Barbell Notes Blog

In my experience, there are three main types of coaches in the world of weightlifting and strength training: the intuitive coach, the engineer, and the mixed type. Barbell Notes aims to help all coaches and their athletes. Find out how in this three-part blog series. Let's start with the intuitive coach.

Under the coach’s eye: the intuitive coach

The intuitive coach can be found in most old-school weightlifting clubs. She is the coach who provides the most individualized training regimens for her athletes. She selects the exercises for each training session based on the athletes’ needs. She monitors the lifter’s performance day in, day out by closely observing their movements and how they execute their lifts. She adjusts their training on the spot, based on immediate feedback from live interaction with her athletes. 

The intuitive coach does not bother prescribing training intensity; the amount of weight on the bar will be an undefined variable. This does not mean that the intuitive coach doesn’t have a plan, or that her training lacks direction. Everything she does serves the purpose of increasing the lifter’s total over a certain period of time. Training will be regulated by the athlete’s readiness, and by how much time they have until the next competition. 

So, how can a training intelligence solution like Barbell Notes help if you are an intuitive coach? Wouldn’t it be nice if, before deciding which exercises to do on a given day, you could quickly and easily visualize what and how the athlete has done in the previous days/weeks/months? Many coaches use various spreadsheets or even spiral notebooks to record such data about their weightlifting programing, but imagine an online platform you could access and update in real time from your phone or laptop that provides not only numbers, but graphs and formulas for building better workouts and athletes!

Barbell Notes delivers that and much more! It provides coaches with a single platform to keep track of all of the workouts they have prescribed. It helps build new workouts, and saves you time with a nice copy-paste functionality. Even better, via Barbell Notes you can help your athletes easily track their workouts — you predefine the exercise for an individual or a group of lifters, with some instructions if needed, and they log the workout with a click of a button from the team’s home page. Once done, they can enter their results on the spot via the Barbell Notes mobile-friendly interface.

To improve program individualization or grouping of your athletes, the workouts your athletes have logged will be accessible to you via their profile pages. You can run exercise statistics with repetition maxes and a list of all workouts. You can also access athletes’ lifting ratios (such as back squat to snatch, snatch to clean and jerk, etc.). And, you can run custom analytics showing exercises with volume distribution, intensity, and missed lifts. All this with just a few clicks.