Why are you lifting weights?

Why are you lifting weights? It’s an honest question.

I had a client come to me that competes in athletic hammer throwing, If you don’t know what that is lets simplify it; You stand in a circle facing on to a field, hold what is nothing more than a small weight attached to a meter long wire with a handle on one end. Spin around in circles like a four year old on red bull, then let go, the small weight flies through the air and job complete. Keep It Simple Stupid.

Anyway back to my question, where does weight lifting fit in to this? The client I was working with had previously done lots of ‘Stuff’ with his other gym ‘Trainer’ (who is a one eyed body builder I might add) with a view of being ‘Explosive’ by getting ‘Stronger’ using ‘Functional Movements’ Sounds fair, my next question was how long had he been working with this trainer and how his sport specific results improved. Once again I got a rather vague answer of ‘Yeah it’s sort of helped, not sure how long I have been with him now’ So in other words he is spending $150 and over three hours of vital training time a week (if you think back to my Derek Boyer interview; don’t train more than six hours a week) on ‘Stuff’ that had only ‘Sort of’ helped his hammer throws. To further confuse me he then went on to explain a training split of isolating body parts. Now I am not an athletics coach but I’m willing to take the punt, In a sport like hammer throw explosive power and strength is critical across the entire body, at no point would the thrower isolate any one muscle.

Being goal orientated is time limited and temporary by nature. If your sport performance has not improved, then start again, find a new trainer or coach, hell even go to a new gym, Mark Bell said ‘you can’t achieve greatness with thirty people on treadmills behind you’ so wake up to your self, there has got to be a better way.