Podcast #3 – How To Choose The Right Sports Performance Training Gym?

What’s going on. Y’all welcome to the pro day podcast. I’m your host, Josh Jackson. Let’s jump into it today. We got a good one. So today we’re going to be pretty specific and what pro day does, and we’re going to be talking about the ways that pro day does it different from all other sports performance trainers, coaches, so on how we as an organization are different and the ways we’re unique at getting you to your goals. So first we need to talk about the goal of sports performance training. So the goal of sports performance training is to make an individual better at their sport and to make them an all around better athlete. It’s also to ensure that an athlete is prepared to play at the highest level. So when you really dive into it, sports performance training is all about the athlete. How do you make sure that the athlete is ready in terms of their capabilities and abilities, and how do you make sure an athlete is ready in terms of health and recovery with proper Sports Performance Training Tulsa?

So let’s jump into a little bit to start the flaws of current personal training. So a little disclaimer here. This isn’t us saying that us at pro day do it better than everybody else and we’re perfect because we’re by no means perfect. This is just a way for you to see what does the world look like of strength and conditioning, sports performance training. We’ve seen a lot of situations where people can abuse their situation and take advantage of you, the consumer, the athlete, the student, whatever it may be. And we want to be sure here at pro day that this doesn’t happen, that you maximize all of your time, money, and energy to becoming the best athlete you can be. So let’s jump in to some of the flaws that we see with current sports performance, training, strength and conditioning, whatever it may be. The first one, and one of the biggest ones is danger and lack of lack of supervision.

So anytime you’re working out in a facility, there’s some lifts that are very complicated and thus dangerous and there are some things that aren’t as dangerous. Give you an example. A barbell back squat is going to be more dangerous than a toe touch AB exercise. Just inevitably where we’re dealing with heavyweights, we’re dealing with metal, we’re dealing with loading up our back. We’re not dealing with just our body weight. There’s so many variables that go into that danger or lack of supervision. I guess danger in that case, and that’s where lack of supervision comes in. A lot of strength and conditioning programs and sports performance training programs will have mass amounts of people doing complex exercises such as squats, deadlift, bench press, so on some of our compound movement exercises, they’ll have them doing those exercises and obviously if you have a lot of people doing that at a time, I’ve heard a story of as much as 20 plus people doing squats, barbell squats, at the same time, there’s no way to supervise that unless you have 20 credible certified people there with a great Sports Performance Training Tulsa experience.

Monitoring and watching all of the movements of those kids. Then there’s a lack of supervision. Even if one kid might be all right at doing that, that doesn’t mean you should squat on your own, especially when you’re dealing with heavier weights. So the lack of supervision comes into play when you have multiple kids doing complex movements on supervised and if there’s one trainer and four kids are doing complex movements, it’s pretty difficult to supervise all of those if not impossible to supervise all of those. So that is one of the first flaws is dangerous exercises and through those dangerous exercises, lack of supervision, not saying that you shouldn’t do squats, but you should do squats while supervised with somebody who has either a done it before and has experience or B is certified and knows what they’re doing and is I guess what would be the trainer of that entire time.

So that’s the first one. Moving on to another flaw is overcrowded classes that don’t allow for actual training. So again, back to the 20 kids doing squats at the same time, whatever it may be. If you’re dealing with 50 60 kids in one session and you have one, two, maybe three trainers, there is absolutely no way that there is actual training going on for every kid. Now, maybe you’re harping on one or two exercises, but if Timmy and Susie are over on the side getting no supervision because two other kids are doing complex movements, which requires that trainer, then do Timmy and Susie get supervision the whole time and if not, then they’re just working out. They just have somebody telling them what to do. I mean, a good trainer should be cycling through, should be watching. All athletes should be controlling the room. Now obviously it’s impossible to watch every single kid at the same time, but every kid should have touchpoints throughout the entire workout from trainers to be sure that they’re getting the attention that they need, that they don’t have any questions, they don’t have any concerns and so on with a new take on Sports Performance Training Tulsa.

