Football Camp

Football camp is here. If you're a coach who works with football or any other fall sport, there are many issues that you must address in early August. To me, this is the hardest time of the year because you're trying to evaluate the new athletes while the coaches are doing the same. We don't want to make the athletes sore or kick their butts, but we do want them to know what we expect from them and we need to find out what they're made of.

Introduction

I was curious as to how others handle these issues, so for this month's column, I called two of my friends to help me out. Let me introduce them...

First up is Adam Davis. Adam is the director of strength and conditioning at Tulsa University. This is his first full year there. Previously, he was a strength and conditioning coach at Baylor. Adam and I first met a few years ago at the CSCCa clinic. I knew immediately that he was someone I wanted to know and steal from as much as I could. Adam is a true professional and makes me proud to be in this profession.

Second up is Carl Johnson. Carl is the head football sports performance coach at Georgetown University. He's a graduate of the University of Iowa and received a master’s degree in kinesiology from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Carl competed to the best of his abilities in Strongman, weightlifting, powerlifting, and bodybuilding, although he has put the posing trunks away for good. His belief is that all strength and conditioning professionals need to be passionate about their own training and constantly strive to be a better coach by educating themselves academically and practically. I first met Carl face to face this year when I walked into his weight room. He looked at me and said, "The bar is loaded." My response was, "That might be my max already," to which he said, "No, now I know you squat."

Training Camp

I asked both of these gentlemen three questions about how they deal with football coming into training camp. Their answers are below:

1. How do you address your team in the first meeting during camp? In other words, what do you say? Do you have certain rules that you go over, and if so, when do you do this?

AD: In any team meeting, we're brief in what we present. We handle any information that we need to get to the team during our training sessions. In doing this, we rely heavily on the leadership of the team to get the necessary information to their teammates.

CJ: Georgetown football arrives on campus on the first Sunday of August, which is approximately four weeks out from the first game of the season. My first meeting with the team is to discuss the conditioning test, which occurs the following morning at 7AM. Here's a brief description of what I normally tell our team:

• Sleep so that you aren't tired tomorrow. (Yes, I really do need to say this).
• Drink so that you aren't thirsty and prone to cramping.
• Don't eat so much for breakfast that you throw up during the test.
• No, you shouldn't run today to “try and get in shape for the test.”
• If you've trained hard and effectively, you'll pass the test; if not, you don't deserve to pass the test.

Following these statements, I'll almost always receive a question from a freshman player asking me what supplements I recommend he take. My response is something that I learned from reading and talking with author and strength coach, Dan John:

• Do you sleep eight hours a night?
• Do you eat a well balanced diet full of whole nutritious foods every single day?
• When you rest, are you actually resting, or are you playing Halo or the new favorite Words with Friends, texting, or reading Facebook?
• Are you an elite athlete with at least five solid years of proper training?

I have yet to have an athlete respond "yes" to each question, which means that our NCAA-approved protein drinks and a basic multivitamin/multimineral is enough nutritional support for them until they get the rest of their recovery and regeneration dialed in.

2. What are your goals for camp training?

AD: Our main priority during camp is to make sure the team has everything they need in order to play football at a higher level. More important than what we're doing in the weight room is what our coaches are doing outside of it. How many guys can we get in the cold tub or on the foam roller? Are the guys dropping weight from day to day? If so, how can we prevent this? One thing we won't do as coaches is make excuses. If we recognize an area that will affect the team’s performance, it's our job to address it.

CJ: Our goals for training camp are:

