Level to Level Adaptability and Versatility of Strength and Conditioning (Part I)
By Justin Lovett, Director of Strength and Conditioning
Western Kentucky University
The intent of this article is to review common threads and share personal examples and experiences of constantly evolving strength and conditioning programming as it relates to developmental football at the high school level, elite collegiate football at the FBS level, and in professional football at the NFL level. I have had the privilege and honor of coaching multiple-age groups at vastly different stages of development, starting my career coaching sports performance under exercise physiologist Billy Glisan in the private sector, then serving as the head high school strength coach and a physical education teacher for 4 years at Grandview High School in Aurora, Colorado. I had opportunity to learn under Kirk Davis and Joe Tereshinski during stints as an assistant strength coach at UTEP and The University of Georgia, respectively, as well as volunteering for an off-season, working a one-year seasonal internship, and eventually catching on for two years as a full-time strength and conditioning assistant coach under Rich Tuten in the NFL with The Denver Broncos.
Thus, all observations, assessments, and opinions (right are wrong) are viewed through the lenses of my own coaching experiences and knowledge gained from my many mentors in the field who still actively help guide our programming today. Currently in our second year, I am assigned as the Director of Football Strength and Conditioning at Western Kentucky University in Bowling Green, Kentucky.
Level to Level Translation
Ability to Communicate, Teach, and Motivate: Teaching athletes how to properly execute an exercise or finish a drill is paramount for obvious reasons. We as teachers and coaches have to be able to get the athlete to do what we want, exactly the way we want to do it. Sounds simple, and it is, if a coach can properly read his/her athletes and correctly communicate with his/her group. Some teams I have trained need to know the why of what we are doing; they want to be sold and need to be convinced that they are working smarter than everyone else. This team may think they have done it all and seen it all with previous coaching staffs and want to be reassured that this new plan is better than the old one.
Other teams have little use for such long-winded instruction and operate much better with a succinct and direct communication style that may be more similar and realistic to the kinds of instruction they regularly receive from on-the-field position coaches during practices or games. This team may prod initially to see if the strength coach and system is legit compared to what they have already experienced.
Another type of team may require the infusion of more energy, hype, and juice in order for the strength coach and his team to aid fostering production. This team might have younger players or lack athletes with thermostat-type of personalities who set regularly the tone. This team is also one who may ultimately look toward the strength staff to regularly motivate and rile them up. Whatever the need, whatever the level, the ability to adequately assess and analyze in real time with good situational awareness is only a key factor if the message, intent, and sustaining effect of training doesn’t get misinterpreted through ineffective communication, subsequent instruction, and rationale for doing so.
A couple of questions we always ask ourselves as a staff to make sure we are hitting our target objectives for training and mental preparation are always…What are we selling? Is our programming properly using appropriate exercise science principles rooted in evidence-based research? Can we effectively execute and teach the plan? Do we actually believe in what we are telling the team? Is our message authentic and genuine or will it be perceived as phony or manufactured? And most importantly, how does our message and communication style integrate and back-up what the Head Football Coach says and wants?
Managing Large and Small Groups With or Without Equipment: Workouts on the field and training sessions in the weight room are truly alive and successfully fueled with active learning time, concise cuing, and applicable feedback, no matter the intensity prescribed. Flow and efficiency go hand in hand in that there must be common-sense progressions, clear expectations, and seamless transitions to maximize the athlete’s time.
As a high school coach, one of the best experiences during my tenure teaching and coaching was having the opportunity to design quality and controlled workouts that were aggressive and well-paced but yet could accommodate any number of athletes from 10 to 100 at any given time or on very short notice. This meant that we could never be equipment-reliant because we may not have had more than 6 ladders, 12 Med Balls, 24 hurdles, 8 Sidewinders, 4 Growlers, and so on available at any one time.
We had to think outside the box and maybe use Med Balls as start/finish gates. If we ran out of cones, we had to be able to run reactive and open ended drills so that we didn’t waste time setting up intricate, choreographed cone patterns, and we had to be able to adjust to a sudden change situation if drills fell flat, weren’t coordinated properly, or just didn’t work for whatever reason. Luckily, these opportunities fell in-line with our sport-specific training methodology and really fed into what we believed to be best for our players at the developmental level.
To look at it another way, as a sports performance coach who may be working a team or running a camp, we want to be as efficient and as purposeful as a top flight waiter/waitress at a busy restaurant who has 5 other tables besides yours but still makes your family feel like they are the only ones that actually matter in the room, and does so without getting flustered or showing any signs of stress to the customer. For us, this means no fluff or extra work just for the sake of extra work, no wasted mechanics or motions, and the elimination of empty or directionless
coaching. Today, both on the field and on the platform, we pick our spots when cueing up athletes or cultivating a message.
