Topic: Pulling up on toes when?

[Jack]

Ryan, I just finished your Milo article "Weightlifting Season". I applaud you for your dedication with your young lifters. You are getting great results with your thought-out motivational strategies. Great job!

Sjaak

[ryankyle]

Sjaak,
     Thank you very much for the kind words.  I wrote that article back in August and e-mailed it but never heard anything back.  I just figured it wouldn't be used.  Can you tell me which issue it is in?  I will have to order that one.  I checked the table of contents for the last two and did not see it listed.
     This year we will be doing the same thing except we will only have time to get in 3 local meets, about once every 3rd week because we will be going to both the school age nationals and hosting the Ohio Weightlifting Championships and Midwest Open.  Still that will make for 5 contests in about a 13 week period. 
     Thanks again for the compliment.
Ryan

[Pete_Stewart]

Hello Ryan,

Would you have a copy of the article you sent to them.  I would be interested learning what motivational strategies you use to keep youth in the sport.  I am trying to develop a Weightlifting for Youth section on another forum and have been trying to compile more useful information to help our readers.

Kind regards,

Peter

[ryankyle]

Pete,
     Funny thing is I don't even have a copy of the article anymore.  I must have deleted it by accident.  What I can do though is tell you a little bit about it and some other interesting things about my set-up.  First off I train kids out of my former high school.  The father of one lifters who has been with us since he was eight, is one of the wrestling coaches and head coach of the Junior High team.  He, for the most part, hand picks a lot of the kids for us.  So in essence, I get really talented athletes to coach. 
     The weightroom is about 17' wide by 45' long and has 8 platforms in it and is connected to the 3600 squat foot wrestling room by a double door at one end.  After wrestling season we rolled up the mats and put a competition platform down, this was in April, and it stayed down until our last meet in July.  We ran competitions every two weeks starting in April and through mid-July, then the Junior Olympics, then the State Meet.  All in all most of the kids lifted in 8 competitions in 14 weeks.  I always made sure their were parents there to watch and Toledo Weightlifting and West Park Y brought kids to just about all of the contests.  At first I wasn't sure if only having a crowd made up of parents would be enough for motivation but you would be surprised at what happens when people are watching. 
      Also, our training has no cycles, we work on alternating weeks of 80%, 90%, 85% and 100%.  The 90% and 100% weeks coincided with competition weeks.  So during a contest week they would be lifting 90% the whole week or 100% and then 100% in the contest.  The weeks where 100% training and contests overlapped usually produced the best contest results. 
     Another motivational method I have is something called "pick your own workout day".  For instance, if a kid does something really spectacular in the contest, say breaks all his PR's then one day the next week he gets to pick his own workout.  I tell him how many exercises he has to do and then he can pick whatever he wants and then we meet half-way on sets and reps.  This is by far the most interesting thing you will ever see.  It is amazing to see what they pick.  One time I had a kid who was having a rough time snatching - the whole team had been rewarded with pick your own workout week and he chose to snatch every single day and then broke his PR at the end of the week.  He needed to get better at snatching so his solution was to do it until he did it right.
      On the opposite side of the coin of pick your own workout is double workouts.  During one contest no one was really focused and as a team only made 50% of their lifts.  So the following week we had double workouts - they would snatch, clean and jerk, then strip the bar back down, snatch again the exact same way, clean and jerked all over again, then finished with squats.  We did this for the whole week.  Needless to say the next weeks workouts were much better as was the next contest.
Ryan
I'll gladly answer any more questions you have. 

[Jack]

Ryan, the article is in "December 2008 Vol.16 number 3", latest issue, page 6-7.

Sjaak