By Bryan Miller, Assistant Strength and Conditioning Coach
United States Naval Academy
The only aspect of college football that is more competitive, viscous and relentless than game day is recruiting. College football coaches invest an unfathomable amount of time, money and resources (recruiting budgets, recruiting personnel and the use of private jets have only escalated) trying to land the best freshmen recruiting class possible. Therefore, as sports performance coaches, we must be equally vigilant and methodical with our development of these freshmen student athletes. Regardless of how many recruiting stars your freshmen had, all have some general and specific training qualities that must improve to give them the best opportunity to be successful. I believe all freshmen football players (regardless of playing time as true freshmen) should follow a periodized developmental off-season training program for 10 months. Every block of stone has a statue inside it; it’s the task and responsibility of the sculptor (coach) to discover it.
This period of growth and development is so vital to freshmen because you are laying the foundation for which everything they accomplish and obtain from this time forward will be built. We are truly the “Directors of First Impressions” with this highly impressionable group. Every second we have with them is an opportunity for us to influence them. It’s a full integration and understanding of your programs standards, culture, expectations, structure, terminology and technique (your programs “Brotherhood”). The skill to mold this raw material into what we want must be learned and attentively cultivated. Unfortunately we have to spend a significant amount of time breaking their bad habits first and then begin building our own programs habits. This is why I have created my Pyramid of Training Philosophy with High Performance Lifestyle being the foundation and that starts their first day on campus and continues long after they have graduated.
The most difficult element throughout this process, for coaches AND athletes, is to be patient with the process and be patient with results. You can’t rush or force feed development, nor will each athlete develop at the same rate. The science of coaching is knowing how to utilize periodization; the art of coaching is knowing when to deviate from the path. This article will be more of a theoretical overview of a freshmen off-season developmental program and not focus entirely on program design and implementation. I have had a tremendous amount of success utilizing my Analyze, Apply and Adapt training model for short term and long term development. This is an off-season training model that begins as a structural balance model and then evolves and transitions into a performance based model.
Analyze (Assessment):
This is the first step to unlocking the promise and potential in an athlete. If you’re unclear as to where to start an athlete’s training you will never progress or evolve them to the finish line. This assessment phase is always ongoing, from their on campus recruiting trip to the time they are done playing football. This battery of assessment’s is different for every program but should consist of analyzing and determining each athlete’s medical/ injury history, training background, strengths, weaknesses, deficiencies, imbalances, and asymmetries (this list is by no means all inclusive and as we evolve as professionals our ability to assess should improve and expand). Most strength and conditioning programs struggle with this process for several reasons: 1) they don’t know what to analyze so they analyze nothing, 2) analyze everything and become so overwhelmed with data that they never apply it or 3) limit themselves to only analyzing an athlete’s physical capacities and never analyze the mental and psychological aspects of the athlete.
Assessment can’t solely rely on a movement screen or combine related measurement. You have to factor in the “24 hour athlete” and all possible stressors within their life. I have had great success in analyzing the complete athlete because of the research I have done on FBI and CIA interrogation skills, child psychology and motor learning development. The strength and conditioning coach has more contact time with an athlete than anyone else within the football department so it is critical that we learn to understand an individual’s learning strategy, learning capacity, learning curve, communication skills (verbal, non-verbal, posture, body language, eye contact, annunciation and pronunciation of words), facial expressions, hand tension, jaw placement and how they process internal versus external coaching cues. From this information I can adjust my teaching and coaching to an individual athletes learning style. I feel this is valuable for several reasons: 1) I will have a better understanding how they process and interpret my coaching cues 2) helps me determine their confidence levels, 3) assists with analyzing how their bodies are really “feeling”, 4) immediately builds rapport with an athlete, 6) creates better communication, 5) allows for better training proficiency, 6) determines their stress levels and 7) produces faster training results with fewer setbacks.
Apply:
After careful analysis, now we move to the next block in the pyramid of freshmen development – applying the training program. Your assessments should help you formulate “why” exercises or modalities will be required for your freshmen. “What” specific exercises to select and implement is really where the art and creativity of a sports performance coach comes to life. This is also where the clear distinction between “teaching” and “coaching” occurs. Teaching refers to how you initially implement, integrate and demonstrate an exercise for the first time. Take the time to explain the finite execution of all the movements required to properly execute a movement AND take the time to elaborate on “why” the movement has to be executed in this specific way.
Coaching in my opinion only occurs after an athlete in truly proficient and confident with an exercise to the point where they can begin to acquire some level of training stimulus or adaptation. Training starts with assessment; coaching starts with connecting with your athletes.
If you were diligent with your implementation of your programs standards and your teams culture, your freshmen should start taking ownership of their own personal development. If you were concise with your teaching, your freshmen should be able to start “Applying” your coaching cues and become more self-aware with their training. The yearly training continuum that I try to follow with freshmen (the team as well) is 1) Teach, 2) Tactical (proficient execution of a movement without having to teach the skill again), 3) Train (improve or increase specific skill or movement), 4) Test (not just 1 RM testing but the ability to repeat perfectly executed repetitions at a high percentage) and 5) Transfer (performance training qualities that actually improve sport performance and reduce injuries).
How applicable (for the freshmen group and individual freshmen) and thorough the training program is for freshmen, will greatly influence their short and long term results, their overall rate of injuries, time lost to injury, timeline for positive results, transfer of training, continued sustainable results and plateaus with training. One of my common questions when interviewing a coach is “if you didn’t have access to a bike, how would you teach someone to ride a bike?” Not only does this reveal to me how creative a coach can be with limited equipment but it also shows me how detailed they are with initially teaching a skill.
Adapt:
This phase in the block of freshmen development actually has two critical components: Step 1) Training Adaptation – which simply refers to the positive growth and development a freshman has hopefully obtained from the training program you have applied. The more they adapt and understand that the quality of ingredients (exercises) is important you should begin to teach them to decipher and acquire a palate (self-evaluate) between good and bad training. Step 2) Adapt- any changes or progressions/regressions that you have to make to a group or to an individual’s training program to either continue with positive growth or address plateaus or decrease in the effectiveness of your training program. Our own personal development as sports performance coaches should revolve around providing the best adaptation to continue to develop and stress the athlete. It is this necessary structural adaptation that will benefit the training process. You can try getting by without making adaptations to your training program but you will eventually have negative performance/feedback/risks (they will be unable to protect themselves from injury and a decrease in performance) that compound each other until adaptations are properly and thoroughly addressed.
Please do not just rely on pre and post testing statistical data from the end of an off-season training cycle to make training program Adaptations. As a sports performance professional and a physical preparation expert you should be skilled and knowledgeable with your width and depth of training expertise that you are making adaptations every day, every workout, every set and even repetition to repetition. Much like the freshman football player, your training program needs constant nurturing to ensure positive adaptations. A successful freshmen developmental program is like a jigsaw puzzle; the edge pieces of a puzzle is easy to put together, it’s the inside borderless pieces that are difficult and time consuming.
In Part II, Coach Miller details a complete Analyze, Apply, and Adapt training template.