We all have an exercise or two that we absolutely hate doing in the gym. You see it on your program and immediately you want to go back into the locker room, change, and leave because of some made up 24-hour disease you make up to avoid doing that one exercise. If only there was a way to add an exercise into the one you hate to make it a little more tolerable.
So, I try to convince you all that you need this particular exercise. It is something that you’re not good at, and you can’t always just do the things that you’re good at. If you only do the things that you’re good at here then you’ll develop imbalances, pain, potentially long term injury. Which is inevitably met with, “I know, but I still don’t like it”.
Unanimously, the Assault or Airdyne sprints are the least favorite. Personally, I don’t mind the Assault bike, I will choose it as a preferred method of aerobic work because I don’t enjoy running mostly (unless it is after a ball). I’ve heard it been called a number of different names with words consisting of “death” and “machine”. I’ll stop and ask why people don’t like it and all I get in return is a shrug of the shoulders or no real reason at all. I understand, if you told me to run for a prolonged period of time I wouldn’t really be too pleasant about it. Even sprints, no thanks.
Split squats and rear foot elevated/bulgarian split squats are pretty high up on that list too.
Personally, I have a love-hate relationship with RFE split squats. I know they’re good for me, I know that I am getting stronger, I can readily see that carryover to performance in other lifts and sprint performance, but they absolutely wipe me out. I’m virtually junk after doing these. So the idea of doing anything else afterward is absolutely demoralizing. Especially if I were to do some sort of HIIT–forget it. But, like I said, it is a necessary evil.
There are a few others that I get the mysterious 2 hour sickness report on. What does everybody else say?
When I think of my hockey, football, and rugby athletes I think of performing the Olympic lifts and loading them up to fairly high intensities. The reason for this is to help the athletes absorb force as well as produce a lot of force in an instant to get the bar moving. I will usually use Olympic lifts with my other athletes as well–baseball excluded mostly–but to a much less degree. I like to spend my weekend evenings sifting through peer reviewed articles and I have been able to find some interesting statistics. Mostly that you only need roughly 40% of someones 1RM, or 1 repetition max, to help develop power. That’s particularly nice for my non-contact athletes who don’t necessarily see the value of a heavy hang clean.
For those athletes who have contraindications to Olympic lifting, or are baseball players, we have a number of other options that we can use. Most simply, I like to use jump squats with either a weighted vest or dumbbells. My next go-to would be the kettlebell swing varieties. It helps to teach extension of the hips and knees in an explosive manner and it does well to keep most athletes in neutral. I have also programmed things like RFE split squat jumps (RFE=rear foot elevated), split squat jumps, single leg jumps on a box/bench, and landmine push presses. I feel that these different options help to reinforce the triple extension/jump patterns and offer a variety to the athlete.