Strongman Versus Power Cleans for Football, Part 1
By
Elliott Hulse
You might disagree, but hear me out on this. As an ex-college football player
and currently a strength coach, I’ve found the utilization and teaching of
Olympic lifts to be tedious, inefficient, and downright boring. As a college
athlete, I hardly found the patience to learn the correct lifting technique for
the power clean. Although I held the St. John’s University power clean record in
my freshman season, muscling 335 lbs (152 kg) off the platform, my technique was
completely flawed. My attempt looked more like an axle clean and press in
Strongman than the smooth pull of an Olympic weightlifter.
After my undergraduate years, I studied exercise science at the graduate
level. The director of the master’s program was an avid Olympic weightlifting
coach and ex-competitor. He spent hours with his students teaching us the finer
points and intricacies of how to perform a proper clean and jerk. Once we were
proficient enough at performing these lifts, we were granted permission to coach
the university’s athletes on how to use these lifts to better their sports
performance.
I remember the very first day that I was given the “ok” to start coaching
athletes. I was assigned to the football team. Because I had been a former
college football player myself, I felt that I would instantly be greeted with
fellowship and amity. This was not the case! In fact, there were a few
kids who hated the fact that I was there. I sensed their apprehension in
allowing me to coach them, and they especially hated it when I taught them how
to Olympic lift.
As it happened, many of the more “meathead-ish” type football players
confided in me that they wanted to “lift heavier weights and stop wasting time
with this BS.” As it turned out, these athletes were first exposed to the
technicalities of Olympic lifting during the off-season prior to my debut. It
was also the first time that they had been coached in the weight room by
graduate students instead of their sports coach. They had previously been using
a powerlifting model that yielded great size and strength gains.
I believe that including power cleans and other Olympic lifts into a strength
and conditioning program for football players is beneficial. However, I also
believe that the less an athlete has to “think” about a movement, the more
attitude he can bring to its accomplishment. Also, I’m a big advocate for
saving time. There’s nothing I hate more than “getting things right before you
get them going.” It’s a personal philosophy of mine that “success is more a
product of attitude… than of technique.” (Of course, don’t take foolish risks
that may cause injury.)
Consider this for a moment. When you’re coaching a player on the kick-off
team, do you tell him, “Johnny, sprint down there with your elbows at a
90-degree angle with your jaw relaxed and your hands in loose fists. Be sure to
breathe through pursed lips. When you get to the first blocker, take a short
inhalation and hold your breath. Brace your abdominals, furrow your brow, and
dip your hips. Lower your shoulders and explode through by extending your
ankles, knees, and hips in a simultaneous manner.”
If this sounds crazy to you, consider that this is the way Olympic lifts are
typically taught. Instead of letting the athlete “do his thing,” we spend hours
“breaking down” and analyzing the movement for them. These valuable hours spent
“teaching” the movement could very well be used for building real strength and
speed in a timely fashion.
In the same manner that you coach your athletes to go “balls to the wall” on
the football field, you can coach them to go “balls to the wall” in the weight
room. Besides getting bigger, faster, and stronger by training like a maniac,
these kids will bring this type of attitude to the field more often. Like
the saying goes, “you play the way that you practice.”
Training in the weight room should be just as intense and as fun as training
on the field. When athletes learn to “attack” an exercise in the gym like they
attack a tackling dummy, they will develop size, strength, speed, and
attitude faster than ever before. For weight training to become a real
part of your school’s program, you’ve got to promote it as a benefit of being on
the team, not just a necessity. I remember looking at a few small colleges when
I graduated high school. One of the most important questions I asked was, “What
kind of strength and conditioning program do you have?”
So, what the heck do you do if Olympic lifts aren’t working? Train like the
world’s strongest men! Not only are Strongmen great examples of brute strength,
they are also well-conditioned and possess great speed and power. Strongman
exercises build functional strength, speed, power, and most importantly,
attitude! Besides the performance benefits of flipping tires and loading
sandbags, Strongman training is fun and easy to teach.
In part two, I’ll give you my list of the best Strongman exercises for building
explosive strength, speed, size, and attitude.
Elliott Hulse is a certified strength and conditioning specialist and owner of Strength Camp, a sports performance service in St. Petersburg Florida. He trains athletes to get stronger and faster in a "warehouse gym" with about $1000 worth of equipment. Lean more about Elliott and get his "Top 10 Gym Exercises for Explosive Football Speed" by visiting
http://www.FootballStrengthProgram.com.
