It pays to win is a phrase our offseason teams have been hearing a lot this spring. As a staff we decided it would be a good time for our offseason teams to get back to competing. This meant that everything from our warm ups to our actual lifts were going to be competitive in nature and we would reward winners and punish losers. Hence the birth of our unofficial slogan of this week: “It Pays to Win.”
Collegiate athletes are near the top level of their sport and every one of them will tell you they did not reach that level without being competitive people. Something within drives them to work on bettering themselves and their team. During the season they satisfy their competitive hunger by playing their games or competing in practice to earn more playing time. When the season is over, so is their opportunity to compete on a regular basis. For many athletes, this makes for a very long and boring offseason. The last thing we want is for our athletes to lose focus of their goals even though they may seem far away. So it is important to incorporate competition into a team’s offseason plan to keep their focus and bring back some of that fire that makes our athletes so great.
Looking for ways to make our warm-ups competitive we immediately thought of carry relays. Racing is the most basic form of competition and the external load of a sandbag or a teammate activates just about every muscle in your body. Our winners got to go on to their lift, while the losers continued to race against each other. For our lifts, we split the teams up into smaller groups and had them compete in various ways. Sometimes we would have them perform a strength circuit for time. Or have the smaller groups compete for maximum tonnage with a particular movement over a timed set. Another great method was to pair two athletes head to head and have them compete for maximum reps of a movement in a set time. We even had our women’s soccer team race through an obstacle course and play some tug of war.
Our competition week gave us great results. The athletes loved the change of pace and our workouts saw a considerable increase in intensity. As strength coaches, we loved being able to remind our athletes of their own competitive spirit. The offseason can be a long and arduous time for an athlete; however, they must never forget that this is the time when the most important gains can be made in their training. Our athletes will not soon forget why it pays to win, which will make them a force when they get to compete against another team in season.
