When it comes to safety and efficiency in your weight room, organization is king. And the more athletes you work with at one time, the more imperative good management of your weight room and training program becomes.

Here are three areas you can address in order to better accommodate large numbers of athletes in your weight room.

Organize your facility

Before manipulating your training program for the needs of many athletes at once, first look at the setup of your facility. How organized is your weight room? In order to move as many athletes through their workouts as efficiently as possible, you’ll need to first optimize your weight room’s layout and organization.

To begin, make sure you have a clear line of sight throughout your weight room, especially from the front desk or administrative area. You should be able to monitor and direct all athletes in your weight room no matter where you are positioned during the workout.

This means keeping squat racks and large rigs close to the perimeter walls while avoiding placing cable towers or other obstructive exercise equipment in the middle of the room. By putting the larger pieces of equipment closest to the walls, you ensure that your line of sight (and therefore your ability to supervise your athletes) won’t be blocked.

Also, think about grouping your equipment into zones, where different types of equipment that are commonly paired together can be placed near each other, such as dumbbells near the squat racks or plyo boxes near the bench press station.

This will allow for a better flow through the weight room during workouts and helps prevent traffic jams if athletes need to use multiple pieces of equipment for back-to-back exercises (like a barbell back squat paired with a dumbbell row).

For a full rundown of weight room safety, organization, and implementation standards—down to how many inches wide your walkways should be for maximal efficiency—we recommend the NSCA’s Essentials of Strength Training and Conditioning, 4th Edition.

Optimize your training

Sometimes, for the sake of moving large numbers of athletes through the weight room in a short period of time, you’ll need to make some compromises in how your training is organized. Luckily there are some organizational strategies you can employ when writing your program to optimize it for a team training environment.

As mentioned above, pairing exercises that require different types of equipment (like a rack and dumbbells) can be a great way to cut down on congestion in high-traffic areas around the racks and platforms. It also helps ensure that your athletes are resting adequately between sets of a movement—if a squat is paired with a row, for example, the athlete can rest the lower body while performing the row and return to the squat having fully recovered.

As a bonus, it keeps athletes busy in the weight room. Waiting at the squat rack for the next set can lead athletes to lose focus and get distracted. It's more effective to have them constantly moving between exercises in order to cut down on weight room “downtime.”

Group your athletes

After organizing the layout of your weight room and optimizing your training program for a team environment, you can now begin to sort your athletes into training groups that will allow for the most efficient sessions.

The easiest way to group athletes is by position, but it might be more efficient for you to group them by strength levels or training needs. Grouping athletes based on similar strength levels will help cut down on radical changes in weight on the bar. There's no need to remove and add several plates every set if all athletes are lifting relatively close to the same amount each time.

It can also be helpful if athletes are similar in height, eliminating the need to readjust the height of the bar inside the squat rack multiple times during training. Forming training groups can also create some healthy competition in the weight room, as athletes train alongside teammates of similar strength levels. You can likewise group athletes based on training needs—novice lifters or athletes recovering from injuries, for example.

Organizing your athletes into lifting groups also creates an opportunity for you to nurture and encourage team leadership. Establish a team leader for every lifting group, and alternate leaders at different times throughout the year.

This not only gives your athletes a chance to feel empowered, but it also helps ensure that groups move through each workout efficiently without you having to push athletes along.

The takeaway

Everyone’s training environment is different. For example, you might not have the ability to reorganize the layout of your weight room or your equipment. Luckily, you can optimize the efficiency of your training sessions by reorganizing your training to allow for more efficient movement pairings, and reorganizing your athletes into smaller lifting groups.

No training program is perfect, but the perfect program for your team will allow all your athletes to move through the weight room safely and efficiently enough to complete every training session.

Free resource for football coaches

Want to learn more about Volt’s football position-specific programs? Check out our step-by-step guide to designing safe and effective football programs: “The Ultimate Guide to Football Strength Training.” Written by Volt’s Sport Performance department in collaboration with our Strength Coach Advisory Board, chaired by legendary hall of fame strength coach Boyd Epley of Nebraska, this free resource is great for any coach looking to expand their knowledge about strength and conditioning for football.

Jace Derwin, CSCS, RSCC, is the lead sport performance specialist at Volt Athletics, the official strength and conditioning provider of USA Football and the U.S. National Team. Volt provides individualized sport-specific training programs to athletes and teams, built by certified strength coaches, through cloud-based technology. To learn more about Volt Athletics, visit www.voltathletics.com and like on Facebook and follow on Twitter.