Strength & Conditioning
The Wellness Center is the destination at Marin Academy for anyone looking to improve their health and wellness.
If you are looking for a place to be active, a place to ask questions and get ideas, or you would like to start a training regiment but do not know where to begin, the Wellness Center will welcome you.
The Wellness Center is open to all students, faculty, and staff. Any student at Marin Academy is welcome to use the space, you do not have to be an athlete. However, the availability of the space does revolve around athletic team's schedules, and it may not always be open for other students. For availability, and any other questions regarding the use of this space, please e-mail Anton Karbushev.
The Wellness Center is also the home of the MA Strength and Conditioning Program. The goal of the Strength and Conditioning program at Marin Academy is simple: develop better athletes. "Better Athletes" means teaching skills that will allow them to perform the demands of their sport(s) safely, effectively, and repeatedly.
We accomplish this by keeping the following in mind:
- Develop Athletes, not Weightlifters, Power-lifters, Cross-fitters, or any single specific activity. The goal of the program is to train the body to move better as a whole. As coaches we put aside our own ego and preferences for the benefit of the athletes we work with.
- Basic Movement Patterns. The goal is to teach athletes to bend, hinge, decelerate, and resist unwanted movement. These are basic athletic traits that used to be learned through childhood play, and multi activity/sport participation through adolescence. However, today many kids are sedentary through childhood, and then progress directly to specialized single sport participation. This leads to many developmental, and overuse injuries. Our mission is to fill in the missing middle step of developing, and re-enforcing, basic movement patterns to help keep athletes healthy for their sport.
- Not training specific sport movements. The goal is to develop stability, flexibility, mobility, and strength, across multi-joint movements, that can be implemented across the board for athletic movement in all sports. In other words, develop the most athletic kids possible, with the least amount of potential for injury, and then turn them over to their sports coaches, who will teach them the sport specific skills they need to succeed. Working out does not improve your jump shot, your swing, your stroke, or your serve (insert any specific sport criteria). But, making the body stronger, more resilient, and more fit, will prepare it for the stresses of all of the repetitions it will take to develop those skills.
- The goal is to always move well first. Once athletes can move well, then they can move more, move often, and react to movement. The belief that athletes need to be "broken down" first, or "run into the ground" to show them how out of shape they are is extremely outdated. These approaches mainly lead to injuries, and decreased moral. Our goal is to first teach how to do things correctly, and then increase volume/intensity/load as needed.
- Results come from consistency, accountability, and effort. Those who show up, work hard, and try to improve their weakness, rather than only continue to work on their strengths, will see the most benefits. This applies across all aspects of life, and this is what we stress to the athletes we work with.
