Strength and Conditioning Discussion

[goodnterribles]

You forgot the 2020 prediction of 10 wins. C'mon man!!!!!

It's actually 11 wins. You just have to learn to read between the lines when it comes to ***'s posts.

 

[Turd Ferguson]

Just to make sure I am following, we are combining a play fast offensive philosophy with a get as big and strong as possible S&C program?

 

[HuskerFaith]

Fair points about Ozigbo. He did look fast and nimble his Sr. Year. He was fun to watch. Again, I have no real concept of what Husker Power is or what Duval and Co. do programming wise. I just like the topic bc I think it has as much to do with success...and it makes for interesting debates. The article posted about the new Tide S&C coach says that programming for the masses, about 1/3 will respond. Sounds reasonable to me and kind of gives an answer to why some kids get better, some don't. If you are in lifting weights and working out, my guess is that a certain percentage of players benefit greatly from it, some benefit in some ways, some stay the same and some regress. His point is that each individual has to require his own unique programming to address his areas of weakness....or get better. Programming workouts to address areas of need vs programming a workout for a position group seems pretty logical. I wonder how many follow this methodology vs creating workouts for the whole or even position groups? I'd bet his programming methodology is in the minority right now.

I remember a discussion when Frost and company first got here that they would analyze each player to scientifically find what is the optimum weight for each player. (Specifically talking about Walker - the now DL who was recruited as an OLinemen). I assume they have done this for each player and all new recruits. In Walkers case they said he couldn’t perform optimally with the weight he needed to put on to be an olinemen. Now this doesn’t address the speed and quickness issue but my point is they are using scientific concepts to analyze players optimum performance criteria. What methods to come up with that data is beyond my knowledge. But I like it. Effectiveness? Remains to be seen.

 

[TrapDL]

***,
Another question I have about SC because I’m fascinated by it who are the top guys in your opinion and what are they doing you like? Other question you said they are using the Trap Bar how are they using it and also the unilateral training? Because Unilateral looks like they are just throwing them in for good measure like some lunges call it good. Dr. Rhea program looked like hand supported SSB heavy getting after it. I know these are your opinions about who to hire and I’m not saying fire Duvall just a what if.

 

[DuckTownHusker]

Publishing some Husker Power numbers is my ideal situation. It's also how you objectively compare progress over time. Was Ahman Green faster than Ameer Abdullah? Who the heck knows?

You put up numbers and you can objectively say that our OL is faster/stronger than last year, etc.

Maybe they know the numbers and won't post them because they've been dismal for a long time.

 

[TrapDL]

Publishing some Husker Power numbers is my ideal situation. It's also how you objectively compare progress over time. Was Ahman Green faster than Ameer Abdullah? Who the heck knows?

You put up numbers and you can objectively say that our OL is faster/stronger than last year, etc.

Maybe they know the numbers and won't post them because they've been dismal for a long time.

I agree post the numbers we can handle the numbers fans we are well aware we need a lot of work.

 

[N2FL]

Alright, i'll get into it a little. I really struggle with these threads, because people call me out for "talking out of both sides of my mouth" anyway. And in the case of our S&C, they're probably right. I see some flaws with what we do, but the Cornhuskers are my team. So am I going to sit here and say that we are screwed and what we are doing isn't close to correct? I'm not going there, but I will bring up some things that have been brought to my attention and things I don't agree with. I want to preface this though, if you get 100 strength coaches in a room, you'll get 100 ideas on how to do things. There's really not a perfect way to do things yet.

I'll start with something we have a lot of success with.... putting on weight. HuskerPower is basically a body builders workout where you put on a ton of mass and do the circuit workout. It starts with the back squat to increase testosterone throughout the circuit to naturally get the body kicking out what it needs to grow its muscles. This is primarily what we have built our program around. It makes sense, because rarely are you getting the 310 pound offensive or defensive linemen that is FBS/Power5 ready. Alabama is, but we aren't. And if any of you were at the 2018 coaches clinic where our coaches spoke, this is where my first worry happened. "There's this new term 'functional' that people are using. If you coaches stayed with HuskerPower from the 90s, you didn't set your program back at all. That's still the gold standard." The older coaches in the audience nodded with approval as if they took a viagra pill. They knew Nebraska football had changed something, and they were able to then go back to what they knew. But for me and a few guys, it was tough to digest, because we were being told that HuskerPower was the first thing in the history of earth that got it right the very first time it was created.

