Getting stronger every day

Plymouth strength and conditioning powers into second-year

Provided by The Pilot News.

PLYMOUTH — You only have to spend five minutes in Plymouth strength coach Aaron Letinski’s weight room to realize he is in his happy place.
Visiting on the last day of school, Letinski is still interacting and encouraging, pushing and motivating. And his athletes are still fully engaged.
Brought on a year ago to head up the strength and conditioning program for athletes and classes for students at Plymouth High School Letinski brings energy to the weight room and challenge for his students.
“One thing is I want the weight room to represent who I am,” he said. “I’m somebody who trains hard to this day and I’m very passionate about it. And I hate to lose. If somebody would ask me what kind of kid they are going to get out of our training I tell them you’ll get a mini version of me, somebody who’s passionate, who’s strong and athletic, and somebody who hates to lose.”
“I feel that is something we need to instill in our kids is just competing no matter what it is,” said Letinski. “We had the Marines come in a few months ago and they have a saying ‘It pays to be a winner’. That’s something I’m trying to build here is somebody who’s passionate about being better.”
Each station in the Plymouth weight room has an iPad where athletes can enter their numbers to track their progress instantly on the Internet. It is a personal program for each student and is a great motivational tool.
“It’s been cool to see,” said Letinski. “I’ve been here for a year and I didn’t have any numbers to compare before but now to really see it on paper is really cool for a lot of the kids. There have been really great dividends already and it makes me excited for next year. Anybody who knows about dividends knows it’s not year one, it’s not year two it’s the things you are building day by day.”
“We use TeamBuildr (software) and we have an iPad at each rack and throughout their career, it’s an individualized program for each student based on their numbers and they are responsible for putting those in and tracking it,” he said. “Throughout your career here it creates a graph and you can see points on the graph. For somebody who has been in my class for one semester, it’s small but for somebody who is four semesters in, including the summer, it’s been over 100 weeks.
“Since I’ve been here for two years I have a story about every kid. Maybe you’re a first-year student in my class the sky is the limit. Kids came in nervous and now they are crushing it. We can get the buy-in because we have the data to show it (the results).”
“We are passionate about what we do,” said Letinski. “At the end of the day, not everybody is going to love the weight room but they love their sport. I love the weight room because it’s my passion. As long as that is in the back of my mind I can relate to them. They want to be held to a standard, and if you can create that standard that ‘this is what it takes to win’ and start seeing some results it pays off.”Weight training is a class that any high school student at PHS can take, not just athletes. Letinski has the job of not just helping each different sport-specific athlete, but also those who just want to gain knowledge of fitness that they can take with them for their lifetime.
“You are both a teacher and a coach,” said Letinski. “If I’m teaching math I’m coaching math. If I’m teaching someone how to do a squat, I’m coaching them how to do a squat. I think of it as the same thing. I’ve seen 380 students here this year and about 20 percent of them aren’t athletes. They probably enjoy lifting because if they didn’t why would they take my class?”
“One of my favorite success stories is a guy who came into my class this year as a senior and he weighed about 240 pounds,” said Letinski. “He’s at like 180 now and he’s gained strength. He learned about getting better every day and he’s taken that into his school work. His GPA from his junior to his senior year went up one whole point. He credits that to what we do, but he is the one who did it. I did nothing. I just stand there and sometimes I yell.”
“I could win however many state championships but to see him change his life like that in just a year I’ll take that over any win.”