Hey, this is Latif Thomas with complete speed training.com and today I want to talk to you about what is the most important components of any speed training or any sports performance or athletic development program. That is strength training. As you can kind of see here in the background I'm in a high school weight room and when I was getting ready to film this portion of the video, I wasn't sure if I wanted to go to a college weight room or what I called a regular people gym or come here to a high school weight room because I know that most people don't have the luxury of working out in a high class million dollar facility.
I thought of going here because this is the environment that I work in. Kids just finished up in the weight room and they just filed out of here. As always after I watch kids lift particularly when they're athletes intermixed with my athletes I do not coach, it's always interesting to see the difference between athletes who are being specifically coached to do certain things and certain lifts and lift in a certain way versus athletes that are just coming here and going through the motions doing their beach lifts. The bicep curls and the chest flies and all that stuff that gets them ready to go out to the beach and look good in the summertime but certainly doesn't prepare them for their athletic performance and so that's really what I want to focus on today. For me the weight room is always been one of my greater weaknesses because I'm not naturally that strong. When I was in high school, no one really advised me on what way to lift if at all. I was on what I call three by ten program during my senior year of high school just to kind of do something in the weight room before the season started. But my technique was terrible. I can just think about when I was squatting for example how far my heels came up off the ground. My knees are all past my toes and this is the typical kind of thing. I didn't squat down the parallel like we should be doing. These are the kind of things I see with athletes in the weight room. When I see athletes doing clings it's really painful to watch. I see squats where it looks like they're gonna hurt themselves. Just try to throw as much weight on the bar as possible and that's not a good solution. Especially when strength training is critical.
Aside from actually training at full speed on it's own, strength training is the most critical part of training athletes so if you're working with athletes, you need to get them in the weight room. If you're working with young athlete, prepubescent athletes. You need to at least get them doing some body weight stuff that's going to help improve their training and prepare them for when you're ready to get them in the weight room. That's what I want to sort of focus and talk to you about today and the first and most important thing is when you're working with athletes or introducing them to weight rooms or really athletes have already been in the weight room, the truth is they probably need some help. You need to kind of take a step back to go two steps toward. The most important thing you can do is talk about technique. Technique is the key to the whole thing. If athletes and this goes for everything we're doing here. If athletes don't have good technique in their lifts, they're setting themselves up for injury and not getting as much out of it as they could be and they're not gonna be able to apply it to the sport, to the running, to the changing of direction, to the jumping, to the throwing their going to be doing. That's really the focus. You have to make sure athletes focus on techniques first. I have what I call graduation. When I'm working with athletes in the weight room, we use a base level of weight for athletes. They're not allowed to use more weight than that until they pass a basic test where I just come and watch each individual athlete and make sure they are proficient after the technique of the lift. Then and only then can they start putting weight on and oftentimes weight they can actually handle. That's what I want to direct you towards today is show you a video clip of good technique for our squat. Squat is a great exercise using the weight room. You all should be using it as part of our program so I want to make sure that you guys can squat properly and your athletes can squat properly so you can take the following video clip I'm going to show you taking it right from the complete speed training program and use that with your athletes and use that to make sure that athletes have good technique in the weight room. Because if they don't and they're not doing it right, they're gonna hurt themselves and they're not gonna get a lot out of it. They start to get hurt. Their back hurts and their knees hurt, they're not gonna want to lift. They need to lift if they're gonna get better. But first and foremost you have to get technique down.
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After technique there's a certain way to lift, certain reps, certain sets, number of sets. Certain load or weight or percentage of overall maximum lift that they need to be using. We're not concerned with that right now. We're gonna get that into greater detail when we get into complete speed training program but for now, we got to get this technique down. This is the first thing I want to get you to go do because when you watch this video clip coming up and you go outside and work with your athletes, you're going to see that when you're in the weight room tomorrow or later on today or a couple days from now, you're gonna say wow, my athletes don't look anything like that video clip I saw. That's a perfect example of what I saw. Let's take a look at what good technique in a squat looks like and how to teach technique in a squat so you go begin and apply that to your athletes and start putting that into your overall weight training program. So let's take a look now at a good back squat. You want to have athletes starting with a good positioning of the feet, shoulder, hip length apart. Sitting back into a squat. We don't want to drop the hits straight down. We want to sit back like we're sitting in a chair. Oftentimes we'll have athletes doing a box squat where they're sitting back on a box. Often put their booty on the box to sit back into it. Chest is up. Proud chest. Sitting back into it. Squatting down to parallels. You can see here this athlete is squatting deep into the squat. Not just going down a quarter squat like you often see athletes doing.
Here's a good view from the side. You can see the athlete come down. You don't see the knees coming out way past the toes. You don't see the upper body coming way forward so there's a lot of strain on the back. This is the proper way to execute a back squat. When athletes drive up in a squat, we want to cue them to drive their heels into the ground and explode their hips up and forward and by driving the heels in the ground, this is gonna activate the gluts and the hamstrings, the muscles that we use when we run. The muscles that we want to fire when we're driving our feet down into the ground. We're using force application. Again, it transfers all the way over like it does in the practice track or on the field when we're doing our speed work. We're doing our speed drills. We want to activate the same muscles. This is the proper back squat. Your athletes begin to make sure that you have your athletes perform the squat in the way you just saw and by doing that your athletes will succeed at their highest level and get the most out of exercise without injuring themselves. This is Latif Thomas, complete speed training.com. I'll be back tomorrow with my next video.
