Oct 11, 2017Remodeling a Weightroom
When it came time to renovate the weightroom at Deer Park (Texas) High School, Strength and Conditioning Coordinator Doug Bull installed 48 Hammer Strength racks.
Equipment that is reliable, durable, and versatile is essential for any weightroom. That’s why Doug Bull, MS, CSCS, Strength and Conditioning Coordinator at Deer Park (Texas) High School, chose Hammer Strength when remodeling the school’s weightroom in 2012. Since installing 48 Hammer Strength racks, Bull and his staff have been able to safely and effectively serve the roughly 980 athletes at their school.
The Hammer Strength full racks, half racks, and squat racks are easily adaptable to every athlete’s needs, whatever their experience or training level. As he oversees the strength and conditioning programs of all 32 teams at Deer Park, Bull is constantly having to adjust and modify exercises based on an athlete’s sport and strength progression. The versatility of the racks has helped make Bull’s job much easier.
“When the girls’ basketball team comes into the weightroom, for example, we’ll split the girls up based on their training age and then we’ll run three different programs simultaneously,” Bull says. “With the Hammer Strength equipment, we can easily do the same types of exercises, just at a different spot in their progression.”
“We’re working with so many different sports, and the openness of the racks enables us to do a variety of different exercises off of each one,” he continues. “I don’t need a special piece of equipment to do a certain exercise, such as a bench press. We can bench press out of all 48 racks that we have. This enables us to adapt. It gives us more versatility in how we program each athlete in each sport because we can do pretty much anything we want to out of those racks.”
While the versatility of the equipment is extremely useful, Hammer Strength racks also possess quality and reliability. This helps ensure that the athletes at Deer Park will be safe when they walk into the weightroom and can train without any added dangers. For Bull, safety and injury prevention is what strength and conditioning is all about.
“The only thing worse than a 14 year old who doesn’t remember what you taught him yesterday is placing him in a rack that might put him in harm’s way,” says Bull. “You need equipment that’s not going to jeopardize the safety of any of your kids. The purpose of the weightroom is to help prevent an injury, and the last thing you want to do is have your equipment or your programming create one.”
Bull’s philosophy is to teach young athletes lifelong skills that will keep them healthy long after they leave Deer Park. Even though many of his athletes might not continue to play sports after high school, Bull hopes that they will take the techniques he has taught them to any gym or workout facility they go to. And in order to teach these training techniques to hundreds of student-athletes everyday, he needs equipment he can rely on.
“The equipment is being used 12 hours a day, everyday,” Bull says. “That’s one of the reasons we went with Hammer Strength. I knew the racks would hold up.”
