Perhaps the subject never talked about at coaching conference bar discussions is the use of microsoft excel (spreadsheets) and programming training. At the end of the day, most college track and field coaches as well as college strength and conditioning coaches use a spreadsheet program and this has been poshlust for the most part. My fellow coach Andreas reviewed over a hundred workout sheets on both softcopy (file), hardcopy (print), and photo, sent from athletes with mobile device. I saw in horror what was though as cutting edge but what was in fact embarrassing. Examples were:
(1) One team hired a excel guru to add in tendo scores and kieser wattage output recordings. The were doing a four day split and also included movement training. After Andreas flew in and consulted with the team about best practices, the team concluded in order to fit the information they were to go from 12 font to 10 font, making it tough on the eyes. Also the team colors on the excel file were fine-tuned along with the football helmet jpeg for a nice price of 5,000 us dollars. Andreas pointed out that they printed on a black and white laser printer and flipped over the cardstock and suggested printing on both sides so kids were not using magnifying glasses. The facial expressions were awesome when they realized that they were spending years and money trying to squeeze everything on one page when they could have just printed two days on one side.
(2) One team was using a FMS scoring system and bodyfat % audit on their athletes every month. When this team last year was getting readings each month they had the numbers but didn’t know what to do with them. After looking at their interventions nothing was recorded but the prescriptions. Andreas and I were asking questions such as what band color did you use that week and did you record something from the stretches besides duration?. Were were not hired for training theory purposes but for IT solutions, but after talking it was clear that the team had no evidence of things working or not working. They were claiming they invested an extreme amount of money on infrastructure and they only recorded how much weight the athletes were using on their lifts, and other obvious scores such as % max, tempo of lifts, and sets and reps. We shared that their spreadsheet was the same one that was used at one college team as I recognized the template from 10 years ago except the team logo was changed. I also predicted that certain naming conventions on the weight lifting exercises were put on the second record. They still had Vew-Do balance board options and they didn’t even google the name to see what it was. They didn’t bother to add in new exercises and simply wrote them in on the drop down options because they were afraid to ruin the template.
(3) One team was using cards instead of clipboards and paper. They said that they could not afford clipboards but were printing sheets with massive shading options that were not even aesthetic. They spent more money on pens, ink cartridges, and cardstock that if they bought a brand new laser printer and printed weekly on paper with clipboards instead of monthly on cardstock they could have saved enough money to buy the staff mobile phones and service plans.
I will talk more about excel and would love people that are interested in saving time, writing better workouts, and even help with administration duties to upload your or other excels that can get the sup up my excel treatment.
Carl Valle
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