In many instances, corrections on the fly are both warranted and required so our strength coaches must be very quick and to the point with individual redirects. Other times corrections are best when strategically planted and given during assigned rest intervals. This is as efficient as is gets in terms of managing time wisely no matter the group size or equipment availability. We would rather spend the bulk of our time programming for success and coaching athletes rather than coordinating how to divide up bags or rearrange cone patterns to set up for the next drill. Some of the best strength coaches and performance enhancement specialists in the world run highly effective strength and conditioning workouts without any equipment at all!
Successful Adaptation
Meet Them Where They Are At: Nate Robinson, a highly successful physical education teacher, assistant football coach, and strength coach in Denver, Colorado said “you always got to meet them where they are at” to me on my first day coaching with him at Grandview High School. This mantra struck a chord with me and still does. His point was why waste the time and energy forcing a square peg into around hole so to speak. Specifically, his teams did not possess the road grader-type of big bodies up front, the prototype hybrids at running back/linebacker, or the elite speed skill players that the premier teams in our league did at the time; so, rather than chase unrealistic numbers or unattainable results, we chose to concentrate our time accentuating what our players were already really good at, but still leave plenty time to adequately address our weaknesses.
In this particular case, we had smaller, athletic, and explosive players who were very football-smart and had great reaction time. Platform work became more functional in terms of mobility and strength endurance with a focus on repeatability and injury prevention while also utilizing more reactive and open ended drilling on the field to address visual recognition and to practice split-second decision making. Our model worked particularly well over the course of 4 years, even helping aid in Grandview’s first 5A football state championship in 2008. Grandview High School also recently won their 100th game in just 11 years of existence.
In Denver, while volunteering for the Broncos in the 2008 off-season, I discovered that Rich Tuten had been doing the same thing in terms of need-based programming over the course of his entire career. This included spending over 31 years as a head strength coach at places like The University of North Carolina, The University of Florida, and in the NFL with Denver. When I got the chance to jump on board, Rich had already earned two Super Bowl rings under Mike Shannahan and had a roster full of very agile, extremely versatile, and quick-footed offensive linemen to work within their highly successful zone run blocking scheme.
Coach Tuten was using 7 different position specific strength training programs to accommodate his team. Because of how Coach Shanahan had built Denver’s roster, specifically as it related to offensive linemen, Rich used wide varieties of Olympic pulls suited to experience level and
preference, employed elements linear and non-linear periodization strength training programs which focused on differentiating uni-lateral and bi-lateral lower body squatting movement patterns as well as upper body multiple angle incline press development. By offering such a large scope of position and athlete specific training options, it was initially hard to classify what time of strength and conditioning programming Coach Tuten actually ran. The best way to describe his programming was that it was whatever each player on the team needed it to be.
When Coach Josh McDaniel came to Denver in 2009 after his successful run with The New England Patriots, he wanted more team-wide physicality on the field that translated from the weight room and off-season program activities in addition from moves that were being made in the front office. This meant our team would be accepting an influx of bigger bodies with much different training targets and needs than in the past. While Rich held true to his core ground-based training principles of football strength and conditioning, he essentially reinvented his sports performance enhancement model to suit what his new head coach envisioned.
This included added elements of strongman training using tractor tires, functional explosives with sledgehammers, bullet belts, sidewinders and bungee cords, body weight exercises utilized through TRX suspension systems, as well as more variable weight training than he had done in the past by incorporating chains and resistance bands. The strength and conditioning programming that Rich ran for Coach McDaniels resulted in a team that finished with a .500 record at 8 wins and 8 losses, but notably finished third in the NFL in least games missed due to injury (Pro-Football-Reference.com).
That being said, Coach John Fox arrived to coach the Broncos in 2011 from The Carolina Panthers, and it was back to the drawing board to re-engineer yet another football strength and conditioning model. Coach Fox preferred a mixture of power-lift priority protocols emphasizing Olympic lifts for Linemen, Linebackers, Running Backs, and Tight Ends while favoring more body weight single-leg explosives and higher rep/lower load strength endurance training for Wide Receivers, Defensive Backs, and Quarterbacks. Long story short, the results from Coach Tuten’s programming under Coach Fox yielded a team that retained 18 of 22 healthy starters on the field for an AFC West title drive and post-season overtime win over the Pittsburgh Steelers in the Wild Card Round of the 2011 NFL Playoffs.
Each team has priorities in terms of need, and each Head Football Coach should be given a team that is trained in a manner he feels most appropriate. It truly becomes a culture, and an integrated philosophy that is program-wide when implemented correctly. But, it will only result in being a fractured and non-effective narrative if the strength coach is not in sync with his head coach or with what is of most importance in physical and mental preparation for the upcoming season. As I learned from Coach Tuten, successful results can come from drastically differentiating strength and conditioning programming if it accentuates training to increase an athlete’s strengths while accommodating for improvement of both individual and team physical weaknesses. Yet, it needs to be done so in the Head Coaches’ vision and voice. No matter if you are working with a high school team or with a premier professional franchise you always have to meet them where they are at!
to be continued, part II will be posted tomorrow
