SS in Mass Setting

[Jason Ferguson]

I am a Texas HS Football and Track coach. Been doing it 20 years. Very blessed and fortunate to have been "brought up right" in the strength game in the sense of what matters most, form, programming and so forth with my early to mid 20's being spent in WF and training at Rip's gym as well as delving off into some competitive years in PLing into my mid 30's and actually training at Westside and crap like that. I've had great success with strength and speed development in HS coaching winning State Championships in both Powerlifting and Track. I happen to agree with Rip in the sense that HS public school coaches are extremely retarded in their understanding and application of basic barbell fundamentals to the performance enhancing aspect of sports. I'm a rare cut of coach in the sense that I believe, specifically in football, if we are stronger than you, we will beat you. So in a nutshell - that's me.

I constantly, like so many here, seek, study and read things to constantly improve. The longer I stay on this journey, the more I embrace and love the simplicity of SS. I've probably adhered to 90% of the concept over the last 15 years. I would say most of my programs evolve to some form of intermediate level lifting and we have had some tremendous success and accomplishment in strength and speed gains.

4 weeks ago, I got a job in my hometown, coaching here and while there is plenty of athleticism and ability here and they had a very successful football season that ended in the State Quarterfinals.....they happen to be the weakest group of HS athletes I've experienced in my career. The great news, is that some key staff members agree and want to make a change. So Starting Strength for Novices begins this Monday.

Now, in fairness - a lot of HS level coaches who actually do have understanding and knowledge to get things done, are some times handcuffed with facilities and other resources. For example, here, we have only 12 squat racks with a bench in it. That's it. The problem with that is we have 130 lifters. Our athletic period is shared with the HS Girls program at the exact same time as well. So, these guys were having a difficult time getting things figured out. On top of that, we have about 40 minutes maximum to get this done each day.

So here's what we did. Divide the kids into 3 groups. And I'm sorry, but something had to give so our straight XC/Tennis types who are mere participants and not "committed" took the hit for the team. The two largest groups (about 40 each) get priority. We'll have an A.M. session and a P.M. session.

We are doing Squat/Bench/DL and Squat/Press/DL MWF with both groups for the next 5 weeks. Another problem many public school coaches have is how to track or keep records. So what I did was make a loading chart based on our 3 work sets that include warm up sets as well. What they do is simply find their work set weight and perform the 3 warm up sets and the 3 work sets. With 2 coaches to every 15 lifters, we help determine if their squat goes up 5 or 10 for next workout and same for bench and press. They sign and date next to that workout weight and bring their card with them next workout and pick up where they left off.

I know the validity of this program and the results it can get. I'll keep you guys posted on how it goes. Coaching that's available from people like Rip and others here is invaluable and I believe, if coaches will LEARN their craft and what really matters and will coach everything that does matter, we can have close to the same results in a team or "mass" setting as can be had with a private coach. I further believe the closer a program can come to this concept the greater success the kids can have. I'm stoked about it and will share results.

This is the beginning of something great here!

[Mark Rippetoe]

Making sure John Janacek sees this.

[John Janecek]

Good to see this. I agree the general knowledge base on strength/speed development of just about every athletic coaching staff I ever worked with the past 30 years was..... We'll just say lacking.

[mpalios]

I'm excited to see how this progresses and will be jealous that my HS son won't be able to experience this in his HS football program

[mpalios]

Just a quick comment. My son and I went to see Pete T on 12/31/19. He took to it very well and we trained together for about 1 month. His form was better than mine.

The last 2.5 weeks, he's been training with his team, and has completely reverted/regressed to the bar too high, back more parallel than mine, etc. Of course he's stronger than many of his peers, so there's some positive reinforcement that is happening. Again, we we had someone like you, Jason, to coach him up.

[Sawyer]

Consider adding a facebook group for formchecks.

Encourage some students to film and post (or just send you) their worksets from a good angle and then you can make a few form analysis videos, where you comment their form and post these in the group.

Yes, this takes time and effort. But without enough coaches it could be a good solution to explain the technique to everybody at the same time.