I am 19 years old and I play division 1 college football. Our strength program is archaic at best. I really want to push myself to my full potential, but I don’t have a place to start,. The effort is not the issue, rather I need guidance on the what, when, and how of training. PLEASE HELP!!!
Why do you think your strength program is “archaic at best?”
[quote]mack94 wrote:
I am 19 years old and I play division 1 college football. Our strength program is archaic at best. I really want to push myself to my full potential, but I don’t have a place to start,. The effort is not the issue, rather I need guidance on the what, when, and how of training. PLEASE HELP!!![/quote]
I don’t like going behind another coach’s back. If I were you I might consider talking to him about it. There is a nice way to do it. Normally a group program is designed for the mean, there are always outliers for whom the program is inadequate, too demanding or not adapted. I would see with him if it would be possible for him to write a more advanced program for you, that you have the desire to work harder to get better, etc.
Now, I would be wary about calling a program “archaic”… some of the best training programs would be seen as archaic by many people’s standards… Wendler’s 5/3/1 is basically only doing the four basic lifts with a fairly simple periodized plan… yet it is producing very solid results. Bulgarian olympic lifters dominated weightlifting by doing only snatches, clean & jerks and squats in their program for sets of 1 or 2 reps… now their simple and archaic program has influenced most other elite lifting countries. Many of the top powerlifters in history (Coan, Kaworsky, Hatfield) used a very simple program where the 3 powerlifts were periodized over 8-12 weeks without much in the way of assistance work. Currently the best powerlifters in the world (those who lift in the IPF where excessive lifting gear is not allowed, the judging is very strict and the doping control is the same as olympic sports) basically only do the competitive lifts and a very small number of assistance exercises that are mostly variations of the competition lifts.
Just because something doesn’t have chains, bands, weight releasers or advanced training techniques doesn’t make it archaic nor does it make it ineffective.
This actually reminds me of a funny story. Last year I helped one of my friends who is starting out as a strength coach. I taught him my teaching progression on the olympic lifts and we designed the off-season training plan for the college team he was training together. His players all progressed and hit amazing numbers… yet several players contacted me asking if I could design their program for the next off-season because they wanted something better… they actually didn’t know that I participated at least as much to their program as their own coach… 
Oftentimes the way you perceive your program has nothing to do with the actual quality of the program.
If a strength coach they don’t like or don’t believe in gives them a program it will look like crap…
If a renowned expert gives them the same program it will look like gold…
Perception is a weird thing
That having been said it could be a crappy program… I’ve seen some bad ones from established strength coaches. But I would talk to him about it (without being confrontational), asking the logic behind the program and why it was built this way.
I assume you’re looking for an off-season training program because there’s no way a D1 college strength coach will let you “do your own thing” in his weight room. When one player goes off-script it makes the entire team lose faith in the program, which in my experience is worse than everyone going 100% together on a bad program. But in my situation, I used the offseason to do my own thing and it worked fairly well.
My D1 football experience came during what I condescendingly call the “stability craze” of coaching in the early 2000s. Our coach had us doing bosu-ball DB overhead, Swiss ball DB bench and a lot of plyometrics. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with that stuff per se, but I do think it’s worthless without a base of strength. For instance, I didn’t perform a deadlift until after college.
But I’ll follow up with this: we won a major 1AA conference championship, defeated a 1A opponent and went deep into the playoffs with a team where nobody benched over 400lbs and nobody on our OL weighed over 300 pounds. But I digress…
My advice is this: stick with the team program during the year, but supplement it with stuff you feel is lacking on your own time. A coach probably won’t give you shit for putting in extra work. And if there’s something he’s omitting from the program, ask him how and if you can implement it. That way you’ll be buying into the system in his eyes.
The offseason however, is a completely different ball of wax. Our conditioning during the year was so intense that I would go home for summer at about 215 and spend the vacation getting back up to 230-240 for the following season. At the time information wasn’t as readily available as it is today so I kept the conditioning portion of our prescribed offseason workout but did a 5-day bodybuilding split to get the weight back on. Not the best idea in hindsight, but not a terrible one either.
For you, I’d look up the football offseason workout that CT published some time ago. You’ll find it in google. Do that in the offseason and stick with your teams plan during the school year.
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