It might seem like I’ve been doing many interviews lately. There’s good reason for this. A few weeks ago, I did an interview for EliteFTS, and I was asked the question, “Who do you feel is getting it done in strength and conditioning?” My answer was anyone who shows up every day! I believe this statement, and I also believe that there are hundreds of strength coaches fighting the good fight. I thought that I needed to talk to more people. Therefore, I’m trying to contact as many strength coaches as I can to see what they’re doing and selfishly steal from all of them!
TH: Tell us about yourself and how you got started in this profession.
PI: I got my start in this profession through an offer from Dave Toub, who was the head strength coach at the University of Missouri in 1998. His offer was, “If you go out to the Denver Broncos and get cut, I want you to come back and work for me!” Now, I’ve always wanted to be a coach. I just didn’t know how it would happen.
Sadly, two days before I was released from training camp, the defensive line coach at Missouri suffered a heart attack and died shortly thereafter. Dave Toub moved to be the defensive line coach, and Don Sommer was promoted from an assistant strength coach to the head position. I was hired to be a strength graduate assistant.
TH: How do you think your playing experience has affected you as a strength professional?
PI: I believe one of the most influential times in my life was the time I spent training with the Denver Broncos. I arrived in Denver three months after they had won the Super Bowl in 1997. What I experienced while being a professional athlete was a team of coaches and athletes working hard together every day to repeat as Superbowl Champions in 1998. This is something that drives me every day to strive for perfection. I can say without a doubt that I know what it takes to be the best in the world at something and what it takes to get there. Having playing experience allows me to reach my student athletes in a way that draws them closer to hearing the “team message.”
TH: Since you have arrived at Missouri, they have achieved as much success as ever before on the football field. What changes have you implemented to help achieve this?
PI: We have assembled a well-rounded staff at the University of Missouri, and we constantly strive to improve our athletic performance department through staff development. This means increasing our knowledge base and finding more efficient ways to train our athletes. We’re able to accomplish all the things that we have by having great communication, being reliable to each other and our athletes, expecting the same things out of ourselves as we ask of our athletes, and having intensity every time we step foot in the weight room or on the field or court.
By constantly seeking out new information, training methods, and training means, we’re able to keep our athletes progressing over the four to five years that they’re with us. One of our staff members is in charge of research for our staff. He does a great job of bringing new ideas, articles, and studies to our staff meetings so that we can discuss and learn from one another. We also pass information on to one another as soon as it comes across our desks. Having an open line of communication helps everyone to learn and expand themselves as coaches.
The information that we use comes from all different sources and experts in their fields (Tom Myslinski, Louie Simmons, Jay Schroeder, and others). We’ve also looked at all of the translated materials available by Verhkoshansky, Issurin, Ajan, Baroga, Bondarchuk, Medvedeyev, Roman, and others. This has helped us make our programming as effective as possible. We look at each of these individuals and their work and use it to our advantage. This has given us a greater understanding of training within the mesocycle and between the mesocycles as well as a system of multi-year training. We feel that understanding this information and changing it to fit our needs of training athletes, not weight lifters, has been a great advantage for us. Using paper resources (books, articles, and journals) and personal resources, we have a great amount to draw upon to make sure that our athletes are receiving the best training possible.
Some of our more tangible changes are the increased use of the Tendo unit and switching to more force absorption instead of just force production. We have started to use the Tendo units with many of our teams. They perform a wide range of exercises on the Tendos including hang cleans, bench presses, squats, Olympic lifting variations, and even good mornings. By using the Tendos, we’re able to truly train explosively because we can measure the speed of the bar at all times. Depending on what we’re working on at the time, our speed range will change to work on that specific strength. Lately, we have incorporated a lot of eccentric, isometric, and depth type of drops to work on force absorption. We realized that the better an athlete can absorb force, the more force they can produce. We started looking at injuries and realized that the better an athlete can absorb force, the less likely a chance of injury will occur.