All right, so that’s the second one, which is overcrowded, overcrowded classes, lack of actual training. Moving on to the third is a style of training that involves standing around and waiting on athletes for their turn. So you’ll see a lot of times kids will go to a training class, they’re going to be working on, let’s say its explosiveness and we’re going to be using two or three types of equipment through this training. But we have six kids. So the first kid steps up, the first athlete steps up and they do an exercise while they’re doing that exercise, the next athletes standing behind them, waiting on them to get done, and then they immediately jump into the exercise. And then after that, the third athlete steps up and it’s their turn to do an exercise. So essentially we’re waiting in a line to perform this exercise. So that’s not terrible.

But the issues you run into with that is okay, if we’re doing one exercise, I’m waiting in line for that exercise. That means I’m getting a short stint of let’s say 10 to 15 seconds of work and I’m just getting through this exercise, trying to figure it out as I go. Then I go back and I stand in line and I stand around waiting and waiting and waiting, and then I go again. So my process of waiting there, I haven’t had time to develop that skill that that drill may take. I haven’t had time to learn how I can speed up that drill because I get one shot at it and then I restart and then one shot and then restart. So when the style of training is the Hey wait we have a great Sports Performance Training Tulsa experience, your turn to go and then go, not saying that that training can’t work but isn’t the most effective, is it good that your kid is waiting to go again, which might seem as rest, but how many repetitions of this exercise are they getting?

How many times do they get to do it before they move on to the next thing? Or is that the one exercise that they stay on for the entire extent of the workout? So that’s going to be the third one. The style of the workout. Alright up next we have mindlessly done exercise just to be better at their sport. So anytime, and I would say that a good amount of facilities do this. This would just be a red flag if a facility doesn’t if your child athlete or yourself as an athlete, high middle school, high school, college pro, whatever it may be, are going to get training and receive training and you don’t receive measurable data and measurable data in my mind should be more than just like a, Hey, you did this much weight on your squat today and this is five pounds heavier than you did on the last day on your set of three to or three sets of 10 to 12 reps.

It needs to be a little bit more in detail and especially when you’re working with athletes. There shouldn’t be any, just like mindlessly going through the motions. If you do the exercise, let’s say you do the exercise all out and then your goal is like say, Oh, how have you done better in your sport? How have you seen that things increase well can do you see that you’re jumping higher? When you go for a rebound, do you see that you’re exploding faster out of the blocks and track or whatever it maybe? Whenever you try to compare data to the time in the sport itself, things can get hairy. That’s not to say that you’re not improving, but it’s hard to measure that because of circumstance matters. The day matters and how you move throughout the game or what happens earlier in the game match or competition, whatever it may be matters and that affects what could be perceived as the end result.

So whenever you’re working with a gym, you need to be sure that they’re tracking measurable data. How are you getting better and can they prove and show to you that you are getting better? Because if you’re not getting better than there’s no point to spend money on training. Now the extent of doing better, that can take different amounts of time. Some people are very athletically gifted and they can do a few things and it can spark this other side of them and they can see increases that other people might not see in those measurable data when offering solid Sports Performance Training Tulsa services. Now, some people, those people being, maybe it takes a month or two months to see that other person, it takes four months or five months and then specifically age can affect that a lot. The older you get, the less rapidly you’re able to develop. So young kids might be able to develop a lot quicker than older kids and so on.

So there’s a lot of variables in that. But are they just doing the exercise mindlessly in terms of, Hey, you’re going to get better at your sport and then just pay attention to see if you do get better or are you given proof? Are you given things that show I am getting better, I am doing better and so on. So those are going to be the four big flaws that we talked about with uh, um, the flaws right now and personal training, sports performance, training, strength, and conditioning. So on. Those are the big ones. So now we’re going to jump into how we do it differently at pro day, what this whole video is about. And this video isn’t about us bragging or anything like this. It’s more to give you expectations that you should assume from your training facility. And if you’re not getting these things, then you’re not getting the best training.

Now, if the trainer you’re using right now or the school strength and conditioning coach that you’re using right now is doing these things, then by all means use it. It’s working. So use it and that’s at the end of the day, the goal, does it work? And can you make it work? So moving in how we do it differently. Now I’m going to start this off with a little disclaimer. These are general rules of thumb we put into play with working with the masses. So these are 90% of the kids that come in. These are the rules of thumb that we put into play. Um, for sure some of our high school, higher-level high school athletes, college athletes, and pro athletes, we make exceptions based on specific needs. Every sport generally needs something different. At the end of the day, I like to say athleticism wins.

