You all may remember what I've had to say about this before. But this article was an eyeopener for me too. All I had to do to know that the Oregon guy was.a snowbird was to see the term "up-downs". This particular exercise is not only useless, but downright dangerous. Nobody with an "exercise science" degree would use it. (Well … should use it.) As the article points out, the main qualifications for strength coaches are in about the same state as Georgia's qualifications for fortune tellers. (We still do that, btw.) Something needs to be done about this, but the research on building human strength is in its infancy. When we get better data, we might get better strength training.
Now, you think the article's scary? Think about strength training in high school. Where, I might add, the prospects for long term damage are much greater.
There are a lot more high schools, which means there are a lot more chances for a horror story to happen.
However, my kids’ high school coaches are better coaches than my coaches were—they know more, for one thing. There are still the moments of “how did you graduate college believing that?” when you run into a crackpot idea. I do wonder what they teach in some of the PE courses, but it still looks like coaches are better aware of exercise science now than they used to be. Younger coaches are going to have an advantage over older coaches in that area.
In college, especially at a P5 school, there’s going to be so much pressure to get the most out of your players that you might see more risks taken compared to high school.
I did a little looking, and there are some rhabdo cases in high school. It's less frequent than in older athletes, but it's there:
Rhabdomyolysis is a syndrome characterized by muscle pain, weakness and myoglobinuria and ranges in severity from asymptomatic to life threatening with acute kidney failure. While a common condition in adult populations, it is understudied in pediatrics and the majority of adolescent cases are...
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
Question: What do Redskins defensive tackle Albert Haynesworth and nearly two dozen football players from McMinnville High School in McMinnville, Ore., have in
www.si.com
This SI article is 12 years old, but I wasn't expecting to see the idea that rhabdo is all over NFL camps. There's probably more of it than we're hearing about at high levels of sport.