It should come as no surprise that among strength and conditioning coaches, certain commonalities exist: a desire to help young adults push beyond boundaries they didn’t know they could, a desire to educate those same students on fundamental technique in the weight room, and certainly a strong work ethic. There are few careers that employ a group of harder working individuals.
For professional high school strength coaches who place such a premium on diligence, you would have to forgive them for falling victim to a pervasive misconception, which is, more work means more gains. Simply put, this is not always the case. While coaches and many of their athletes have cultivated within themselves the idea that pushing through and grinding hard will produce elite results, there exists a threshold beyond which this is most assuredly not the case.
Beyond that threshold lies injury, exhaustion, heat illness, even rhabdomyolysis, a condition whereby training far beyond one’s work capacity can result in the release of the protein myoglobin into the blood. This protein can easily damage kidneys and has been known to cause death.
So, it’s important to understand that taking time to slow down isn’t a weakness. Rather, taking time to rest and rethink how your programming is impacting your student-athletes can be just as important as a strong work ethic.
Lee Weber, Head Football Coach and Head Strength Coach at Rose Hill (Kan) High School, is one such strength coach who clearly understands this concept. After 22 years in his chosen profession, Weber has found the right pace to get the most out of his athletes without grinding them to dust. At Rose Hill, he has implemented Tony Holler’s “Feed the Cats” philosophy. As a 43-year coaching veteran who now coaches Track & Field at Plainfield (Ill.) High School, Holler has plenty of experience and data showing that his philosophy works.
Lee Weber describes the impact coaches can have when they explain “the why” to student-athletes.
“You have to start thinking like a cat and not like a dog,” Weber says. “It’s really the truth. We want to work like dogs. Everybody talks about the grind, but Feed the Cats is anti-grind. It’s that ‘less is more” philosophy. It means that, when you’re walking out of practice at 4:30, it’s important to accept how good that feels and stop telling yourself, ‘We should be doing more. We should be doing more. We should be doing more.’ That is the mentality you have to fight.”
“Feed the Cats” is what keeps Weber’s athletes coming back to get better every day. Instead of burning fuel until empty during every single training session, Weber channels his athletes’ effort more conservatively and efficiently. It’s about being mindful of the effort you do put in rather than dwelling on the erroneous idea that you haven’t done enough.
By employing this training methodology, Weber insists that his athletes follow a much more manageable pace, leaving them both the time and the brainpower to engage in deeper ways and ultimately outperform those who run to exhaustion. This way, athletes can focus on consistent improvement over time, rather than constantly pushing themselves beyond a threshold that is impossible to maintain.
“We search for ways to improve those cats by showing them how to cultivate a strong work ethic without driving them away from the program,” Weber explains. “And so, we have to break the old mindset where strength and speed coaches think they must grind everybody into the dirt and then build them back up. Instead, we must identify and enhance the abilities they do have and help them perform at their top level.”
By slowing down and reevaluating the grind, Weber has discovered a more sustainable training method for his program that keeps athletes coming back for more. Now that he’s “Feeding the Cats,” he’s discovered a new perspective that promotes both healthier, sustainable training and a productive environment in which to coach it.
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