If you are an overall athlete, you’re going to be good at basketball, you’re going to be sufficient. At soccer, you’re going to be great at football and so on. So if we can create all-around athletes, that’s amazing. So with this rule, there are exceptions to be made. If we’re dealing with a pro-level athlete who’s done a million squats in their career, we might not shy away from the weight as much as we would with a 15-year-old high school kid that’s just trying to figure out how to work their legs cause they grew four inches in the last five months or whatever it may be. So let’s jump into this a little bit. We’ll go through some of the ways we do it differently and some of the ways that you should look for and whatever gym it is that you have access to that you are using to see if they’re doing things in the proper manner.

So with the first one, we have no unsupervised exercises. So there are never unsupervised exercises or any complex movements unattended. That’s something we pride ourselves on. We build our workouts so that there aren’t multiple kids at the same time doing extremely complex movements that have a high risk of injury. So we piece it together so that if someone is doing a heavy barbell squat, we don’t have somebody on the other side of the gym doing an intense resisted jump squat with a med ball, a crazy exercise that could cause for injury when using a great Sports Performance Training Tulsa. So we spread our workout out depending on the number of trainers that we have ready and on the floor, but we spread that workout out to make sure that there aren’t unsupervised complex exercises. If there’s a kid doing Russian twists past the basics of form, once they get that down, there really isn’t much to say besides twisting your shoulders all the way in either direction so you get more of a stretch through your obliques and your core and so on.

So the amount of information you can give them is less. Now someone doing a barbell back squat, you probably, it would take a long time to get through all of the information that they need to think about and process in order to perform, perform it properly. Again, this gets back to the case by case with specific needs. Obviously some a pro athlete is going to have done barbell squats for much longer, so they might need less instruction to somebody who’s just now picking it up. So that’s the first one. Um, avoiding unsupervised exercise and complex movements that would be left unattended. Now moving onto the next one, um, we also avoid the, what’s your one-rep max mindset? So the one-rep max, how much can you bench when your buddy comes up to you and says, or your friend says, how much does your son or anybody says, Hey, how much is your bench press?

What do you bench and you, he’s talking about as one rep max and he’s trying to hit three 15 for one rep. Okay, that’s fine. I’m a big proponent against the one-rep max. I think that the one-rep max causes more risk than it does reward. So let’s break that down real quick. What’s the risk of a one-rep max? While you’re doing the maximum weight your body can handle, which means the maximum way your bones, your muscle, and your whole structure as your body can handle. That’s scary in and of itself. Especially when you’re looking at something like a bench press where you’re holding a bar over your chest and throat or a squat where the bars on the back of your neck or your shoulders pressing down on you. Anytime we work with a heavyweight as heavy as a one-rep max, few things are gonna happen.

Number one, typically if you’re really, really, really pushing it, you’re probably going to sacrifice form. And the only people who aren’t sacrificing form on their one-rep max are your major Olympic lifters or your powerlifters. And in this scenario, I’m not talking about the Olympic lifters or the powerlifters at all. It’s their job to have a one-rep max. So those are out of the question. If those are the things that you’re looking at and you are doing one rep max is, that’s okay because we really want great Sports Performance Training Tulsa services. Next, you would want to look into the frequency of those, but that’s beside the point. Right now we’re talking about for the masses like I said earlier, and a one-rep max is by far something you should avoid. Your risk is high for injury, for lack of form, which is the best way to cause injury and your reward is low.

If you think about it, what reward do you have from benching 315 pounds? Once will you have the knowledge that you’ve binged 315 pounds once? When’s the last time that the knowledge gave you a five-inch vertical increase? It doesn’t. Knowledge doesn’t do it. It’s what you put into place. So just being able to know that you did something. Yes, it can help the mindset and you might feel stronger because of it, but it doesn’t really make you stronger. It just affects your mind. So when you’re looking at your reward, you can do one rep of three 15 or you can do three reps of two 75 which is where we approach it. If you can do three reps of two 75 you can do a one-rep max calculator, which you can find all over the internet and figure out your exact one rep max because the truth is even if you do one rep of 315 pounds, your one-rep max is higher than three 15 which is weird to think about but go check out one of those calculators and see what I mean.