TH: Who are your mentors in this profession?
PI: Dave Toub, Don Sommer, and Bob Jones were my strength coaches while I was a student athlete football player at Mizzou. Dave is currently the head special teams coach for the Chicago Bears while Don is the director of strength and conditioning at TCU. Bob is the director of strength and conditioning at William Woods University. Scott Bird and Jeff Fish were very instrumental in my development as well. Scott is now the baseball strength coach at Kansas State University, and Jeff is the head strength coach for the Atlanta Falcons. I learned a lot from Jeff about professionalism and development.
Outside of the University of Missouri and Gary Pinkel, my head football coach, the people who have made the most impact on me are Boyd Epley, Jeff Madden, Doc Kreis, Louie Simmons, and Jay Schroeder. In 2000, when I had just been hired as a full-timer, we played in Lincoln, and Boyd Epley spent five hours with me on Friday and Saturday before the game. There aren’t many strength coaches who would do that. I learned from Boyd how to put your vision into action. He had three pages of future ideas written down on a legal pad.
And finally, as a staff, we only hire people who can push us to be the best that we can be and that means hiring people who know more than others do about certain aspects of training. We think of ourselves as learners. I like Gary Gray’s philosophy—“To be a teacher in the right sense is to be a learner. I am not a teacher, only a fellow learner.”
TH: I truly believe that the missing components in this profession are staff development and management skills. Tell us how you manage such a large staff and continue to develop a cohesive staff?
PI: Staff development is something we believe is critical to our success! This one question could be an entire article in itself because we really do a lot to address this. It’s something that we’re very passionate about. We make it a priority for each staff member to grow.
First off, something that we expect from all of our staff is that they operate at the next level. Basically, if you’re an intern, you act like a graduate assistant. If you’re a graduate assistant, you act as an assistant director. An assistant director should act like a director, and a director should act like an assistant athletic director. You get the idea. Essentially, everyone aspires to operate at the next level. However, how do you expect to get there if you aren’t already acting the part?
Communication, loyalty, and a deep rooted willingness to learn are expected from all staff. We have to communicate with each other all the time to head off potential issues so that we don’t put each other in compromising positions. Just doing this develops trust. Do we do it perfectly? No! But we are always addressing any issue and how it fits the big picture. Loyalty to the program and the direction of the athletic department is needed. This isn’t loyalty to a person as in “I got your back, to hell with everyone else.” The willingness to learn was emphasized above because it takes a lot of humility to change anything that you thought was right. Also, learning new skills only makes you better at the skills that you use every day. Since starting at Mizzou, we have made many changes that wouldn’t have been possible without this.
All the above is nice to talk about, but the first question is probably “How does that get done?” It starts with transparency. We don’t hide any information from each other. We conduct weekly staff meetings, which are preceded by weekly staff clean-ups. Every Thursday, we start at 9:00 a.m. and everyone cleans the weight room together. The whole staff meets at 10:00 a.m. Before I proceed, I must digress. Each staff member has administrative duties in addition to team responsibilities. For example, one staff member is responsible for facility maintenance, equipment service agreements, guest speaking coordination, graduate assistant development, and team record boards.
Additionally, some staff serve on athletic department committees and a couple even participate in campus wide groups. This means we have a lot of information coming in from a lot of angles. We use our meetings to get this information to the staff. Everyone brings a notepad, and everyone has something to report. We start with the minutes from the last meeting, review any old items, hit on the new items, and then adjourn. Then we all go to lunch together as a staff. So each Thursday, we spend four hours together (9:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m.), and it gets done because it’s made a priority by all staff.
Additionally, because we want to make sure that we’re able to review policies and procedures as well as get new staff up to speed quickly, we have developed a staff handbook that covers everything we do. We also make it a priority to attend the CSCCA conference as a staff each year. Why do we choose that conference? It fits our schedule, and we like it. Is it expensive to travel with all the staff? Yes. But again it is a priority for us. It is also very important for each staff member to take care of themselves by taking time out of the weight room, taking vacation time, and getting proper sleep and nutrition, all in an effort to not burn out. A burned out coach is not an effective, efficient coach.