But when you take a deeper dive, is putting on weight always good? I can't find the thread, but remember everyone in July 2019 posting the pic of Martinez at the road race and talking about his "gains"? We couldn't get over what it was going to be like having him run over people at his new size. I tried to insert myself to slow the talk down, but at the same time you don't want to extinguish positive thoughts and messages. But fast-forward to the 2019 season, and was our QB more explosive? Was he faster? And you saw it across the board with our linemen in space, or the regression of some linebackers. Which leads me the point of the game isn't the 90s and in a phone booth anymore, it's being spread out and speed/athleticism is key. So again, there's been some advancements.

Now you have your teams like Wisconsin, etc., but they still defensively need to be able to stop the spread. So let me tell you where I worry a bit with what we are doing, with where football is heading, and how McCaffrey trains that you asked about.

I've read the book that he models his training after, it quite literally states that you should get rid of squatting. Now, I wouldn't do that, squatting is pretty important for some things. But it's a fundamental difference between the #1 lift we focus on, and what sprinters/McCaffrey focus on. For the most part, McCaffrey doesn't squat except for an occasional 1/4 box squat, it's almost all hex bar deadlifts and unilateral TRAINING. (I put in bold for you to remember later). What his book states, is that bodybuilding is not about actual strength and rhythmic reflexes, it's not about muscles working together, it's actually about growing muscles as much as you can. You don't have to worry about them working well together, because bodybuilding is designed for you to look good standing for an hour on stage (or in my case tipping back beers on the beach).

So how does that relate to us? If you have imbalances, and are just creating muscle gain, you are widening the gap of those muscles working in synergy, which gives you injuries. I think injuries have been a huge issue for us these first two years.

But let's go back to the word I bolded, TRAINING. For the most part, you are either training or you are exercising. McCaffrey talks about 5 minutes rest in between his sets, not doing more than 5 reps in season. Nebraska goes 30 seconds between reps in their circuit workout, or 10 reps of 800 or 900 pounds on the bar. It crushes your CNS (bolded for later talk). McCaffrey and his trainer talk about how the workouts take longer, but they are less taxing and his body performs better on the field. He talks about how he made the classic mistake of overtraining, if he wasn't feeling dead after his workout he took that as someone outworking him. He found out when he crushed his body all week, he was slower when it mattered most. He was exercising, he wasn't training to be the best NFL RB he could. He has a comment of "this may come off wrong, but I was working too hard and it was having a negative impact on my performance." Here, we were celebrating "having puke buckets".



Those are just a few of the things I struggle with. We put too much weight on guys, wreck their CNS, and the high weight high rep squats at limited range of motion are creating unathletic players in the open field, IMO. I don't know what changed, and i've told this story before, but we went to a smaller college where a buddy had a cousin. One of his friends looked at a Nebraska DL and goes "what makes you guys just **** on everyone." The player looked at him and I am not lying, went down to touch his toes and his elbows almost hit the ground he was so flexible. We've lost a bit of that. We look stiff and unable to react in open spaces. I'll just go ahead and put this out there, I don't think you can combine HuskerPower with Oregon speed offenses. Oregon had a track coach getting their guys fast, we have an outwork your opponent get jacked strength coach. That wasn't a negative, i'm just saying how do you combine those two things? There's a place for both things in football, but I just don't know how you can reach your max potential if you try to do both things. One focuses on muscle gain, Oregon and now Alabama focus on speed training and getting guys as fast as possible. There's a reason Usain Bolt was the fastest to ever do it, but looks like he really doesn't lift at all.

I'm just going to go one more negative thing and i'm not trying to be a prick here, but it was brought up to me by someone that had played with our strength staff at a previous stop, and I spoke with them roughly a month ago. He knew I was a Nebraska guy and asked how I thought things were going. Told him what I say on here... "we will get where we want, Frost won't let us be mediocre long, but we definitely should have been to a bowl game last year. We underachieved." The guy shook his head but had had a few pops so he wasn't going to let it slide. "Ya, you're lucky you have Frost. I think 2019 was your strength coaches 8th losing season out of 10 tries." That was a crazy stat I had to fact-check. He went on to say "there's a reason he's only been recommended or hired by old Nebraska guys, a lot has changed since then. The teams you are losing to are getting their guys hired away to CFP teams. Indiana doesn't get better players than Nebraska. But they are trained better. Watch to see what Alabama does the next few years with those coaches."

