 You play high school football. Here's the perfect work out for you. Our next caller is Brian from California. Hey, what's up, Brian? How can we help you? How's it going, guys? I am a 40 year old strength and conditioning coach, football coach and a high school teacher. And instead of asking a question for myself, I figured I'd ask you guys a question regarding my program. Currently, I am an on the field coach, but I'm transitioning to the strength and conditioning program. And because the COVID year and the community that I work in, our players don't have the best weightlifting background. And so what I've tried to do is implement all the principles that you guys have incorporated throughout your guys' programs and implement it into our strength and conditioning program. And I submitted my workout plan to you guys. And I wanted to see if you guys had any tweaks or suggestions on how we can actually improve or things that you think might be able to be added to it. Wait a second. You went 10 and 0 in the regular season? Yes, we went 10 and 0 in the regular season. We're looking at your question right now. Do you mind if I read off some of the stuff that you wrote just so the audience know? Yeah. Knock it off. Okay. So it says here that you're having the boys go to the gym, the weight room, excuse me, three days a week. They do one priming exercise per zone. So that's three movements, one for the upper middle part of the body and then the lower body. Then after that, the boys go to the racks. There's 12 racks, 12 platforms. That's a nice school gym, by the way. There's two kids per rack and two per platform. And there's four exercises assigned. So essentially the whole workout, besides the priming, is about four exercises. And then halfway through, they switch. You go platform to rack and then vice versa. And you're taking from MAPS enabolic, MAPS performance and MAPS aesthetic. I like where you're going. Did I cover that pretty well? Yeah, you knocked it off pretty well. The only thing is there's actually eight exercises, four in each location. So they'll go four on the rack and then half the period and they'll switch to four on the platform. Okay. And now I'd love to hear what Justin, this is totally his wheelhouse and his expertise is superior on this. So well, okay. So I'm trying to kind of rack my brain around what were your difficulties with your kids? Because I know for me, the biggest difficulty was establishing proper forms and mechanics because they just, I just felt like they didn't have any kind of, there wasn't a whole lot of education provided previous to that in terms of, you know, a back loaded squat, dead lifts, you know, bench press. And so for me, I was scrambling to try and establish like proper form and really reduce it down to, you know, the bare minimum in terms of what I had them focus on. So with that in mind, I've actually been doing quite a bit of this and thinking about how to construct a good off season program and training. And one of the things that I love how you're bringing up the priming zones and you're addressing that before we even get into the workouts because I think that's essential and a lot of coaches, you know, just kind of breeze over a lot of like the actual quality of their movements and their capability of providing that kind of stability and structure with their joints. And so for me, I wanted to kind of maybe address it more from a unilateral perspective in the beginning and make sure that, you know, I was addressing the imbalances, you know, going through a phase of that and then kind of picking that momentum up and then going back into bilateral type of lifts like you're describing here. So I guess my question to you is how good do you feel that their mechanics are currently? Well, what are the eight exercises? First of all, because maybe he's doing a Bulgarian squad in there. What are you doing? So actually, I attached to you guys, but we do it, there's three phases into it. So like what I've done is I planned out from January all the way through in season. So what we're looking at is we're doing all the major lifts, but depending on the phase, we phase into some unilateral stuff and some multi-planier stuff just because one of the things that I figured out with you guys and when I went through performance myself, I noticed that I was really strong in one plane, but I get into another plane and I would really struggle with that. And so that incorporating the multi-planier stuff and the priming stuff was one of the key things. Our big issue was our boys weren't very mobile and we had built a pretty good strength base with our head coach, but our problem was COVID and everything else has gone on in the lockdowns. A lot of our kids that are coming in haven't played or haven't worked out in quite a while. And so that was one of the big things that we found in this season this year. Yeah, no, that's good to know because I'm glad you guys were able to establish good strength. I felt like we did a terrible job of that and I kind of came in mid-go in terms of our off-season training. And so my big focus is to eliminate a lot of the cardiovascular endurance type training and just focus on the strength and get as far as we can up leading into Hell Week in a sense because that's one of those. Conditioning is sort of that button that coaches always want to hit because it's difficult, it provides that mental discipline and this is sort of what a lot of coaches tend to throttle