Georgia Tech Hoops Gets Back in the Weight Room
June 10, 2020 / Strength & Conditioning • Winning Hoops
As student-athletes at various levels begin rearing up for their respective seasons in The Peach State, the Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets’ basketball strength and conditioning coach Dan Taylor has developed an altered plan for his players.
In a recent article with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Taylor outlined his plans for the men’s basketball team as the athletic department begins the first phase of its voluntary workout program.
In Georgia Tech’s Phase 1, only returning Tech athletes living in metro Atlanta are eligible to participate. Athletic activities were suspended in mid-March due to the COVID-19 pandemic until the NCAA voted to allow schools to resume voluntary, on-campus workouts on June 1.
To start, Taylor has his players judge their performance in the hour-long workout on a scale from 1 to 10, what he refers to as a Rate of Perceived Exhaustion (RPE) scale.
“And I want the first two weeks, that perceived number, to be low, like lower than five,” he told the AJC. “Just nice and easy. Not easy, like just walking through, but just easy, like I’m not leaving here exhausted.”
The early challenge for Taylor has been trying to harness his elite athletes from doing too much too early, as many have not been part of any organized workouts in nearly three months.
“The guys will be a little bit of a pain with it because they’re going to want to put their foot on the gas because it’s their nature to,” Taylor said to the AJC.
Athletes will have six one-hour workouts in the first two weeks of Phase 1, three each week. In the hour, Taylor’s plan, according to the AJC, is to put players through 25 different exercises, doing 20 repetitions of each, along with warm-up, cool down and a few exercises specifically designed for each player.
The socially-distance approved range of movements and lifts include planks, dumbbell bench press, and trap-bar deadlifts. No more than four players will be allowed in the weight room and everyone will be masked.
Since the campus has been closed, Taylor, like many other strength coaches in the country, designed individual workouts for his student-athletes and offered advice. The level of commitment those players used in those at-home workouts remains to be seen, however.
To read the full story on Georgia Tech men’s basketball strength coach Dan Taylor’s return-to-sports regimen from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, click here.
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