Weight Training Goals - Chris Woldstad

If you want to lose fat or change your body for an athletic event, one of the most important things you can do is lift weights. Diet, cardiovascular workouts and flexibility are equally important. Lifting weight can:

1. Help raise your metabolism. Muscle burns more calories than fat, so the more muscle you have, the more calories you’ll burn all day long.
2. Strengthen bones, especially important for women
3. Make you stronger and increase muscular endurance
4. Help you avoid injuries
5. Increase your confidence and self-esteem
6. Improve coordination and balance

There are some basic terms that everyone should know if you are going to get involved in weight training.

1. Overload: To build muscle, you need to use more resistance than your muscles are used to. This is important because the more you do, the more your body is capable of doing, so you should increase your workload to avoid plateaus. You should be able to finish your last rep with difficulty but also with good form.
2. Progression: To avoid plateaus, you need to increase your intensity regularly. You can do this by increasing the amount of weight lifted, changing your sets/reps, changing the exercises and changing the type of resistance. You can make these changes on a weekly or monthly basis.
3. Specificity: This principle means you should train for your goal. That means if you want to increase your strength, your program should be designed around that goal.
4. Rest and Recovery: Rest days are just as important as workout days. It is during these rest periods that your muscles grow and change, so make sure you’re not working the same muscle groups 2 days in a row.

The goals of every student are going to be different depending on their age, height, weight and weight lifting level they are currently at. All sports have strength, speed, agility, and flexibility involved in them, so we test every quarter on different exercises to set goals for ourselves. We test in:

1. Strength: Bench Press, Squats, Power Clean and Dead Lift
2. Power: Vertical Jump, Standing Long Jump
3. Speed: 40 Yard Dash and 20 Yard Dash
4. Agility: Dot Drill
5. Flexibility: V-Sit and Reach

My way of measuring these activities is with the Bigger Faster Stronger Poster which gives a measurement for every kid depending on their age, height, weight and year in school they are. The poster gives them a rating of Good, Great, All-State or All American. We do a pre-test at the beginning of the quarter and then a final test at the end of the semester. The students receive t-shirts if they reach their goal in three of the four lifts in the strength category.