Once per academic year, we bring in a facilitator from campus to run a workshop for our staff. Each member has taken or will take the MBTI-I and FIRO-B personality inventories. We review the results in this workshop, which gives everyone an opportunity to understand themselves a little better. We take it further though in that we force everyone out of their comfort zones with interactive activities that touch on subjects like difficult conversations, communication, and life-work integration. It is always valuable, and we learn from it each year.
In the end, we’re developing ourselves as leaders in the department so that we can be great examples for the student athletes we train. If we’re going to stand up and demand hard work or tell our athletes that a certain behavior is bad, we had better follow the same or we will not be effective.
TH: What are your goals as a strength coach?
PI: Rick McGuire, the head track coach at Mizzou has taught me many valuable lessons. The number one lesson I learned was to focus on winning kids, not games because that will happen soon enough. I want to be a role model for staff and all our student athletes by the way I live my life every day. Of course, I want to win championships as well, but I’m more concerned about developing champions for life. We have three core values at the University of Missouri that I fully embrace—academic integrity, social responsibility, and competitive excellence. I want to be a leader.
TH: At the CSCCA, you spoke about the screens that you run with your athletes. I know you referenced the functional movement screens as well as Eric Cressey’s work. Tell us about your movement screens.
PI: After the 2007 football season, we took a look at not only our injury rates but also the kinds of injuries our athletes were sustaining. Our numbers weren’t bad, but we wanted to be sure we were doing everything in our power to cut these numbers down. A couple of our staff members had some experience with some different styles of movement screening systems and some ideas that could help. After a couple months of researching experts like Cook, Cressey, Boyle, Robertson, Sahrmann, and even Vladimir Janda among others and brainstorming among our own staff, we came up with a movement screening system that was/is unique to the University of Missouri. We wanted the system to be very efficient and applicable.
What we came up with was a two-part test that can be done with an athlete in 5–7 minutes. The first part includes exercises like the squat, overhead squat, backward lunge, a standing knee raise psoas test, and a lying leg raise test. When watching these exercises, we really pay attention to the compensation patterns that the athlete uses. These compensation patterns are noted, and corrective exercises are prescribed for each individual athlete.
The second part of the test is shoulder based and has four parts, which are meant to give us a good indication of the athlete’s glenohumeral range of motion as well as any weaknesses or imbalances that may be present. This is especially useful for overhead athletes. We are continuing to improve and reengineer this system. Unfortunately, we never quite know how well the screen actually works. Injury rates can tell us a lot, but there are never any stats on how many injuries didn’t happen.
TH: How do you and your athletic training staff work together with injury rehabilitation/prehabilitation?
PI: We sit down and talk. We’re fortunate enough to have our head trainer, Rex Sharp, teach classes so all of the graduate assistants have taken his athletic training classes. This has provided us a great advantage because we understand the athletic training staff’s philosophy. We’re constantly communicating to see what the athletes are doing in the training room and making sure that we’re complimenting each other. The trainers will tell us what the injury is and what they’re doing. Very seldom do they ever use blanket statements like “no lower body” or “no upper body.” Our trainers understand that we can train around the injury and continue to get the athletes stronger by doing things such as pulling the sled or single leg movements. Making sure that we compliment each other instead of going against each other has allowed us to bring athletes back to the field as quickly as possible. One other way that we compliment the athletic training staff is that we send athletes directly to the athletic training staff if we find anything in our functional movement screens.
TH: Coach Ivey, thanks for the time. Do you have any parting words to leave us with?
PI: Todd, I want to thank for the opportunity to share with you and others some of the intimate details of our program, which have allowed us to create a wonderful environment to work in every day while we train our student athletes. We truly believe that athletes don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.