down on when what's going to provide longevity and performance on the field is the strength that we're going to be able to apply. So if you don't mind, I'll kind of break down what I'm basically going to be doing with this team and see if it applies to your guys. But we're going to be focusing primarily on unilateral training. We're going to build that into like a five by five type of situation where we're working on five to seven core lifts and we're going to master those lifts. We're going to kind of transition from that into more of a maps anabolic where we're just focusing on building up that muscle and size and add in a bit of hypertrophy and I'm going to kind of drag that then into transition to more of a maps performance where we're going to get into actually that multiplanar type of movement and strength and then I'm going to string that out all the way up until then the very last peak is we're going to be in our conditioning phase and we're going to be doing more speed power and skill training in conjunction with that. So one of the things that I want to make sure that I establish is the skill on the field and so less on the conditioning, more on the quality of the movement. So explosive movement, running their passing trees, like having like each group. So whether you're linemen, you have very specific drills that you're running on the field like say on our, if maps anabolic is our example, we're going to be doing that during our trigger session type days. So you know they're going to be on the field just working and drilling their skill and then also applying the rubber band workouts, full body workouts to then help to you know establish that recovery, active recovery and then we're going to jump back into our foundational type lifts. So I'm sort of like pairing those together and then using our program as the baseline but then implementing and so one other thing to kind of you know sum this up as well, deadlifting for me, I find valuable, I find a lot of value in the trap bar deadlifts with this particular group because it's less technical and it's less cues. I have to make sure I establish ahead of time but also you know the kids can just pick it up and really like build upon that foundational strength and it's something like that risk versus reward thing. I'm always playing with that to see which one has the most value and so like even power cleans is something I'm sort of subbing out for things like heavy kettlebell swings and also like trap bar type of cleans. So just things to consider in terms of where your athletes are at with their education, their background, their skill and then what you can establish in that window leading back into the season. So Justin, I want to back you up too when you talked about so let's look at this as like a at least a rough time frame. What are you talking about? When you said unilateral training, are you doing that for a couple weeks leading into MAPS Anabolic? Are you doing that for three months? Like how long are you focusing on unilateral before you move them into MAPS Anabolic and then into performance and how much of a time window does he need? Yeah it's about a month month and a half we're focusing on unilateral training and then leading into the five by five which we're going to run then for the next like you know two months leading into the MAPS Anabolic which then we're going to establish that and go through that entire progression which then leads into MAPS performance and so I might actually repeat you know one or two phases of say MAPS Anabolic or MAPS performance depending on you know the timing of that leading into the end of the off season so that's what I'm kind of constructing and drawing up for. So essentially at least a month of unilateral type training? At least a month and two this is good because after season you know the players are beat up and if we just jump right into strength training and we're building upon you know some of these these functions and we're not addressing them specifically. That's a good point. You know that's something that is going to you know we're going to lead into bad patterns that we're going to deal with later on so I want to really like hyper focus on those and it's not as cool and sexy to get into that because the kids really want to just build muscle. Yeah and one thing I want to comment on Brian is especially when you're working with you know high school kids form is everything so they may want to push themselves add more weight you see a slight breakdown in form no go lighter I want your form to be perfect because the strength that they're that they're going to build with good technique and good firing patterns is going to translate more to the field than even more strength games with crappy form right so focus on the form at all times that's got to be the number because it's very easy for to get away from you especially when you're dealing with high school kids and there's a bunch of guys in the gym and they want to push and they want to lift harder and they oh my god I can add 10 pounds if I if I just you know tweak my form a little bit like you got to be really really strict with the form because that's going to give them such bigger dividends than just pushing the weight I mean I just want to comment that I think you're doing a hell of a job I think what you built is a pretty pretty goddamn good foundation I think the only thing that I would contribute is the two things that I heard Justin say that's