I don't mean to go so negative there, but 8 losing seasons out of 10 is a crazy stat. Our biggest issue IMO is lack of athleticism. With Covid, guys were running hills and doing body weight or makeshift weight room workouts on their own, for the most part. I think that's going to be huge. You see some of these guys and they can't even turn to talk to you they've gotten so big. Guys like Ben Stille and Matt Farniok are plenty big, time to get them athletic and mobile which we have been doing the past few months. I think that is really going to help us in the long run. I just really struggle with how we've looked. How did Colorado with a strength staff and football coaches only there for 2 games beat us? We could have 95% of the players on Indiana and Purdue if we offer them a scholarship, but they beat us.

All of that said, we are going to get there. 7 wins for sure this year. I like what we are doing and our staff definitely took a look in the mirror after 2019. It didn't go the way the coaches or players wanted it to. And it wasn't from lack of effort.

EDIT: I see I forgot about 1/4 squat. Definitely some benefits. I would use it a couple weeks before combine or testing as it will artificially inflate some of your numbers and help you test better. But if you build a program around it, we go back to imbalances. Because it will certainly boost testosterone and build muscle, but all of the angles you are cutting out your muscles aren't being trained while missing it.

One of the big themes of spring, before COVID took it away, was how the coaches all did a huge self-scout in the offseason to assess what went wrong and how they can do better on all levels. Did this include the S&C staff? It's pretty common for coaches to look at what's working at other schools or the NFL, whether it's schemes, plays, concepts - basically everything. Football is a copycat game. Coaches will take what's working and incorporate it into their own program.

Don't guys like Duval do the same thing? Are S&C coaches more stubborn?

 

[SSM]

One of the big themes of spring, before COVID took it away, was how the coaches all did a huge self-scout in the offseason to assess what went wrong and how they can do better on all levels. Did this include the S&C staff? It's pretty common for coaches to look at what's working at other schools or the NFL, whether it's schemes, plays, concepts - basically everything. Football is a copycat game. Coaches will take what's working and incorporate it into their own program.

Don't guys like Duval do the same thing? Are S&C coaches more stubborn?

I suspect you are waiting for a response from somebody that knows the answer to that question. It's not me. I'll simply comment that I would think S&C would always be learning, reading, copying, testing, etc. What we actually know about the human body is relatively small. What I did 30 years ago as "cutting edge" is ass backwards now. Getting better in this field requires trial and error and continual learning...basically through experimentation and the results may not be conclusive for years. You don't read a book, take a few courses and are suddenly the maestro. I'd hope and I'd bet that they are continually spending time evaluating data from all over the place, including their own. Evolve or become extinct....or at least you get passed by. Just from watching interviews, posts and video snippets, it's pretty easy to see Duval's passion for S&C.

I just read the Will Compton article, fascinating that he still uses J Dobson as his strength coach. If I recall, he took a beating from the boards when he was here. I suspect, don't know, that his training is more related to the Tide coach than not. If someone knows that answer, I'd love to read their comments. BTW, I don't have the time nor the inclination or the skills to go back and find discussions about JDobson. My comment is purely from my memory, which fails me more and more everyday.

N2FL - BTW, if you are truly not a fan of NU and I guess even if you are, thank you for all of your posts, articles, insights. I enjoy them, they make this board more interesting. You do pretty good work. Two thumbs up!

 

[threefeetofsnow]

When comparing current and former team's on field performance as a result of S&C, I wonder about steroid use. I don't know, and I'm not making any accusations, but If they were used back in the day and aren't now, could we make fair comparisons? What all would steroids affect - strength, size, quickness, speed, other?

 

[Cisco]

When comparing current and former team's on field performance as a result of S&C, I wonder about steroid use. I don't know, and I'm not making any accusations, but If they were used back in the day and aren't now, could we make fair comparisons? What all would steroids affect - strength, size, quickness, speed, other?

People used PEDs then and they use them now. There have been multiple meta studies done over the years on natural bodybuilders that spanned decades. The average person would be pretty surprised by the limits of how much lean mass a person can build and maintain naturally. People's ideas on this are very distorted by what they see on television, the internet, and magazine covers. Bodybuilding is obviously a little different because they aren't bulking year around because they have to cut for stage. It's a little different for powerlifters and strongmen at the heaviest weight classes as they can essentially add mass year round. But football players are also doing a lot of conditioning and practice that somewhat limits what they can do too.

There are guys on every single team in the country who are on something or several things and it's been that way for decades.

