Local Trainer Drills Young Clients On Safe Weightlifting

By John Voket

Like in many fields of expertise, personal trainer Rob Ebin has been working to not only develop a niche specialty, but to apply that specialty to help protect some of his clients most prone to particular injuries at their most vulnerable time of life. Mr Ebin has been working for the past three-and-a-half years teaching the finer nuances of weight lifting to young people — particularly in their adolescence and teen years — when they have the greatest tendency to do lifelong damage.

“In their growth spurt, teens are most susceptible to related injuries because they tend to lift too much weight, and for too many reps,” Mr Ebin recently told The Newtown Bee as he led two young clients and an adult through their paces in a rented corporate gym he uses in the Curtis Corporate Park.

“The time between 12 and 15 years old is the most dangerous period when it comes to weight training,” he continued. “Teens always want to run before they can walk, and they think they’re unbreakable, so they tend to put a lot of weight on the bar.”

The trainer, who got his first real taste for proper weight training more than 15 years ago as a student athlete and linebacker on the Ohio University football team, said he was lucky to have built his interest in safe lifting from the ground up.

“College was where I laid the foundation, and began to acquire the knowledge I eventually applied to start this career,” he said. “Our strength coach was a real professional, and we spent a lot of time doing Olympic lifts, even though he wasn’t an Olympic coach.”

Today, Mr Ebin continues his own training with Master’s Champion Olympic weight lifting coach Gary Valentine, who is based in Wilton. In his own training sessions, Mr Ebin said that he primarily instructs his teen clients on the “snatch” and the “clean and jerk.”

“The clean and jerk is really a complex lift that requires being taught to do it properly, and protect yourself from an injury that could show up and cause life-changing issues ten years or even decades later as an adult,” he said. “But you really can’t get an eager young person to understand or appreciate that when they are hot to build up their muscles to become a stronger and more competitive athlete themselves.”

If he had his druthers, Mr Ebin said he would encourage parents whose children are showing a predisposition for athletics to seek out and begin proper weight training as young as possible.

“Children are easier to train than teens,” he said. “And they establish safe practices that stick with them throughout their life, because they really listen and are eager to reproduce the proper form perfectly every time.”

He said when beginning a training regiment with teens, he will catch boys as well as girls rolling their eyes as he starts them out with few if no weights on the bar.

“Sure we start them off very slowly, so they can master the proper form,” Mr Ebin said. “But if they are dedicated, it doesn’t take long before they are actually handling more weight than they thought they were capable of lifting.”

He said there is a lot of common sense involved in weight lifting, and that the physical process is quite natural.

“The body is meant to be used in certain ways,” he said. “If they learn the proper technique and practice until it becomes natural to them — and not get impatient — they can go to a higher level of weight because of the technique, not necessarily because they are just building strength.”

When he meets prospective clients, Mr Ebin issues a standard warning to his young clients as well as their parents.

“Learning how to lift weights by watching someone do it on YouTube is extremely dangerous,” he said. “I’ve personally seen so much more bad information than good on the Internet, in general I believe it’s a bad place to start if you’re trying to learn how to lift.”

He said typing “clean and jerk” into an Internet search engine might bring up a video of an Olympic trained athlete with perfect form, but the viewer is much more likely to see videos of “a college athlete doing 300 pounds with the most terrible form.”

“It may give the impression they are lifting correctly because it is filmed in a professional or college gym environment. And I believe most college weight trainers are great,” Mr Ebin said. “Unfortunately, the lifters don’t often listen to their trainers and go off and video tape themselves and post the clips.”

Speaking of clips, Mr Ebin also touched upon another potentially lethal practice among the untrained or irresponsible weight lifters. That practice involves clipping an inappropriately high level of weights onto the bar when performing the bench press.

“It’s is extremely rare that someone dies, but the bench press is the most dangerous lift,” he said. “The key to maximizing your safety is by leaving the clips [that hold the weights onto the bar] off.”

Mr Ebin said it may be embarrassing if a lifter gets into trouble and has to “dump” the weights — which always causes a tremendous racket.

“First, you should always bench press with a spotter,” he advises. “And it is critical in any case where you’re overextended to learn how to bail out of trouble correctly. You have to get that weight off and get that bar away from your body as quickly and safely as possible.”

The local trainer said the most common injury he has seen in his time working one-on-one with clients is stress related back strains from doing a “dead lift.”

“That move may seem pretty simple when you’re watching someone trained to do it right, but if your back become the least bit rounded during the lift, it can take you out of the game for a couple of weeks, or a couple of months.”

He reiterated that young athletes are “durable,” but he said repetitive lifting with poor form can come back to haunt individuals when they are in their 40s or 50s.

For more information, or to contact Mr Ebin, call 914-582-1980, or email him at renegadetraining@hotmail.com