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.
A few years after my football career ended, I found myself playing linebacker in a recreational flag football game in Long Island’s Eisenhower Park. This is rarely ever a good idea.
A few weeks ago, we decided to put together a roundtable-style article about the use of the Prowler…
The title of this article is a little misleading. It’s not about the balance that most trainers think about such as standing on one foot on a Bosu ball. It’s about building a physically and structurally balanced athlete. These ideas and qualities are what form the exercise selection of our strength program. Our staff has five major goals in mind for our strength program—increasing power/explosiveness, increasing speed, increasing strength, increasing lean muscle tissue (size), and preventing injury.
If you watch runners before a race or if you watch baseball, football, or other athletes warming up before a game, you will see that most of them do the butt kick (quadriceps) stretch.
This strength program is a combination of several styles and programs that I have discovered in my ten years of experience. You will read about systems that I’ve learned from Joe DeFranco, Dave Tate, and Louie Simmons. You will learn philosophies that I’ve adopted from BFS’s Greg Shepard, Mike Boyle, and Paul Chek. I’ve learned a ton by training with Strongman champion, Tom Mitchell, and watching videos from the Parisi School.
Football coaches know that selecting a player based on combine results is a crap shoot at best. In this article, Dr. Yessis evaluates the tests used to offer a possible explanation of why the combine results are such poor predictors of game play success.
On this program, you’ve got to eat. If you are skinny and weak, you need to eat a ton of food. And don’t just tell me that you “eat a lot.” I get this answer from many kids, and when I take one look at what they really consume, it turns out to be nothing more than a few slices of Elio’s Pizza and some cereal all day long.
Did you ever take a good look at the shape of the Prowler? How about someone giving you the finger?
Many people refer to the stretch reflex as the key to explosive training. How it is applied, however, is frequently misunderstood. This article takes an in-depth look at this action and how you can better utilize it in any or all aspects of your training.
Football season has just ended and you’ve quickly realized that you’re only half the man you were in August. Losing 10–20 lbs during the football season is typical for most high school and small college athletes. But you’re not typical.
As a strength coach, a good athlete—let’s call him Johnny—lands in your lap. Do you wonder what brilliant programs you can create to make Johnny bigger, stronger, and faster?
With James Smith, Mark McLaughlin, Tom Deebel, Jim Wendler, Travis Mash, Julia Ladewski, C. J. Murphy, Matt Brand, Nick Zostautas, Kevin Deweese, and Tim Kontos
“The last part of progress is always easier than the next. Determination must be continually manufactured and tested.”
*The number of workouts that this athlete performed each week with me was dependent on the team’s practice schedule, meeting schedule, travel time & injuries that occurred during the season.
This is the time of the season when I’m sure you’re asked the same question over and over—how do I run a faster 40? Here are the top seven tips to increase your 40-yard time dramatically without having to run a step.
Speed is a product of stride length (the distance your hips travel in a stride) and stride frequency (the number of steps you take in a given time period). However, you won’t reach top speed by taking increasingly larger steps to increase stride length or taking short, quick steps to increase stride frequency.
In any sport, athletes need to be able to accelerate as quickly as possible to get to the ball or opponent first. As a coach, you must put your athletes in the best possible position to succeed.
“Real deference doesn’t come based on size and intimidation but on monster work capacities and real street toughness.”
Although there are several different reasons for this, lack of time in the day is a large one (especially for the collegiate strength coach). Here at Northwestern State University (NSU), we developed a method for classifying our athletes to make their programs/training more individualized.
Like everyone else who peruses Elitefts.com on a daily – hell, let’s call it hourly – basis, I’ve turned into something of a fan of the site’s incredibly eclectic cast of characters: guys just like me, only significantly stronger, who’ve dedicated their lives to hoisting more iron than anyone else in the gym.
This letter is to inform you that I am resigning from my position as head strength and conditioning coach. I enjoyed my time while at the university and feel grateful for the knowledge and friendships that I have gained. I feel I owe it to you to offer an explanation as to why I have made this decision.
While at the Syracuse seminar, several of us chatted about the gyms and teams that were always kicking major ass. They all had the same thing in common—attitude. This attitude spread like wildfire throughout the gym and equated to success, BIG success.
This article is designed to give future strength & conditioning coaches a better insight as to what it takes to get your “foot in the door”.
Last night I closed the doors to my strength and conditioning facility for the last time. After over ten years in the same town and the same building, it was time for me to move on to new challenges.
Evan Simon recently became the head strength and conditioning coach for Davidson College in Davidson, North Carolina.
Here are some actual stories from actual strength coaches. All these stories have been substantiated by coaches that I know very well and trust.
I sometimes wonder if there are any prerequisites at all to getting a job as college strength and conditioning coach.
Maybe it’s because I found out the hard way that you must vent information through a screen door in order to attain measurable improvements every training session in the real world. Maybe it’s because I have been doing research lately on American training strategies and I got a swift kick of deja vu.
