Although Joe says he will be covering a few more topics as far as the business coaching is concerned, we are pretty much focused on shadowing at this point. This week I watched as he worked with one his high school athletes from his sports performance program.
Joe was a scholarship football player and has a serious passion for sports. He tells me that working with athletes is what he wants to be doing with the majority of his time. Although he says he will always make time to work with people from all different backgrounds and needs, he believes he can do something really special working with athletes.
The athlete is a football player and will be entering his freshman year of high school next year. He is a safety and cornerback. He is injury free so far, and his dad wants Joe to mainly work on improving his speed. He made it a very big point to make sure I understood that even though they were working on a lot of mobility, jumping, sprinting, and agility, the absolute best way to improve an athlete's speed is to improve his strength.
In this situation, the athlete is doing most of his weight training at a gym that his dad works at with one of their coaches, so Joe is doing what he calls the "fine tuning". Still he does work in some weight training with him. He focuses on the trap bar dead lift with all athletes as it is easy to teach, safe, and more than any other exercises, directly improves speed.
His approach to sports performance training is to get the maximum results, doing the minimum amount of work, because it decreases the chance of getting hurt.
Even though I don't see myself working with athletes because I'm more interested in training body builders, it was a very fun and interesting session to watch. I could tell how much he loves this type of training more than any other.