Nailed to the X

So I started volunteering as a wrestling coach at the school I'm student teaching at because:

• As a social studies teacher I'm basically required to coach a sport
• I miss wrestling
• I regret never committing to it when I was in high school
• I should not have quit my senior year
• Wrestling is the manliest high school sport

I started showing up to pre-season conditioning last Friday, and I'm pretty psyched for this. My biggest current problem, as I've already bitched about to Clayton, is that for pre-season work they do some light jogging, then P90X, three times a week.

I guess I should start by giving P90X a fair appraisal: to train a lot of guys in a relatively small gym, it's not bad. The tempo is alright to build up some stamina (as long as you work to keep up), and a lot of the guys are untrained enough that they'll benefit from just about any program. There's a good variety of exercises, so I guess you get different movements in.

But it's pretty dumb.

First of all, the host says dumb shit like "This isn't Ab Ripper 100, or 200, this is AB RIPPER THREE HUNDRED AND THIRTY NINE" and it's this for an hour:

So dumb

Man I hate this guy

We did chest and back today, and it was about 5 different variations of push-ups, each supersetted with either a chin-up variation or a DB row variation. Then you do the whole circuit over again. Target is about 25-30 push-ups in a minute-ish. For kids who need to build mass or strength (which is pretty much every single kid there) there's not much, just some endurance training and gut check.

Leg day was even worse, just a bunch of different DB lunge variations (again shooting for 15-20 reps) and the occasional wall-sit supersetted with chin-up variations (Chin-ups on leg day? makes perfect sense). No posterior chain work, and lunges were going in every direction so it'd be difficult to add serious weight to them (most kids held 10-25 lb DBs).

We've done the 10ish minute ab workout after every day, it's just a bunch of dumb crunch variations, no core stabilization or anti-rotation.

The program is basically a laundry list of every dumb thing a crappy trainer would make their clients do in a crappy gym. TO THE POWER OF THE X.

I talked to the head coach and pitched him the idea of a strongman day, where we'll do farmer's walks, prowler/car pushes, sandbag loading, tire flips, etc. which will be pretty awesome. Starting that next friday.

I've got that 80 pound sandbag , so I'm thinking I'll take them out to the parking lot and have them do a 50 yard carry for time, lapping and shouldering the bag every parking space line they cross. Should be tough and get some explosive posterior chain work in.

I'm also thinking a medley, something like 20m prowler push, 30m farmers walk, 40m sandbag carry, 50m run. Have them compete against each other for best time.

I'm open to other ideas, I just want some more strength-oriented stuff to cycle in to give these guys something more interesting.