Husker Power

by: Boyd Epley
Director of Performance, Nebraska
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Looking back, it's hard to believe it. But just 30 years ago, coaches at the University of Nebraska were actually discouraging athletes from lifting weights for fear it would make them muscle bound and slower. My, have times changed in Lincoln.

I first came to Nebraska in 1968, competing as a pole valuter on the track and field team. A back injury halted my valuting career in the spring of my junior year. To rehab my back, I went to the weight room every day where a few injured Husker football players began to join me in my routine.

Due to my bad back, I was redshirted the following season. I spent that year training hard, running and lifting, and helping out anyone who was around. One of the athletes I helped was Joe Orduna, a star I-back who had knee surgery. Back then when you had knee surgery, your career was over. But Joe recovered from the knee surgery and shocked everyone by playing great football again. He went on to be drafted in the second round by the 49ers.

A few other injured players who worked with me went on to make similar combacks, and one day I got a call from then-assistant coach Tom Osborne.

Coach Osborne asked if I was the guy who was showing the football players how to lift weights. He requested that I come to his office to talk about it. I thought I was in deep trouble.

Much to my pleasant surprise, Osborne was not upset at all. He noticed how the injured players were coming back to practice with more development than before they were hurt. He wondered if I could do this for the rest of the team. I was still a student-athlete myself with another year left to compete, but I said I would help out as much as I could. I also told him the weight room was much too small, making it impossible to fit more than a dozen guys in there at one time. I recommended knocking out a wall to triple the size of the room. He agreed and we went to work on a two-page list of new equipment that needed to be purchased.

In the meantime, my back injury wasn't getting any better. Doctors determined that my pole valuting career was over. But, luckily, the athletic department began paying me to supervise the weight room.

At this time, the years were becoming a little lean by Nebraska football standards. At the start of the 1969 season, we had just endured back-to-back 6-4 seaons - almost unheard of in Lincoln. Because of this and much lobbying on the part of Coach Osborne, head coach Bob Devaney agreed to begin allowing the entire team to start lifting. However, weight room time would not be mandatory. Devaney also threw in one more caveat to the agreement: "If anyone gets slower, you're fired."

I felt like I was in the middle of Interstate 80, trying to get all the traffic to stop and go the opposite direction without getting run over. Fortunately, Nebraska had recruited some JUCO players who had lifted weights before. These guys were headed in the right direction weight room-wise, but the rest of the Nebraska players were not.

At the beginning of the season, I tested each player in the 40-yard dash and a few other tests. Much to the surprise of nearly everyone, each player tested faster at the end of the season than he did at the beginning.

The team also finished 9-2.

Not only did I get to keep my job, Coach Devaney began making lifting mandatory. The result: for the next two seaons we physically dominated everyone we played and won consecutive national championships in 1970 and 1971.

I credit the testing programs for helping me get off to a good start in establishing the weight training the program at Nebraska. Over the years, we have added more testing including the vertical jump, 10-yard dash and the pro-agility run.

When the program started, I didn't have a computer - or even an assistant — to help me compile and average out the test scores. But now, Husker Power has a staff of 35 people overseeing 24 sports and three lifting facilities.

Nebraska football has won five national championships and have not had a season without at least nine wins and a bowl appearance since Coach Devaney asked me to start the Husker Power program in 1969. Because of the team's success, the Nebraska Strength, Conditioning and Nutrition program is recognized as the best in the nation.

10 Principles for Power Sports

1. Ground-Based Activities

Sport skills are initiated by applying force wth the feet against the ground. You need to select lifting exercises and conditioning drills that apply force with the feet against the ground such as the squat, hang clean, hang snatch or push jerk. The more force your athletes can apply against the ground, the faster they will run and more effective they will be. Other exercises will do little to improve performances.

2. Multiple Joint Actions

Your strength and conditioning program should be based on exercises and drills inolving multiple joint actions to improve athletic performance. Sport skills require multiple joint actions timed in the proper neuromuscular recruitment patterns. Otherwise, you have no coordination or ability to generate explosive force. Think of a core lifting exercise such as the hang snatch. It requires joint actions at the hips, knees, ankles, shoulders and elbows to work together as a unit, generating explosive force. Compare this to having your athletes focus on isolated muscle groups such as bicep curls, leg curls or leg extensions. Isolating on single joint actions might work for bodybuilders to improve their appearance, but athletes need to concentrate on activities involving multiple joint actions to improve performance.

3. Three-Dimensional Movements

Sport skills involve movements in three planes of space simultaneously: forward-backward, up-down and side-to-side. Your strength program should improve functional strength with exercises approximating these skills. Only free weights allow movement in three dimensions simultaneously. This makes the transfer of strength and power easier to merge with the development of sport skills. Try to use free weights as much as possible. Machines limit the development of sport skills. For example, when you use free weights, the muscles regulate and coordinate the movement pattern of the resistance, while machines use lever arms, guide rods and pulleys to dictate the path of the movement.

4. Train Explosively

The amount of force required for a given activity is regulated by the use of two different types of motor units found in the body: fast-twitch and slow-twitch. Power sport athletes are interested in developing fast-twitch, while cross country runners are interested in develping slow-twitch. The number of fibers a fast-twitch fiber innervates is greater than with a slow-twitch fiber, and the contractile mechanisms of fast-twitch fibers are much larger. Thus, a fast-twitch fiber generates a force four times greater than a slow-twitch fiber. In most cases, power sport athletes are born with a higher ratio of fast-twitch fibers, which allows them the potential to be powerful if they train correctly. Training exclusively with free weights allows more fast-twitch muscle fibers to be recruited, and in return, improves an athlete's football performance potential.

