“Next, I want to talk about one of the greatest things we ever did. We studied the situation and worked it out on our own and then went to the physiologists and doctors and track coaches to get their opinion….We felt that, in a football game, a player literally busts his guts for about four to five seconds and then he has 20 to 25 seconds to rest and recover….So anything that we could do to stress in a man the ability to bust his gut for four to five seconds and then be able to come back 20 seconds later and do it again, would make a better football player out of him. We substituted that for what we used to use for the six-minute mile.”
The quote above is just a sliver of a clinic presentation by one of the most respected coaches in the history of college football. He’s not a Chip Kelly or Dana Holgorsen talking about prepping players to run a high-speed spread offense, and he’s not a Gary Patterson or Nick Saban giving tips on preparing for these offenses.
Instead, the quote is from a Woody Hayes coaching clinic. Hayes was talking about what he did with his Ohio State squads to get them ready to play…in the mid-seventies. You could match a lot of today’s hot descriptors—“functional training,” “energy-system aware,” and “sport-specific,” for starters—to this quote. He talked about stealing training tips from the Russians, about consulting with performance experts across various sports, and about balancing training to address both the demands of football, and to address essential physical capacities that aren’t developed in-game.
Of course, Hayes wasn’t even the first college football coach to look at the sport through a scientific lens. Nebraska legend Boyd Epley was using Olympic S&C methods from all manner of American and Soviet teams, the latest in bodybuilding knowledge and powerlifting techniques, advice and theories from academics in a host of fields, performing max-testing, and conducting strength-based rehab in 1969. The faulty basics Hayes, Epley, and others were pulling away from are largely things of the past, things like bench pressing from a neck bridge, lifting weights with no more than twenty pounds on the bar, or keeping your strong players away from barbells altogether for fear of compromising their flexibility.
Epley’s stratagems are staples of strength and conditioning in any sport, and while the methods these men and their peers used have evolved over time, their fundamentals are largely unchanged. We see today’s coaches innovating in areas of health, recovery, and individualization, but not as much in the nuts and bolts, i.e., basic strength and conditioning. What has changed is that these fundamentals are widely adopted now.
I’m going to argue that this is a good thing and that we’re in something of a new Golden Age for S&C, with the first era roughly encompassing the few decades where strength training became an international pursuit embraced by the common man. My reasoning is this: while the rate of change in performance coaching might be less than what it was, the democratization of the knowledge is astounding. If Reeves, Schwarzenegger, Anderson, Alekseyev, and such got us interested in lifting, then it’s been Glasnost, the Internet, and cheap home media that’s gotten us educated.
We take it for granted now that, for a long time, the only organized S&C research around was happening in the Eastern Bloc. As late as the 1970’s, an American’s best shot at learning Russkie techniques was having a subscription to a Michael Yessis service, or watching the comrades prepping for events. Meanwhile, your best shot at American research was an optimistic outlook because little to nothing was happening—outside of NASA, no one in the US was really interested in the science of strength.
What a change a few decades can make. The Berlin Wall fell and suddenly nearly ever lesson learned and confirmed by the Soviets and Co. was not only out, but their coaches and theorists were on the tour circuit. Better yet, western researchers have picked up the slack, especially in the cellular and molecular areas they tend to have advantages in, and they’re communicating more than ever with practitioners in the field. Meanwhile, those same practitioners have picked clean the bones of 20th century periodization models and training techniques, and are spawning innovations of their own.
To put it another way, in 2000 I was a training neophyte who decided to thumb through Supertraining and read Louie and Dave Tate articles online. I was goofing around with DE days and accommodating resistance. Prilepin’s chart was a starting point for me, not a crowning revelation. Ten years earlier, and the closest I’d have gotten to any of that would be owning a subscription to PLUSA or MILO (neither of which were exactly newsstand regulars), or digging through vague books on “Soviet secrets.” Go even farther back and I would’ve had to call Marv Marinovich “dad” to have a crack at this stuff.
I’m going to guess that the good folks at elitefts™ Q&A get basic technique questions about box squats and JM presses about 10,000 times a day. While it means the poor souls filtering the questions spend most of their working lives looking insanity in the eye, it’s a sight better than getting the same number of questions on the pump or concentration curls.
I’m not arguing things are perfect: they never will be. But today it’s almost impossible for a thoughtful high school ball coach to put his kids on a bad strength program or a bad conditioning program, or for a newbie to find a routine that isn’t good enough. Information and healthy competition have flushed most of the real crap from the market. Even the paper rags bring on reputable coaches and athletes to talk honest programming strategies and thoughts, and internet searches and forum views eventually lead to reputable sources. Conversely, it’s pretty easy to weed out the truly lazy and incompetent folks out there.
I don’t have a clue what the next step is. Genetics, understanding the nervous system, and recovery methods all have hidden facets. Whatever it is, I can’t wait to learn more.
