Rumor has it that we don’t believe in running our athletes at my training facility. Many people misinterpret our training philosophy with regards to running and conditioning. So I’ll say it one more time—“YES! We DO condition our athletes, and we DO have them run. We just don’t run their guts out all year long!”
For example, we run and condition our football players about two months before training camp. We believe in building the foundation of speed during the initial stages of the off-season with strength training, proper nutrition, and flexibility/mobility training. And as I’ve said before, many of our top athletes play two sports, or they generally stay active during the months that we don’t do “formalized” speed training. They don’t sit on their couch and do nothing for five months.
When we do start our formalized speed and conditioning sessions, we run at local high school football fields and tracks. Most coaches and athletic directors in our area don’t have any problem with letting us use their fields to help their kids. Our new facility also has a parking lot that’s about 100 yards long and 15 yards wide. This space is great for Strongman training, and you can’t beat the rent—the parking lot doesn’t cost us anything. This enables us to keep our expenses down with a “smaller” facility, and the quality of our training goes up.
Our quality improves because we never have to train large groups of kids with different ages and skill levels in the same group just so that we can afford the rent. I know many training facilities water down their training just so that they can make more money per hour and pay their rent. This is NOT the business model that DeFranco’s Training was built on. Our training system is based on quality and results, not trying to jam as many kids as possible into our building every hour because our rent is so expensive.
And larger doesn’t always mean better. By starting small and gradually working up, you can keep your expenses down so that you can focus on the “core” of the business—training athletes. DeFranco’s Training was started in a 500 square foot closet! This smaller space means fewer headaches unlike the mega facilities which require investors, loans, and a boatload of other problems, all of which take away from the ability to train athletes. Remember that a great facility is not based on size and a pretty juice bar—it’s based on the trainers, atmosphere, equipment, and the results that the previous three factors produce. Believe me, athletes see through the BS. When it’s all said and done, the most dedicated athletes will choose the place that produces the best results.
Now back to conditioning…
While we run and condition our football players at the local track, for our wrestlers, the best conditioning is to get them doing what they do best—wrestling. All of the wrestlers that we train attend special wrestling clubs throughout the year. At these club practices, they wrestle and condition in every session. These sessions are usually brutal so there’s no need for us to focus too much on conditioning. Our main focuses are strength development and nutritional counseling. When we do condition our wrestlers, we favor Strongman conditioning. Again, we use the parking lot in the back of our facility for this.
When the weather starts to get colder, we do the same exact thing that we do when it’s warmer—Strongman conditioning in the parking lot! Who cares if it’s a little colder outside in the winter? Most great wrestlers are nuts. If they don’t want to go drag the sled or push a truck outside when it’s cold, they’re training at the wrong place. There are plenty of carpet and chrome health clubs where they can train, and I would be more than happy to give them a full refund. Any kid that complains about going outside and training in the cold doesn’t have any shot at winning a state championship anyway.
Here are just two highlights from three of our top high school wrestlers’ workouts last week:
Paramus High School’s Matt Lindsay (left) and Hawthorne High School’s Luke DeFranco (right) push Joe DeFranco’s Tahoe for three sets of 30 yards. (Check out those 22s that Joe’s Tahoe sits on!)
Don Bosco Prep’s 152-lb Doug Lanzo benches 275 lbs!
Stay tuned for more highlights from our high school wrestler’s workouts. We have a very talented/insane group of kids this year, and they’re all transforming on our program. Hopefully, I put to rest the rumor that we don’t believe in conditioning our athletes. See ya at states!
Joe DeFranco is one of this countries most highly sought after performance enhancement specialists. He has trained over 500 high school and college athletes from various sports. This includes All-State and All-American performers in football, baseball, wrestling, basketball, track and field, lacrosse, and hockey. Thirty-one of Joe’s athletes have been drafted by the NFL. Joe has developed a reputation for achieving previously unheard of results with his athletes. He is considered one of the most highly respected trainers in the world. For more information, visit DeFrancosTraining.com.
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