A lot of people ask me why I chose the exercises that I do
for the different sport programs that we train. It’s cause kids have to learn how to the basics before they move on to advanced exercises. 

 A lot of times we will get teams, players,
athletes, or clients that come in and believe they are a lot further along than
what they really are…and let me tell you something that is not the case with
most of the athletes that we come across. 

We will get kids that are pushing 500 lbs. on a box squat
that can’t even properly squat their own weight.  So they are doing these “BS” quarter squats
of 4 plates on each side when they can’t even keep their heals down and do a
proper body weight squat.

It’s really bad.

Doing exercises wrong not only promotes bad technique but
most importantly promotes weakness.  When
we are training athletes, hip mobility and proper hip flexibility are some of
the most important things that are overlooked. Hip mobility and hip flexibility
are probably even more important than squatting extremely heavy weight because
having good hip mobility and great range of motion promotes more power. So,
back to the question on why we chose the exercises that we do…..the things that
make us successful are the simple things that we choose to implement when we
are out training our athletes.

A sumo squat is a great example. It is a very basic exercise
that kids can’t even do right. I think one of the poorest things we see over
time is that we will demonstrate an exercise to our athletes, for example the
sumo squat. The sumo squat is a basic touch your toes with straight legs, feet
shoulder width apart and go down into a squat position and hold ourselves up
with our feet flat to the ground, with your elbows inside of our knees. We’ll
demonstrate the sumo squat to kids and what we will get is elbows outside of
the knees…toes are the only thing touching the ground…the back is flat to the
ground instead of being perpendicular to the surface that they are standing on.
It’s really sick to watch some of these athletes.

You know what this stems from? It’s from kids not watching
sports, they are playing frickin video games all day…..it’s horrible. So I
think a real big part of the un-athleticism of today’s athletes is just having
no knowledge of bio-mechanics of movements….it’s really bad.