Joe DeFranco is a busy man. So busy, in fact, that if you’d like to talk to him on the phone – as so many do – you’ll need to queue up, wait your turn, and settle for the privilege of being granted an appointment. You’ll need to email him a week in advance – demonstrating copious amounts of patience and resolve through a half-dozen time changes on his end - in order to pin the man down and get what you need. And what you need - what you and everyone else is asking for these days - is his time.

Good luck getting some.

“Dude,” he said, “everyone’s busting my balls about this. I’m looking at my phone right now and I have seventeen voicemails on it. I have to tell people to make appointments, otherwise I never get back to them and I’m the one who looks like some kind of asshole.”

It’s pre-Combine training season in Wyckoff, New Jersey, and DeFranco’s life is no longer his own. It belongs to the seemingly endless cavalcade of agents, players and hangers-on who wander through his doors – and monopolize his precious telephone time – at all hours of the day and night. It belongs, essentially, to the hopes and dreams of the dozen young men who’ll comprise his 2008 NFL Combine class come January.

“I’m still in the process of filling the class out,” said DeFranco between appointments. “We have some guys signed already, but I’m dealing with more agents this year than usual, and I think this is gonna be the biggest class we’ve ever had here and I need extra time to deal with everything. Usually I’m only dealing with two or three agents, but it’s a lot more than that this year and that’s taking up all my time because I have to introduce a lot of them to what we do here and what we can offer. I hate that part of the process, but it’s something that has to be done.”

Things are happening at DeFranco’s. Big things. Things on an international scale, among them a soon-to-be-released documentary chronicling a summer spent training his impressive stable of athletes, and a mention in Men’s Health magazine as one of America’s top fifty places to train.

As if we didn’t already know.

“It’s been pretty crazy here, but what else is new? Some guys don’t even realize the documentary is finished. I get calls from guys who still think they can be in it. The thing’s already been seen by some major distributors, and I’m still hearing from guys I trained five years ago who want to come in and get filmed. And you’re seriously asking me why I don’t answer my fucking phone anymore?”

DeFranco’s biggest problem is that there is no time. He has until the beginning of January – the pre-Combine program’s start – to fill out this year’s class and take care of all necessary logistics with both agents and players. After that, he’ll be running an intensive six-days-per-week program designed to rigorously prepare his draft hopefuls for “The World’s Most Intense Job Interview,” which takes place in Indianapolis from February 20-26.

“When you think about it,” he said, “it’s only six weeks, but it’s six weeks where you have to fit so much stuff in. They need to master the combine drills, they need to work on their football specific stuff, and they have to get stronger, and there’s no real time to indoctrinate them into the program. A lot of these guys have never really trained the ‘right way’ before, so you have to teach them some fundamentals, but the key thing is to get them hitting the ground running. That’s what we try to do, because there’s not a lot of time to fit in as much stuff as they’re gonna have to digest.”

The problem, according to DeFranco, is that the vast majority of the athletes with whom he’ll be working have never utilized any Westside-style methods in their training before. Much of what comprises even a “condensed” version of his now famous WS4SB (Westside For Skinny Bastards) program is completely foreign to them. They’ve never done box squats, used bands and chains, or completed a single rep on a Glute-Ham Raise – all staples of the strength portion of DeFranco’s Combine-prep program.

“Anyone who has done any of that stuff before is off to a good head start,” he said, “but we don’t expect them to know what they’re doing when they get here. Football-wise, you’re talking about Division One players who know the game and are already on NFL scouts’ radar, but in the gym, sometimes they’re just lost and we need to get them up to speed in a hurry.”

This often entails spending valuable time doing something akin to weightroom remedial work, but the results yielded by spending sufficient time on technique are usually well worth the wait.

“That’s the flip side of this whole thing,” DeFranco said. “When you get guys who’ve never trained this way before, and you teach them how to do a few things, you see things happen right away. They get stronger and faster really quick. What you have to remember here is that, again, these guys are Division One athletes and some of them are going to be professionals. What you’re doing isn’t necessarily training them, per se. My job is to be a facilitator to bring something out of them that’s already in there.”

Which, according to DeFranco, is where the psychological portion of his program comes into play. The mental game.

“I see the same things out of guys every year, and this is something I cover in the first speech I make to my classes on day one. The first week or two, they’ll make absolutely incredible gains. You can give a guy one or two little tips, and suddenly he’s jumping a few inches higher or his forty time drops by two tenths of a second, and they’re flying and they think I’m a genius. But then, after three or four weeks, there’s always some kind of sticking point and they start to panic. They’ll have a bad day, or they’ll slip during a three-cone drill or something, and it starts to fuck with their head and they’ll start doing it every time. They come to me in a panic, and they’ll be like, ‘I’m not ready! I can’t do this! I’ll never get drafted! I look like shit!’”

“What they have to realize,” said DeFranco, “is that there’s no time for that shit. In a six week program, when a bad day turns into a bad week, one bad week out of six is a major percentage of the time they’ll be spending here. What I tell them from the first day is that they have to get past that shit, otherwise we can’t accomplish what we need to accomplish in the limited period of time we have to work.”

Limited time or no, life in Wyckoff won’t be back to normal until March, but that’s something DeFranco has come to accept as part of his reality these days. The challenge of helping a dozen young men - some of whom are extreme longshots to even manage an invite to an NFL minicamp – realize a dream is the part of the job he relishes above all else.

“This is the time of year where I have absolutely no time to myself,” he said, “but I wouldn’t have it any other way. I can’t wait to get started.”

Joe's Product Line

DeFranco's Training Log

Joe's Bio Page

Articles By Joe DeFranco

Ask Joe A Question

Team EliteFTS