If you can get it up, then you didn’t use all the energy in your tank to the point where you were a millisecond from crushing your face in which is not where you want to be. So when we look at the one-rep max, the risk is crazy high. The reward is low. You can do a three rep max and see what weight can you get three times where you’re probably less likely to sacrifice form because odds are you get to your third and you can try a fourth and then you have to have help up on the fourth but because you’ve already gotten three, you don’t have to prove yourself that you can get four. If you don’t get one, you want to get that one when approaching a solid Sports Performance Training Tulsa experience. So you’re going to push through all the bad form and everything for the one-rep max. Whereas with a three rep max, you might find that at three you fail and your spotter can help you up.

Or at four you fail or you surpass that. And again it doesn’t matter. You’re seeing what your overall strength is. So if you can do three reps of two 75 and one rep of three 15 we’ll figure out what that one rep max is are. And that will give you an accurate representation of actually how strong you are. I know that’s pretty complex, but when you weigh risk and reward, it really just doesn’t make any sense. Okay. Moving into this next one, we’re going to be talking about the style of workout. So this is something that I have been setting up in the start of it, but how we do things to avoid some of the stuff that we’ve seen in the flaws. So we do a circuit style training, a hit style training, but the training we do within those circuit training, compromise and not compromise.

They are composed of everything. We have hypertrophy training, we have cross-functional training, we have all kinds of different styles in there. Obviously, with the whole goal being sports performance training, how do we make you the best athlete we can be? You can be, sorry. So with circuit and hit training, the way our circuits are set up, we have eight exercises. You’re going to move throughout the room performing these eight exercises. You’ll start, let’s say you started on workout number one, exercise number one. You’re going to do that exercise all out for 30 seconds. This is where the hit comes in. We’re going to be time-based, so 30 seconds as hard as you can. So let’s say we’re doing a single leg line hop for this first exercise. We’re going one foot. Once that timer starts, you got 30 seconds all out. How many reps can you get in after that?

30 seconds? Immediately you rest for 30 seconds. You get that 30 seconds recover, drop that heart rate a little bit, get back ready to go, switch feet, single-leg line hops, go again, 30 more seconds. We’re going to perform that exercise four times, so 30 seconds on, 30 seconds off for four rounds. After that, you receive a minute break. During that minute rest, you can get a drink, you can do whatever you need to do, but you’re shifting and transitioning to the next exercise. So we spent, what is it close to like four and a half minutes including rest on one exercise. That exercise, because we did it at our peak intensity, actually gave us the work we needed to get in for that rather than doing it one or two or three times. We’ve been going all out for a total of two minutes of active exercise on that exercise.

So you’re going all out, your calves are done. They’ve shot those single line though if I can talk those single-leg line hops are not going to be what they could have been. If we go into six, seven, eight sets, we’re going to stick at that four rounds and then move on to the next one. So we’re moving to the next exercise, our lower body shot. Then we’re going to be transitioning into something that doesn’t kill that lower body again or at least the calves. And because we structure it like this, it allows us to get maximum work on a single leg line hop, which is going to be speed and balanced focus. It allows us to get maximum work on that. Jump to the next exercise, which let’s say could be explosiveness than upper body than abs. And then we get to rego back around and revisit the single-leg balance, lower body leg strength, calf strength, and speed exercise like we did at the beginning.

We get to revisit that. We can implement another speed and balance exercise, not the same exercise but one that works on similar things. So you’ve done one round of it, you get some rest because you’re doing other muscle groups and then you get to attack that same muscle group again to get maximum effort. This allows us not to spend a whole hour working on explosiveness, but it allows us to work on explosiveness, work on everything else you can think of, speed, reaction, agility, power, and then go back to explosiveness but not be too shot to perform at a high level. If you sit and you do jump squats for an hour straight, then that hour, those last jump squats, my guess is that wouldn’t even be a jump. You’re going to be squatting because your legs are going to be done because your explosiveness is gone, your energy stores are gone.

You don’t have anything left in the tank to go with. So because we structure our workout with eight exercises in that hour, it allows us to work on eight different things and we can work on explosiveness twice, speed, twice, agility twice, and so on, which allows us to get a maximum workload within that hour. So the next thing that separates us, and this is our big separator, is at pro day sports we have pro day scouting combines. So a scouting combine is what it sounds like. The NBA, combine the NFL, combine all of those major sports that have these to test athletic abilities of individual outside and in the sport. So in the NBA and NFL combine, you have your skill-specific drills, which are going to be how do you catch, how do you throw, how do you shoot, how do you pass? And then you’re going to have the athletic drills.