• Improve sport-specific conditioning: Most of this should've already been accomplished through our off-season and summer workouts. During camp, our conditioning is mostly accomplished through a fast practice tempo. We also include short sprints following practice approximately three to four times per week.
• Evaluate new and returning players: We evaluate our athletes when they return the first week of camp. This helps the football staff assess the freshman players as well as make sure our returners have put in the required work while at home over the summer. The majority of our team isn't able to train with me over the summer because of the high cost of living in the Washington D.C. area. We test our athletes in the bench press, pull-up, broad jump, vertical jump, and 5-10-5 pro agility test.
• Decrease injury rates: Typically, the most common injuries during our August training camp are muscle strains such as hamstring pulls and hip flexor pulls. Our sports medicine department does a fantastic job helping players return to play as fast as possible and communicating with me so that I can make modifications to their training. Looking at data from past seasons, I have found that the players who stay and train at Georgetown over the summer are much less likely to be injured during camp and during the regular season.
• Begin the developmental training block for freshman players: We have a training phase that all athletes are required to participate in. It teaches proper movement patterns and screens basic movement patterns for any obvious dysfunction or asymmetry that hopefully can be improved. This phase will teach proper bracing of the torso, jumping and landing mechanics, squatting, and pressing, as well as scapular control and an introduction to the Olympic variations.
• Perform restoration and regeneration techniques: During August in D.C., the weather can be quite brutal, so during intense hot periods, we use some swimming pool workouts to cool our athletes down and work on some joint mobility and flexibility. We also encourage them to use contrast showers and adopt proper eating and sleeping habits.

3. How do you break the team up for training during this time of year? When do you train positions together?

AD: Our training schedule during camp is broken up by unit (offense or defense), and time in the weight room is generally scheduled after practice and before a meal. We will spend 20 to 30 minutes in the weight room, get the athletes what they need for recovery, and get them out. The athletes have enough other stressors going on at this time of year. We aren't helping by adding more.

CJ: Our training is done with an offense and defense grouping. We have two mandatory lifts scheduled per week with an encouraged optional lift. Each workout during camp is a full body lift that focuses on muti-joint, three-dimensional compound movements. Our main goal is to increase our strength and retain as much lean body mass that we worked so hard to obtain during the off-season as possible. We include squats, presses, and many pull variations. However, during August, we don't incorporate many weightlifting movements because of the increased demands on the joints from the long periods on the field. In my opinion, practice includes high-power output full-body movements that don't need to be doubled in the weight room. Our limited recovery ability during this hard training period needs to be expended on increasing maximal strength and retaining lean body mass.

Our training differs by position but not dramatically. All players perform the main compound movements together. However, assistance work is often tailored depending on position. For instance, skill players may complete glute ham raises as posterior chain work while our linemen will use Romanian deadlifts or stability ball leg curls. Similar to most football programs, we don't allow our quarterbacks to barbell bench press during the season because of the increased demands on the shoulder.

My overall training philosophy has been shaped by my training background as well as by the colleagues I’ve worked with and the literature I've read. The principal ambitions that I strive for are simplicity and training efficiency. Finally, something Dan John explained to me, was that we all need to understand our impact on the sports we coach both on and off the field. Eventually, wins and losses are determined by the ability to play the game of football as a team. All we can do is prepare our athletes to the best of our abilities and teach them how to train themselves. Many of my players go on to successful careers in business, law, politics, and other fields, not football. My number one goal for all of them is that they carry on the passion for training that I partly instilled in them.

Any other thoughts or concerns on training during this time of the year?

AD: Training camp is one of my favorite times of year because it reminds me of what our job is all about. I wasn't hired to improve the team’s squat, bench, or clean maxes, nor was I hired to make sure the team is in shape. I was hired to improve the team’s athletic performance. Far too often, I talk with coaches who get caught up in what they think their job should be. No one cares how sound your training program is if players are cramping or pulling up. The television announcers are going to blame it on conditioning. At the end of the day, it's about on field production, and our staff believes that fall camp is a time of year when we can make a huge impact on the team’s success.

Wrap up

As you can see, these two coaches seem to approach camp with the same underlying principles, yet each has his own style. To me, this is what makes our jobs so great! It's about the art, not the science, that makes one a great strength coach.

As we watch what happened at Penn State with their punishments, think about what a great job those strength coaches must be doing to keep that team together. I don't know what is going on, but I'll bet the coaches are motivating the athletes to improve for the greater good of all involved. I can promise you one thing—I'll absolutely be using the Penn State situation to help educate and build better leaders at my school. It's of the utmost importance that we find a way during this season's camp to take what has happened and help educate our young men and women so our teams, as well as the world, are a better place and we all learn what great leadership can be when utilized in a positive manner.