Is your Sports Performance Facility designed to last decades?

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1 By Nick Giglia National Sales Manager-The Equipment Guys Equipmentguys.com Over the last few decades The Equipment Guys have been inolved in upgrading Sports Performace Facilities in Ohio and throughout the country. Over that period, the view of these facilities has changed from upgrading a weight room to create a Sports Performance Facility. 20 years ago if an Athletic Program had implemented a strength training program centered soley around getting their athletes stronger, they were ahead of the curve. The science of training has evolved and just getting stronger is no longer the competitive advantage. Today a facility has athlets of all genders and on all points in their developmental curve. The science of Sports Performance is always evolving. The way you train your athletes today will not be the same way they will train in five years. So how do you keep your Sports Performance efforts up to date without scrapping your facility every few years? Planning a new facility or an upgrade making it work for all athletes o Software versus Hardware CAD Forward Design o Keep it Simple - Less is more o Avoid training Bottlenecks o Space as a design element o Get the important stuff done in the first 30 minutes Keep it working for decades o Planning for Oil Changes and Maintenance o Open Purchase Orders Making it simple o Modular Equipment Designs training changes, so should your equipment.

2 So you are planning a new facility or an upgrade making it work for all athletes There are many elements that lead up to the planning of a new facility to get it from an idea to a reality. For the purposes of brevity, we will keep the business side of what it takes to even get to the point of getting a new facility off the ground removed from this writing. It is a full article in and of itself. Software versus Hardware We define Software as training programs/protocols. Hardware is the physical tools that allow you to execute training programs/protocols. It only makes sense to think deeply through how your athletes will train before you buy the hardware needed to do this. We can help you look into different training philosphies, but in the end it should match what your coaches feel comfortable with. All the same, we feel the following qualities must be involved in thinking about your training programs. Injury Prevention: The single most important element of a modern training program. Does your training program focus on strengthening joints and other vulnerable aspects of the human body? Asking an athelte that cannot do a body weight squat to add a bar to their back is a formula for failure. Confidence Building: You need your athletes to feel more confident. Impacting the one square foot between their ears is much more valuable than increasing a squat 50 lbs. This can be accomplished by impacting their bodies or by accomplishing goals. You want that 3 rd string athlete to push the folks in front of them to work harder. Confidence is a key element. Team Building: No matter the sport, the group element of team training cannot be overlooked. Leaders will rise and bonds will form. Teaching athletes the mindset of competing is the ultimate competitive advantage. Physical Strength, Quickness and Speed: An incredibly important element. Improving these in the proper fashion will prevent injuries, build confidence and ultamitly bring the team together. One huge note here, all athletes benefit from all of the above. Male/Female, the differences between how you train your football team as compared to women s volleyball aren t as great as you d think. Again, see the first sentence of this paragraph. All athletes and teams, regardless of the sport or their sex, train for the same basic goals. Set/rep schemes may change, progression into more advance elements may be different and even how some of the exercises are performed may vary slightly. Still there is more commonality to training than there are differences. CAD Forward Design the hardware element of design This simple exercise of undestanding the training element brings us to CAD Forward Design. In the Auto Industry this term means that design of the CAD of vehicles centers around the needs of the driver. A facility design needs to take into account these elements. These facts need to be stated first. Teams that have never embraced training will embrace training when a new facility is complete. How many athletes do you want to train in an hour?

3 Most teams will want to train between the end of school and 5 PM So a CAD-Forward design must broach these elements. Keep it Simple - Less is More Keep things simple. You want as little steel and iron as possible to safely and efficiently train your teams. If you think of facility usage based on the participation rates of your current facility you will be shocked by the turnout once you put in a new facility. So if we think deeply on the bullet-points above you will have a facility that will work for all athletes. Unlike major colleges who may train athletes 12 at a time with a professional staff of 6 coaches to oversee their training, your facility will need to be high volume dependent. You will need a facility that can deal with a large number of users at one time, and that cannot be accomplished efficiently with more equipment. It needs lots of the right equipment. Rack Stations are the central point of any modern Sports Peformance Facilities. They allow a maximum of training options in a minimal amount of space. They are also chameleon s of sorts. They can be set up for certain teams to be used for bodyweight training only, or they can be the structure to allow an athlete that squats 500 lbs accomplish that. Their versatility is the key. A typical formula for your rack stations is they should house 3 to 4 athletes at a time. So the question we posed earlier, how many athletes will you need to train in an hour comes into play. If it is 80 athletes an hour, in a perfect world you would need 20 to 26 training stations. That s typically not an option. You want as many stations as possible to fit your room, with out overcrowding the space. We also believe the design can create Compartments in your facility. By Compartments we mean a proper design will allow two or more teams to train at the same time relatively independently. An example might be a line of 8 Double Sided Half Racks with Dumbbells positioned on either side. This gives you the ability to assign multiple teams the number of stations they need concurrently, thus helping solve the problem of teams wanting to train in that After School to 5 PM sweet spot. Auxiliary machines are best kept simple too. Products that have utility are best (example Lat Pull Downs w/ Low Rows this stystem lets you target almost 80% of the muscles in a person s body). Having multiples of these type of machines are best. In a large production setting, and that s what a modern Sports Performance Facility is, you want to have enough of the auxiliary pieces that will allow you to efficiently train larger groups of athletes so that you avoid Bottlenecks Bottlenecks occur in a weight room when you lack enough pieces to allow the flow of training to access those pieces efficiently. You end up having athletes standing around, and nothing good comes out of that. So when Team A says they need one of these gadgets and Team B says they need one of these gadgets. Almost without exception, one of anything will not benefit the training of athletes and will always lead to less efficient flow in a facility.

