy, range of motion, and/or jump distances.

Subjective Testing

Subjective checkpoints, though not measurable, can illuminate details about the athlete’s condition that objective data will not. Putting an athlete through a functional test or workout will give us an idea of how comfortable the athlete is with running, jumping, cutting, throwing, and sport-specific movements. For instance, is the athlete jumping as high off both legs? Are they taking more time cutting to one side versus the other? Are they driving their hips the same when sprinting?

A functional test can include but not be limited to straight-ahead running, side shuffle, change of speed, deceleration, single-leg bounding, and change of direction exercises to name a few. When the basic movements have been mastered, functional tests then shift to sport-specific drills or exercises (e.g. one-leg lay-up for a basketball player). Any hitches or abnormalities observed should be addressed with corrective exercises and/or therapeutic rehab techniques.  

Example: If you notice an athlete is not jumping as high off their left leg when performing skip jumps or lay-ups, single-leg jumps performed on a force plate will work to correct the abnormality and also provide feedback to the athlete.

Putting an athlete through controlled and repeated functional tests/workouts will allow them to: 

1. Work on movements/techniques they are struggling to perform, and 
2. Gain the necessary confidence in performing those movements needed to play their sport.

Discussion

When returning an athlete to their sport, it is important to look at both objective and subjective measures of their performance with specific exercises before determining their readiness for full participation. This should be done on a continual and regular basis to make sure athletes are making progress to a successful return to sport.  If you smoke a brisket for 8 hours, are you going to light the fire, walk away and assume the temperature is going to remain constant for that long? No. Timely tests and checkpoints must be achieved before an athlete is to progress to their next goal. To continually add exercises or drills before hitting their marks can put that athlete, not only at a disadvantage, but at risk for further injury. 

Creating a functional workout based on the deficits/limitations uncovered through objective measures will help return the athlete to play in a safer environment, and allow the athlete to gain confidence during their progression. For example, if you notice an athlete coming back from an ACL reconstruction is collapsing their knee into a varus position during a single-leg press (objective test), a functional workout should include a controlled eccentric load forcing the athlete to control their knee flexion (shallow 1-leg depth jump).

Only after the objective goals and subjective checkpoints are met are we confident that our athletes are ready to return to play.

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