 

[ThrowFar60]

Ya, they are doing it with pretty much everyone. Ozigbo was victim of thinking to see the field pre 2018 he needed to be the big bulldozer back because Wilbon and Bryant had the "smaller back" roles "locked up". Once Wilbon left and Bryant retired, he was free to sculpt himself how he knew it worked best and lose weight. Our S&C definitely deserves credit there. A guy like Jaylin Bradley literally put on too much muscle when doing the HuskerPower circuit, crazy to think about. So he had to scale it back.

What’s surprising to me the most was when we went through the metabolic circuit in the past, once you hit your goal weight, you were pulled off.

Here’s even an article stating as such with Lawrence Philips. I actually remember quite a few athletes that were never allowed to compete the metabolic circuit for fear that they would put on too much muscle.

The Path to Athletic Power

Tap into the genius of Boyd Epley, founder of the National Strength and Conditioning Association (NSCA) and the University of Nebraska's storied Husker Power program. The Path to Athletic Powerprovides unique insight into the evolution of modern sports conditioning, how it was significantly...

books.google.com

 

[Bleed Red]

Ya, they are doing it with pretty much everyone. Ozigbo was victim of thinking to see the field pre 2018 he needed to be the big bulldozer back because Wilbon and Bryant had the "smaller back" roles "locked up". Once Wilbon left and Bryant retired, he was free to sculpt himself how he knew it worked best and lose weight. Our S&C definitely deserves credit there. A guy like Jaylin Bradley literally put on too much muscle when doing the HuskerPower circuit, crazy to think about. So he had to scale it back.

If the bolded is true, that might be the biggest indictment of the strength staff i've seen. People can argue which lifts, how many reps, etc all day long but in the end it is the philosophy of the strength staff and they have to believe in what they are doing. However, in the end, they are strength COACHES....and if they let the players choose what they should look like AND that is better than what the staff tried to make them into??? Well, then they are failing as coaches.

 

[Bleed Red]

One of the big themes of spring, before COVID took it away, was how the coaches all did a huge self-scout in the offseason to assess what went wrong and how they can do better on all levels. Did this include the S&C staff? It's pretty common for coaches to look at what's working at other schools or the NFL, whether it's schemes, plays, concepts - basically everything. Football is a copycat game. Coaches will take what's working and incorporate it into their own program.

Don't guys like Duval do the same thing? Are S&C coaches more stubborn?

I'm sure they look at results, but it may be as difficult as asking SF to change his offense to the Power I. All coaches believe in their system, and although tweaking and revising things should constantly be done to make it more productive, that may be a bit tougher on the S&C side than SF saying "we need to run more in goal line situations or we need to run more 2 TE sets".

S&C may require a much more complete makeover if what is being done isn't producing the results.

 

[LarstheRed]

What’s surprising to me the most was when we went through the metabolic circuit in the past, once you hit your goal weight, you were pulled off.

Here’s even an article stating as such with Lawrence Philips. I actually remember quite a few athletes that were never allowed to compete the metabolic circuit for fear that they would put on too much muscle.

The Path to Athletic Power

Tap into the genius of Boyd Epley, founder of the National Strength and Conditioning Association (NSCA) and the University of Nebraska's storied Husker Power program. The Path to Athletic Powerprovides unique insight into the evolution of modern sports conditioning, how it was significantly...

books.google.com

You might recall the interview with the guys from the mid 90s Pipeline who were in a constant battle with Boyd and company regarding their workouts. They would be told to shutdown, then sneak over to Sports Courts to get in additional work. If I remember correctly, it was either Tom or Milt who had to intervene, saying what they were doing was apparently not hurting them and actually seemed to help them. I’m sure that never sat well with the S&C staff.

 

[RogelioVB]

Specific example of an *** phrase: "You see some of these guys and they can't even turn to talk to you they've gotten so big."
Just made me think: I was in Lincoln for business a few years ago and at a social event a friend introduced me to a Husker DL. Nice guy and we had a pleasant visit. He received a phone call and needed to be somewhere else and his ride wasn't available. I volunteered to drive him, me driving, him front seat and my wife in back - 4 door pickup, large Chevy'. Wife was talking with him during the drive and I noticed he wasn't able to turn and speak with her ! So darn bulky that he virtually had to unhook his seatbelt to be able to turn around and look at her! ***'s phrase made me think of this situation - in a small area his bulk and strength could be an advantage, but in an open area, e.g., 10 yards either side of the line of scrimmage, he might be certainly exposed as not being able to move or react appropriately and be truly "out of the play" within 1 second of the snap.