Bauer, definitely interested in hearing more stories about what Thomas did at PSU. I find it amazing that you didn’t perform one clean or snatch while on campus.
[quote]Scipio wrote:
Bauer, I’m out in LA now but lived in Pittsburgh (Wexford) for many years. Went to N.A.- a little older than Greg Garrity. I wonder if S&C coaches are doing any of the Archuleta/Jay Schroeder/InnoSport/Kelley Bagget, etc. training that promotes quickness and better short distance speed, cutting ability, etc? Jumanji is a good proponent; I am starting to think this is how my son (freshman in HS) ought to train. However, it seems college and HS are still dominated by heavy lifting, which is good to a point but utilizes 2 sec movements…when the athlete needs to react or move to a ballcarrier or to a pass in what? .2 or .3 seconds? Hence the need for advanced plyos? Thx.[/quote]
Well, I can’t really speak for what the S&C coaches are doing at any school besides PSU, because I don’t have first-hand experience with any other program.
Granted, I’ve reasearched a lot into what some of the programs I respect do (Nebraska, Texas, Tennesee, etc.), and I could certainly pretend to know what I’m talking about in regards to their training like some people do, but I would rather not.
As for PSU training, neither “quickness” nor “heavy lifting” training qualifies as to what is performed there.
The position your son is playing should dictate exactly what kind of training he focuses on.
In my opinion, every football player should be doing a mix of both heavy and explosive lifts (assuming they know how to properly perform them), as well as plyo/speed work. No reason to favor one over the other, except for what “training phase” you’re in during the year.
If anything, far more attention needs to be paid to lateral movement/change of direction. The ability to decelerate and then accelerate again is far more important on the football field than straight ahead sprinting speed.
[quote]WildcatBaseball wrote:
Bauer, definitely interested in hearing more stories about what Thomas did at PSU. I find it amazing that you didn’t perform one clean or snatch while on campus.[/quote]
I’d honestly be willing to bet that 85% of the players at PSU wouldn’t even know what a snatch is (all sarcasm aside), let alone be able to perform one.
To sum up the weight training (I think I’ve said this before, but I digress:)
All movements were performed on either Hammer Strength or Paramount machines. Generally a 3-5 second concentric, 6-8 second eccentric pace, and around 3-5 forced reps at the end of each set, after you’ve reached failure.
Full body workouts, 1-2 sets per bodypart. Lower body work consisted of 1 set of Leg Press for 30 reps, 1 set of Leg Extension, 1 set of Leg Curl, and once in a while, for the truly hardcore, 1 set of seated calf raises.
There are some benches there, but we never touched them except for doing our 225 max rep test (pure genius to not do any barbell benching all year, and then throw players under the bar for a max rep test)
There’s a monstrous dumbbell rack with beautiful new dumbbells from 5 pounds to 180, but again, we never touched them. Actually, I think we did a set of walking lunges holding the 15’s once in a while. Very productive.
There are also some big tires for flipping, and some sandbags. I never touched either of them in all 4 years I played there. Apparently they were just for show.
Quite often we would have to do moronic “intensity” workouts, where you’d have to do things like bearcrawl or do jump squats in between every exercise. Basically the point was to make you vomit, which was apparently the sign of a good workout.
That’s the weight training. This fails to mention the 10-12 mile “campus runs” we performed. I must have missed when I transported back to the 1950’s…
Let me know anything else you’re curious about.
I have a copy of an old Virginia Tech manual. The strength training programs look pretty decent - there are a lot of squats and cleans and they even specify sets, reps, and percentages of max to use. If anything I might complain there were no deadlifts included and that the overall volume appears a little high. There doesn’t appear to be much periodization. It also includes some nutrition guidance which is extremely basic and seemingly geared towards young kids who aren’t expected to have a lot of discipline in their eating. This is supposed to be one of the top football S&C programs in the country, and I’m sure it is, however, my guess is the success is based more on the enforcement of simple concepts like eating tons of food and incorporating heavy compound movements in your lifting as opposed to anything really profound in the program. The programs and diets generally discussed here on this website are far more advanced and detailed than what this manual contains. I would suspect the same is true of most, if not all S&C programs around the country.
This might be similar to what they do at Penn State. They have the S&C manual available too.
i played basketball at a low-level d1 school without a football team. we had a former football S&C coach and a lot of the basketball players didnt like the workouts because they were “football” workouts. we did “crazy” things like box squats below parallel, band bench press, sled drags, push press and snatch grip deadlifts. i wouldn’t have known it then, but i was actually pretty blessed in that area during my time there. too bad the more naturally gifted athletes didnt really buy into the stuff just cuz it wasnt making them huge. at that level, s&c can really make the difference but the athletes have to make the effort.
i feel bad for you guys at PSU. i cant imagine doing that stuff for 4 years when you know that it isnt optimizing performance.
[quote]Donut62 wrote:
Bauer97 wrote:
Dyoder, you’re absolutely right in what you heard. The head strength coach, John Thomas, has indeed “banned” Zatsiorsky from the football facilities, and was extremely opposed to me taking one of Zatsiorskys courses.
I seriously cannot believe I just read this…
Coach X at elitefts (former Pitt and now Browns strength coach) brought up a great point. He said if you want to find a great lifting program look at a smaller less famous schools because a lot of the big ones just get by on the superb athletes they bring in. The small schools have to be creative to get all they can out of their players.[/quote]
I know, this shit is crazy right? I go to a small D3 school up north that has a very good football team. In my opinion, they have a very very good S&C program that consists of:
Cleans and variations, Snatches and variations, squats, overhead squats, bench, row, push press, etc…
In fact, my highschool football team has a better S&C program than PSU with a bunch of kids that did and set powerlifting records at northeast meets. I just can’t believe that this goes in in D1 programs.
This is from last year but it has a short list of various NFL team/player workouts.
http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2005/football/nfl/specials/preview/2005/08/03/vikings.trainer/
They even did a story on refree Ed Hochuli’s workout
http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2006/players/01/10/nfl.workout0116/
where do you go to school bigblue?
It’s amazing how much potential is wasted in high-level sports because of narrow-minded ignoramouses like some of the S&C coaches mentioned in this thread. Can you imagine how much better Football would be if more of the S&C guys read T-Nation?
True, Panther. Big Blue I’m guessing, goes to New Hampshire. Pretty damn good team for a small college. Buddy Morris&Tom Myslinski=good S&Cs!!
Bauer - thanks.