that sounds different than what you're doing is probably starting the beginning of their weight training with unilateral stuff so you know you pick your four to eight you know biggest bang for the buck type of unilateral movements to start this with and then incorporating some of the like on field type of movements like you know running their their routes and stuff that that explosive training in there other than that I really like the direction that you're going maybe just put a little bit of focus on unilateral that started off and I think what you're doing is a great job Brian is it okay if you let us know what high school this is because I mean ten and oh that's pretty phenomenal yeah I teach at boldenburg high school in Southern California oh good deal all right shout out to those to you guys out there do you have so you have access to maps prime anabolic performance aesthetic are you in our forum yeah I have pretty much everything you guys done I've been listening since episode 25 hey please that's why this programming looks so goddamn yeah well we got a new one coming now I'm not going to completely give it away but that's something that I'll be able to use I do want you to use because I'm going to be using it with my athletes as well and we'll keep you informed with that well why don't you learn why don't we do something special for him Brian why don't you email Justin personally and maybe he can give you a peek at that before anybody else gets to see there you go you'll be my beta tester how about that you got to be promised not to share it with anybody okay I'm all for it I won't share it and just so just a touch on the unilateral on the on the field stuff I'm actually using the performance mobility days beautiful the two days that we're not lifting to start in January and actually since the beginning of November we've been going over technique and form with pvc pipe just because I know any breakdown yeah dude you're on the right path Brian that's been I love hearing this from a strength and conditioning coach for a high school that's phenomenal all right I appreciate it guys you guys have drastically improved my life as well as the people around me and now I'm hoping to impart that to my my players and my students yeah thank thank you so much right now man send a send an email over to Jerry who who organizes these questions for us and just let her know that Justin was going to follow up with you regarding the new program and I'd love to share notes with you as well man you're doing great things so for sure I really appreciate it guys all right brother thank you that's a you know that's great that's cool yeah well I don't know I you know high school strength coaches or high school coaches in general sometimes I think get a bad rap and I understand why um I've seen some of the workouts in the programming I love hearing this though this is excellent these kids are getting introduced in their defense most uh all or not all but most unless you're going to some private high school that's got the money or volunteer dads there and they fall back on what they did that's right back in the 80s yeah so it's changed a lot so yeah it's where you get a guy like this who's actually probably pretty damn qualified yeah to be helping these or get a Justin who's out there on the field you're not getting like that kind of a background it's just so it's tough for high school and and and you know what you're you're laying the foundation for these kids so you could argue that it's probably one of the most important time for them to get really good uh good advice from a coach or a trainer so I think he's I think for the most part you know and then after hearing what he just said right now I mean he's really addressing the main concern of the unilateral was you know you're coming off this offseason you're not doing any you're not doing anything you have all these bad patterns you have bad movements but I mean if he's incorporating stuff from performance on mobility today he's he's working with PVC pipes to get technique down he's peering into he's looking into the dysfunction and addressing it right away so that that was my biggest concern and that's why you know I mentioned that it was really because it's a way to be able to see that um you know with with a large group of kids pretty pretty visibly yeah and the challenge was training especially boys in this age group their bodies all of a sudden have all this testosterone they don't have years of wear and tear uh on their bodies that they recover very quickly the strength gains you make when you're 16 17 18 happen anyway like you take a it's a 15 year old and have them do nothing and a year later he's way stronger so you turbo charge that with resistance training and but the challenge is is is making sure to to to direct it in the right place and have because I know like I said I've trained these kids and it's really easy even for an experienced trainer to be like oh cool we can add 10 pounds oh cool you can do it wow you hit a new PR and let the form go off by a couple degrees like that's the challenge the challenge is I got it's like it's like growing a plant that's growing real fast let's make sure it grows straight before we allow it to just go crazy because you're right you're setting the foundation this is what what sets everything up in the future hey if you enjoyed that clip you can find the full episode here or you can find other clips over here and be sure to subscribe