Strength and Conditioning - St. John's Preparatory School

Strong Body, Strong Mind

STRENGTH AND CONDITIONING

Every single student is welcome in the weight room.

At St. John's Prep, strength and conditioning actually lives under our Wellness Department, not Athletics. It's important to us that all students feel welcome in the fitness center, regardless of whether they are on an athletic team or not.

To that end, students can take Strength & Conditioning as a PE elective or sign up for our seasonal, after-school strength and conditioning programs. Athletes in-season will participate in strength and conditioning programs twice a week.

PE: Strength & Conditioning

This course develops students’ knowledge, skills, and confidence to support a lifetime of healthy physical activity. Students learn to design and safely administer evidence-based training programs that improve strength, power, speed, agility, endurance, stability, and hypertrophy while promoting lifelong wellness.

For Athletes

Our dedicated strength and conditioning coaches work with all teams currently in-season, twice a week, with specific work outs and exercises that target the needs of that sport. And while the Levis Family Fitness Center is the home base for our strength and conditioning program, strength and conditioning coaches go directly to teams as well, whether that's fencing practice in Memorial Gym to tennis practice down on the courts.

The Full Picture

In addition to learning movement efficiency, movement variability, and working on core movements like push and pull, students gain an understanding of the role sleep hygiene, hydration, and nutrition play in overall wellness, and can see how those elements can directly correlate to their experience in the fitness center.

The two-story Joseph R. Levis '60 Fitness Center allows everything from the warm up to the cool down to happen in a dedicated space.

Walk through the fitness center and you'll see students moving through their workout with a piece of paper close by. Programming is by group, but students track their individual performance themselves. It's the best of both worlds: your only competition is yourself, but you're surrounded by peers who are doing the same workout right alongside you.

How Strength & Conditioning Benefits Boys

The Power of Movement
Research shows that physical activity supports both boys' brain function and emotional well-being. Movement is a way for our students to give their brains a break from classroom learning and switch to an entirely different type of engagement, one that burns energy and allows them to feel more comfortable and able in their growing bodies.

Building Confidence
The weight room is the perfect place to learn how to fail. What does that mean? Say you didn't bench quite as much as two days ago, or maybe your speed decreased in a timed dash. We teach students to ask themselves what they want to accomplish, what they can change to make it happen, and how they can execute so that next time, they hit that PR.

Presence of Mind
The weight room isn't the classroom. There aren't grades, there isn't a test at the end of the quarter. All you need to think about is the next lift, the next push up. Strength and conditioning allows boys to enter into a mental flow state where the only thing that matters is where you are in this moment.