BFS Magazine

Notes from the BFS Total Program Camps and Certifications

Don’t confuse strength training with weight lifting, bodybuilding or powerlifting. These activities are driven by competition, with participants vying to lift heavier weights or build bigger muscles.

For kids, light resistance and controlled movements are best, with emphasis on proper technique and safety. Your child can do many strength training exercises with his or her own body weight. Free weights and machine weights are other options.

Practical advice on the best way to get strong with this powerful exercise

There is absolutely no question about it: The deadlift is the most misunderstood lift in America today. Many coaches tell me they are concerned that it can cause lower back pain, and certainly there are several deadlifting mistakes that can cause this problem. Here are three valuable tips to help athletes deadlift more weight and perform the exercise safely:

Tip 1. Only perform low reps. To perform more than 5 reps in the deadlift, especially in the 10-rep category, is asking for serious trouble. The maximum number of heavy reps that should ever be attempted in the deadlift is 5.

Despite advanced sports medicine care and the best-of-the-best coaching staffs, there were a reported 45 hamstring injuries during the first three weeks of the 2019 NFL season!

For over four decades, BFS has taken a multi-faceted approach to prevent hamstring injuries. In addition to a stretching program that addresses both hamstring and hip flexor tightness, the BFS program includes many weight room exercises that strengthen the hamstrings, including glute-ham raises, hex bar (or straight-bar) deadlifts, squats, straight-leg deadlifts, and Olympic lifting movements such as cleans. Why so much attention to a single muscle group? Besides helping to prevent injuries, hamstring development is critical for improving speed.

There is no question that simply playing a sport will improve agility and lateral speed. There are many methods of increasing these essential athletic qualities that will help any athlete beyond their natural talent or how much they practice their sport.  Learning proper movement skills is, of course, essential to moving quickly, and this is one of the primary jobs of the sports coach.  Here are six effective ways to step up your athlete's game...

It was while attending South Sioux City High School in South Sioux City, Nebraska, that Shadle learned about the BFS Total Program. “A BFS clinician came to our school, set up our weight room, and taught our coaching staff how to implement the program,” says Shadle. “I liked the BFS program and thought it helped me stay healthy and set up a strong structural foundation for my future athletic career.

Distance runners often have reservations about lifting weights, but this wasn’t the case with Shadle’s high school coaches. “The message I got from my coaches was that performance is all about the strength-to-weight ratio.  It was important to be structurally strong and fast.” She says that not only did the BFS program fulfill her goals of being a faster and stronger runner, but also helped keep her injury-free. “Strength training for a distance runner is much more than just strengthening bones,” says Shadle.

The BFS Dot Drill is not only an effective warm-up but it also improves agility and quickness. BFS offers a FREE DOWNLOAD to help you get started on the DOT DRILL. Check out the BFS Downloads here: http://bit.ly/BFSDownloads BFS also offers other DOT DRILL materials here: http://bit.ly/BFSDotDrill Thanks for watching!

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How important is ankle mobility to injury prevention? One study of 10,393 Australian basketball players found that the “players who did not stretch before the game were 2.6 times more likely to injure an ankle than players who did.” Let’s look at another example.

Many athletes believe that tendons are fragile and that they should wear high-top tennis shoes for added support – however, there is no research to support the idea that high-top tennis shoes reduce the risk of any injury. Further, in the sport of weightlifting (snatch and clean and jerk), the athletes wear low-top shoes. And although male athletes have lifted triple bodyweight overhead and women have lifted double, ankle and knee injuries are rare.