By Ella Harvey
As a rite of passage in high school, many freshmen take the Strength and Conditioning fitness class to earn their Physical Education credit. Some even decide to take Advanced Fitness later. I spoke with Coach Maldonado and Coach Dobbins about the class (I took it last year, and they saw me bench-press 450lbs). Both coaches have been teaching the year-long weightlifting class for 15 years.
Because this class is mainly for freshmen, Coach Maldonado said he enjoys “teaching them new techniques and watching them get stronger, watching them improve and progress to doing things they thought they couldn’t do,” he explained.
Along with this, many freshmen are taught early on about “Injury prevention” and lifts that center around injury prevention. They also focus on “athletic performance, and creating better health for them to be prepared for their athletic journey.”
Beginner weightlifting involves learning techniques in the first semester and gradually becoming more advanced throughout the year. “We do some Olympic lifts, and then we do some smaller lifts, smaller muscle lifts, along with those. But the core lifts we do are clean, squats, bench, those things.”
The class, besides just weightlifting, also includes agility and running drills. The coaches try to implement heart rate runs, teaching how to get your heart rate in a certain zone (this was the most horrible part of the entire class, sorry :)). But the main point of these runs is to build endurance.
If there is an injury outside of the weightlifting class, in a Lovett or club sport, the coaches still instruct students on how to adjust their workouts to avoid further aggravating the injury. Coach Dobbins explained that they “work with the trainers to modify their workouts so they can rehab their injuries to back to health.”
When it comes to Coach Maldonado and Coach Dobbins tracking students’ progress, they use documentation papers to chart their lifts. The coaches also walk around the weight room to help evaluate students’ form and technique to make sure the lifts are making them stronger rather than potentially injuring. They also track their lifting weights with weekly sheets.
Freshmen are not the only ones who weightlift in the gym; many sports teams also do weekly like wrestling and football. Coach Maldonado teaches four freshmen weightlifting classes and says that it is his favorite “team” to coach.
Since these coaches have been teaching the class for 15 years, they have both developed their own coaching styles. Coach Maldonado expressed how “my style would be positive reinforcement and constructive criticism,” he explained.
Coach Dobbins explained that sometimes his students feel unmotivated or do not want to lift a certain weight, yet he emphasizes with them that the more you work, “you’re getting almost instant gratification by seeing that you’re doing more weight than you did last,” he says.
Even when someone is unmotivated, the coaches explained that someone successful in the program should be able to have a “good attitude, good work ethic, and the ability to be coachable.
What I vividly remember working in the weight room at nine o’clock in the morning was the playlist, which was “repetitive, but pumped you up,” one of my friends said.
So while this class is sometimes considered a chore, in the end, the weightlifting coaches have created a well-thought-out course to help freshmen become as healthy and strong as possible.