4 We believe that instead of spending $4500 on trendy products or gadgets, re-invest that into your dumbbell sets. Having multiple pairs of dumbbells, and we d suggest as many as needed, in the weight ranges your athletes use the most. Allowing 5 or 6 athletes access to the weight ranges they need will allow the flow of your training to progress smoothly. Almost without exception, dumbbells, bands and kettlebells can work in place of dedicated single use machines. Example: Putting x 2 Leg Extension Machines into your facility when you are training large amounts of athletes. Solution: A comprehesive dumbbell set (see above) that would allow 10 to 12 athletes to do step-ups, which train the same muscles plus others muscle groups (core area, grip, etc.). Space as a Design Element Modern athletes need more than to be just strong. Movement, be it quickness or speed, should always be elements of a training program. To accomplish this, a facility needs open space to learn to jump, to move and in a perfect world to run. All the other elements we ve dicsussed leads us to this one, you must plan to keep as much open space in a facility as possible. Avoiding space eating machines or equipment is always incredibly important to help maximize the space in your facility. Think of it like a farmer looks at each acre of their fields, how can we get the most out of every square foot. If you don t plan for open space, then you simply won t have it. The value of open space? Scenario: You have to train over 200 athletes after school and get them home for family dinners. Open space in your facility will allow one group of athletes to warm-up, while another group is on the racks and another group is working on auxiliary movements. Without open space each group must wait for the other to get done, and by the time they all get their fair time in your facility it s 7 PM. At this point we can talk about Cardio for a high school facility. Cardio, by design, allows one athlete at a time to access the machines. To properly impact VO capacity, a user needs at least 20 minutes on most traditional machines. Add in over 200 athletes in a small window, and it s efficiency as a large element of a Sports Performance Facility is quite small. This is not to say Cardio pieces don t have some value, but you are not opening a YMCA. We d suggest products such as bikes that are portable (you can open up space by moving them), typically have longer lives than Treadmills or Ellipticals and the cost of buying and owning (Treadmills and Ellitpicals are pricey, and keeping them maintained is expensive too) these pieces are much better. Get the important stuff done in the first half an hour (okay maybe 40 minutes) You are dealing with teenagers. Their ability to stay focused in the best of times isn t spectacular. Now add in gruelling phsyical training, and their ability to stay on task drops dramatically. Designing a Sports Performance Facility needs to keep this fact in mind. If you read through the design points above, it syncs with this concept perfectly. An athletic department has a big blend of athletes and body types. Training knowledge and science is your friend.

5 Keeping it simple and volume friendly allows it to be great for all and will provide you with the tools needed to achieve the Competitive Advantage. Keep it working for decades - So you now have a new facility, what do you do now? You have new a new facility and if you ve followed these guidelines you have facility that will work for everyone. Is it time to sit back and watch the results? Yes, but it doesn t mean the job is done. You need to plan for Budgets for Maintenance, Repairs and Operations. Bars will get dropped onto spotter arms and bend (this isn t something a bar warranty covers), exercise bands will fray and upholstery will tear. Establishing a continuing budget for your room is incredibly important. Depending on the size of the facility, each year having a budget available to ensure that big investment keeps humming. This leads perfectly into the concept of Open Purchase Orders Making it simple Discussing the importance of establishing a yearly budget for your facility is fairly easy to understand. The issue is, when things happen, which they always will how can you get them fixed fast? Our solution to this, an Open Purchase Order. We do these with many facilities and it simply allows you to get things done quickly. Take this scenario: Issue: A person squatting slams the bar down onto the spotter arms of your racks and it bends. You need one bar, and you need it quickly because you are now down a station. You may have to go out and get 3 quotes to buy the bar, which slows down the whole process. Open Purchase order to the rescue. Setting up an open PO with your main vendor, as one part of your yearly budget, allows you to place the order ASAP for that bar. If the bar is $ to your door and you have a $ PO with that vendor, you simply contact them, the order is placed against the $ PO and now you have $ left for your facility. Month 3 your coaches notice a dozen bands are wearing down and don t seem safe. Same scenario, contact that vendor, $200 of bands are on their way quickly. You know have $ left on your Open PO. The school year is winding down, you still have that $ left on your Open PO. Now is the time to re-invest that into your facility. Your collars are okay, but some aren t as fresh as they used to be. You remember that bar that went bad and want to get one more for an on-site back up and your coaches want a few BOSU Balls to work on stability and balance. You place an order for $ to close out the PO and re-invest into your room. No lengthy PO process or paperwork. Things will always fail, the ability to fix these things fast with little interruption is the key. An Open PO just makes things easier.

6 Modular Equipment Designs training changes, so should your equipment. We stated earlier that training always changes and advances each year. The biggest reason a school will change out there current equipment is because it lacks the ability to evolve with the training. It s rarely ever because the equipment is unsafe, it s that the fully welded frames don t allow you to adjust to the way you train. The same situation can occur when you make changes to coaching staffs. The new staff loves the set-up of the room, but they feel more comfortable with a cage style rack as compared to the more open design of a half rack. It s not feasible to change out your whole room everytime new elements of training make their way into your program. Companies like ours, design our equipment just in case of these continginces. Our racks are like an erector set. Parts can be added to create a new footprint. Holes are in place to add new attachments to the racks to increase and modernize training options. Our dumbbell racks can be added onto. If you need more dumbbells, simply add more trays. If you only need some more space for your dumbbells, but would also like one of those trays to hold kettlebells we can do that. In Conclusion: To be great for everyone in your program, simple is always better. Keep as much space open as you can and make sure you buy equpment that can grow with your needs. Quality made equipment will last. Quality designed equipment will grow with you. Make sure you re-invest yearly into your facility and you will have decades of production and amazing results from your Sports Performance Facility.