We have, so the Acme providers join us three days a week.

We break up into smaller groups twice a week, Monday and Wednesday.

And then the group that you just saw, they meet with us on Saturday, all six of them.

We split the programming.

On Monday and Wednesday, our lifters do the deadlift and the bench press,

and on Saturday they do the squat and the press, and then sometimes we throw in some chin-ups.

So one of the things we first discovered was our special needs lifters tend to respond best to tactile cues.

Verbal cues can work sometimes, sometimes they don't.

It's entirely dependent on the person and on the day, really.

But tactile cues seem to work the best.

The first one that we developed, actually Coach Schaller developed, was using his foot to actually

place the lifter's foot, exactly where it needs to go.

And we found that that's very successful. The lifters tend to respond to that

well. So as a general rule, we don't, you know, we try not to touch the bar for any lifter. But in this

particular case, hands on the bar makes a lot of difference because oftentimes the lifters will

collapse, will give out, you know,

when you least expect it and you have to have your hands on the bar, but we do not lift

the weight for them. There's never any additional force provided. All the force production

is there. The occasional hand is used to prevent any unsafe movement of the bar as well.

For Marcia and Katie, they have a tendency to roll the bar up their back.

So simply placing it, placing a hand in front of the bar prevents it from rolling up onto the neck.

Now, Nick sometimes, uh, sometimes Nick has a hard time telling his muscles what they ought to do. So in the case of the squat, we have to shove out his knees. He helps me, but I do a lot of the pushing there. He also, on the bench press, he has a real hard time controlling the bar path going up, so I tend to have my hands on there. But unfortunately for him, I'm usually pushing straight down on the bar. So it doesn't make it easier. It actually makes it a bit tougher for him.

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