5. Progressive Overload

The load or amount of weight lifted for each exercise is the most fundamental component of a strength training program. The application of the load has a crucial impact on maximizing performance and keeping injuries to a minimum. Overload happens when the body responds to training loads greater than normal. The overload causes the muscle tissue of the body to go into a catabolic state or to break down. The body then adapts - through good nutrition and rest - through the development of more strength and endurance. Intensity and volume are the key factors used to progressively increase the overload. The use of heavier loads increases the intensity. Adding more repetitions increases the volume. Each method causes specific adaptions. Increasing the weight and keeping the repetitions low develops strength and power. Increasing the number of repeititons and keeping the weight light causes improvement in endurance and muscular size.

6. Application of Periodization

Phases are different combinations of volume and intensity, each translating into different responses by the body. Usually, a cycle starts off with a base phase which progresses to a strength phase and finishes with a peak phase. The area of each building block of the pyramid represents the least amount of volume. The height of the pyramid represents the magnitude of intensity. Your program should go from high volume/low intensity to low volume/high intensity.

7. Split Routine

Most fitness training programs include three workouts per week on alternate days. For example, a Monday-Wednesday-Friday schedule or a Tuesday-Thursday-Saturday program. This approach gives the muscles a one-day rest on the off days. With strength training for power sports, we use a much better program called a split routine. This is a very efficient and widely used principle in stimulating gains. It simply means splitting the body parts and working them on alternate days. For example, do the upper body on Monday and Thursday and lower body on Tuesday and Friday. The split routine allows half of your body to recover and rebuild while you work the other half. With the split routine, you get at least two full days of recovery for each body part.

8. Hard/Easy System

You make more progress over longer periods of time if you do not work at maximum loads during each workout. The hard/easy system eliminates overtraining and mental burnout. With it, there is only one hard workout per week per body part. The other days are light workouts. With only one heavy workout load per week per body part, you will be ready, both physically and mentally, as the loads become greater.

Monday: Explosive lifts, speed/acceleration Hard

Tuesday: Strength lifts, agility/conditioning Hard

Wednesday: Rest

Thursday: Explosive lifts, speed/acceleration Easy

Friday: Strength lifts, agility/conditioning Easy

Saturday: Rest

Sunday: Rest

9. Specificity of Training

The primary objective of conditioning is to improve the energy capacity of an athlete to improve performance. Many coaches and athletes are confused or misinformed on how to implement the correct conditioning. For example, an abundance of football coaches believe doing aerobic distance running in their conditioning program prepares football players for the fourth quarter. Many strength and conditioning coaches also believe in aerobics to build a conditioning base for power sports. But recent scientific research has shown that building an aerobic base contributes little to the improvement of a football player's performance. On the other hand, when specificity is applied to conditioning you train the same way that you play. The first step in setting up a conditioning program is to determine the intensity and duration of the activity. The athlete's success will be largely dependent upon speed, power and agility. So why not incorporate a conditioning program that has drills and activities that involve speed, power and agility? The drills should be short and intense, simulating game-like actions. So why are coaches having athletes do distance running? Good question.

10. Interval Training

Your conditiong program should be based on interval training principles. Interval training is work or exercise followed by a prescribed rest period. The program must include work periods that are very intense for a duration of three to eight seconds, and it must have rest periods that last at least 30 seconds. A common training error that coaches make in their conditiong programs is making the rest intervals too short. If the rest period is too short, the amount of energy is not sufficient to meet the demands of the next maximum intensity effort and force output will be reduced. The problem is very common. Coaches who make the rest interval too short cause the slow-twitch muscle fibers to be trained instead of the fast-twitch fibers. s

For more information on the Husker Power program, including publications and clinics, call (402) 472-3333 or visit www.huskerpower.com

This universal gym machine formed the roots of the Nebraska strength program in 1969.

Nebraska Strength Program Timeline 1969 - Nebraska becomes the first school in the Big Eight to hire a strength coach (Boyd Epley)
1969 - Nebraska is the first school in the nation to have inseason lifting for football players
1969 - Nebraska football players begin testing for the first time; the average bodyweight was 212 pounds and the average bench press was 212 pounds
1969 - Nebraska's current national-record string of bowl games begins
1970 - Nebraska wins national championship
1971 - Nebraska wins national championship
1978 - Nebraska begins first summer conditioning class
1978 - The National Strength and Conditioning Association is founded in Lincoln, Neb., by Boyd Epley
1978 - Husker Power celebrates 100th win
1979 - Univ. of Nebraska becomes first school to offer a degree in strength coaching
1980 - Nebraska becomes first school to take a portable weight room to a bowl game
1980 - Nebraska becomes first school in the country to have computerized lifting programs for each athlete
1983 - Husker Power becomes first program to produce a total of 10 Outland, Lombardi or Heisman Trophy winners and the first to have three straight Outland winners
1990 - Univ. of Nebraska unveils a new 30,000 square-foot strength training facility, setting a new standard for weight rooms in the United States.
1994 - Nebraska wins national championship
1995 - Danny Noonan, coordinator of education and former Nebraska All-American, creates huskerpower.com website
1995 - Nebraska wins national championship
1997 - Nebraska wins national championship
1998 - Husker Power celebrates 300th win
1998 - "Complete Conditioning for Football," by Mike Arthur and Bryan Bailey is published
1998 - Nebraska becomes first school in the nation with two full-time nutritionists on staff
1999 - Husker Power celebrates 30 years of football with at least nine wins per season.

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