What’s your 40-yard dash? What’s your shuttle run? What’s your lane drill? And so on, where you figure out these measurables of athletic ability, which enhance your ability to play on a high level because they see that you’re an overall athlete. So maybe if you’re slightly lacking in your ability to shoot the college or pro team or high school team will see that you are accelerating in your speed and explosiveness. So they can teach you how to shoot because you have these intangible athletic abilities, which are awesome. So with that, our protein scouting combines have all of our athletes come in and perform in this scouting combine, whatever sport it is. If you’re a gymnast, if you are a table tennis player, if you play chess, you can come and do a scouting combine to figure out what is your speed, power, explosiveness, agility, and reaction.

All of the measurements of athleticism. Yes, you could add a few more in there, balance, and so on. But those are the the skills that we test, the attributes that we test. We do about two drills per section. So if we’re working speed, we’re going to have a couple of speed. If we’re working explosiveness, we’re going to have couple explosiveness. That way we can measure a bunch of different things. For example, if we’re working explosively, we’re going to be working broad jump, standing vertical, and approach vertical. So we have three different tests for that. In those tests, you get to see what is your broad jump, which is your explosiveness out, your standing vertical, which is your explosiveness up and your approach vertical, which is your ability to transfer speed out to explosiveness up. So we track all of these things, giving you exact measurements.

So instead of just, Hey, be better at your sport. We’re saying, no, no, no, no, no. Don’t look for the differences. You can, you’ll see them. But here is the specific information on how you’ve increased through your time there. However long it is through time here we’re going to be tracking all of this stuff, showing you exact increases and even decreases because who knows if you’re not doing the things you need to do, you could see decreases. So we’re going to track this for you so you don’t have to guess if you’ve gotten better, you have the cold hard facts that you 100% have gotten better. So a lot of talking on this one with how we do it differently. I talked about the flaws, danger, lack of supervision, overcrowded classes that don’t allow for actual training. The style that involves standing around and waiting on other athletes for your turn and mindlessly doing exercises just to be better at your sport, whatever that means when it comes to the best Sports Performance Training Tulsa.

So those are all red flags you should look for in whatever training it is you’re using now. Or if you’re going to look into some training, those are the things you should watch out for and avoid at all costs because those aren’t going to be fruitful in creating the best athlete they can be. There’s danger, there’s a risk, and there’s just a waste of time included in all of those. We approach that in a different way by not having unsupervised exercises, by minimizing the amount of complex, unsupervised movements. Um, we avoid them, what’s your one-rep max philosophy? Our style of workout is different so that way we get maximum effort. We do combine testing to track your progress as you go. And one of the big things as well as we minimize our class sizes. So that’s kind of, it goes without saying. With the unsupervised exercise, we make sure that we have enough training for the number of people, but for the majority of our classes, we max them out at eight people.

For teams, the max would go with 16 so our goal isn’t how many people can we jam into this class. Our goal is how can we keep this training personalized enough where everybody feels included and everybody feels like they’re growing as an athlete. So because of our smaller class size, it allows our trainers to be much more in touch, have much more of a personal relationship with all of the athletes, and thus get the athlete to give their all and get the most out of everything that we do. So that’s going to be the end of this one. I hope that gives you a little bit of information to play out in your own decision making. When it is time to choose someone to train to coach or whatever your kid, you need to focus on these things, make sure that these boxes are checked, and if they’re not, keep looking around.

There’s a ton, a ton of good places to train and good places to get better out there. There isn’t one singular that you could say is the best at all of it. Everybody has their own special attributes, but this list of things you should just be mindful of and be sure that you don’t get caught up in a situation that isn’t going to be the best for you. Don’t get stuck and just picking one and being done. Look around, talk to some people, try some free classes, and give everything a go. If you’re interested in trying anything at pro day, we offer free classes for anybody who wants to come in and try a free class. Uh, we offer a multitude of services at our gym, so contact us if you have any questions or if you’re interested in anything. If you have any ideas for a podcast, anything that you want the answer to, send us a message. We can either just respond straight back or we can possibly do both and respond back and make an entire podcast over it. So be sure to reach out. Let us know if you have any questions. Thank you all so, so much for listening and we’ll see you next time.