Being a Good Role Model & Mentor

One of my favorite things is when my athletes send me pictures of the dinners they have cooked or their grocery carts.

It usually takes a while--especially with high school boys. They have to first care about eating and then learn to accept responsibility for preparing their own food. The first step for many guys is making scrambled eggs or their own peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for their lunch or after school snack. This is the fist step in their evolution.

Food shopping and real cooking are not usually high on their list of fun things to do, especially when mom and dad are still around. Not even close to being on the radar.

But then something changes--usually is it going away to college--and WHAMMO, whole foods, lean meat, vegetables, fruits, nuts suddenly become part of their vocabulary and shopping list. They send me pictures of giant salads and stirfrys.

They very excitedly tell me they start to feel the benefits of eating better and they embrace the opportunity to make nutrition part of their training program. They brag about the junk food they've left behind.

I cannot tell you how happy this makes me! If I don't do anything else for these kids, I can at least help them discover the joy in shopping for and cooking their own food and life-long value in eating well.

Comments

Boris said…
That's HUGE!
8:03 AM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Form and Function

Image
Way back in 2002, I scanned these images by Howard Schatz from Sports Illustrated (October 14, 2002). A fascinating array of elite female athlete physiques, heights and weights, eh? These are some of the women featured in his book Athlete --a very cool pictorial essay that celebrates athletic form and function.
Read more

It's About Preparing People, not Preventing Injuries

ACL injuries do not happen in a void. People sustain injuries when their infrastructure is unable to manage a specific set of physical circumstances. To describe the mechanism of the injury without the context of the person and their level/type of sport, is to miss valuable insight. In sport, we prepare the person, to the best of our understanding, to meet the physical demands of that sport. We do not just work to prevent one particular injury; we prepare athletes to navigate the total sport physical environment. By "we" I mean the coaching and support staff -- specifically the athletic development staff.  Athletic development (AD) coaches prepare athletes through the development of physical literacy and movement competencies via movement progressions. It is more than strength, power, agility; it is the acquisition of knowledge, skills, abilities and behaviors to manage themselves within the entire sporting environment. At the higher levels of sport, AD coaches coordinate wit...
Read more

Strength: Overcoming Tradition & Assumptions

Image
The term "strength" comes with many images and stereotypes. The most common stereotype usually includes intimidating men who look like action figures, in spaces that look like iron jungles. Strength is associated with mass gain, limb girth increases, muscle hypertrophy and maximal force production against an external load. With regard to lower body strength, we speak in terms of multiples of bodyweight (BW), with the ratio of 2x BW historically viewed as necessary and desirable. We have historically trained in terms of 1 RM. There has been a trend recently to adopt a VBT (velocity based training) approach, as we know 1 RM changes on a daily basis and technology now allows us to more finely tune things with velocity as the target within each set. These things can be helpful as we initially learn to measure and document progress. But I think it is important to step back from this narrow outlook, because this view of strength does not serve all of us well, in either the rehab or...
Read more