AFM RSS Feed Follow Us on Twitter       
AMERICAN FOOTBALL MONTHLY THE #1 RESOURCE FOR FOOTBALL COACHES
ABOUT |  CONTACT |  ADVERTISE |  HELP  



   User Name    Password 
      Password Help





Article Categories


AFM Magazine

AFM Magazine


Heavy Impact

Strength and conditioning coaches and facilities have taken the game of football to a whole new level
by: Jeff Davis
© More from this issue

Click for Printer Friendly Version          


It’s the youngest, and certainly in many respects, the most important element in developing winning athletic programs, especially football, other than the head coach himself. The strength and conditioning coach and his staff can be difference makers between a winning program and mediocrity.

Before the early 1960s, only a handful of athletes dared to try weight lifting. “They used to think you’d become muscle-bound,” says Mike Burgener, for decades, the esteemed strength and conditioning coach at Rancho Buena Vista High School near San Diego.

That old saw still held true for Burgener when he was a highly recruited halfback in Marion, Illinois. “My dad would never let me lift weights when I was a boy.”

When Burgener visited Notre Dame in 1964, he could not resist the salesmanship of the dynamic new coach Ara Parseghian. The clincher came when he visited a priest, Father B.H.B. Lang in his weight room. “He might have been about the only conditioning coach in the United States. Fr. Lang ran it himself. It was not school sponsored,” Burgener recalls.

By 1969, Parseghian’s Fighting Irish had won a National Championship in 1966, and were always in the running for the top spot every other year. Those teams, were big, strong, and powerful. Another coach who took note was Bob Devaney at Nebraska who hired Boyd Epley in 1969 to install a facility under the west stands at Memorial Stadium. National titles followed in 1970 and again the next season. Soon, Nebraska football players were noted for their strength, speed, and power. With 30,000 square feet, 16,000 square feet of that devoted to lifting, the West Stadium Strength complex is the largest such facility in the world.

Yet, despite the obvious successes at Notre Dame and Nebraska, some programs were slow to come aboard. “Back when I played, there weren’t mandatory weight training programs. Just a handful of guys would go lift weights,” recalls Northwestern’s long time Director of Strength and Conditioning Larry Lilja.

Lilja enrolled at Northwestern in 1972. “When I came out of high school, I was undersized,” Lilja recalls. “Alex Agase was coach then, and he told me I needed to get bigger and stronger to play there.” After the season, Lilja and another freshman player did something about it. “When we saw Alex that spring we each had put on 20 pounds of solid muscle. He said he didn’t recognize us. We told him we had lifted in the basement of Patten Gym. He was sold. The next year the whole team was lifting.”

Lilja, a trim 220 these days, played offensive center at a beefy 265 pounds, a weight he shed after football. After Northwestern, he knocked around the NFL for a couple of years, taught at St. Patrick’s High School in Chicago, then returned to Northwestern in 1980 as the school’s first strength and conditioning coach where he developed facilities as a one man band while he learned the craft. “Now I have three full time assistants who are just fantastic.”

These days, Lilja and his staff are busy training Wildcat teams in the 10,000 square foot Byron S. Coon Center adjacent to Ryan Field. It’s a year around business in and out of seasons, that seemingly never ends, especially in winter. “I’ll see the entire football team. They’ll lift weights four times a week,” Lilja says. “They do some type of speed development three times a week. During the summer months as we get closer to fall practice, it’s not unusual for 90 percent of the players to stay on campus.”

And, wherever that may be, the athletes and their conditioning coaches will be working to compete. One such man is New Mexico State’s Head Performance Training Coach, John Taylor, who understands that not every player is a thoroughbred. “Sometimes we often judge strength and conditioning by success of the football team. There you take quarter horses and make faster quarter horses. At smaller places, you are taking pack mules and lesser horses and trying to make quarter horses.”

Many places, Taylor notes, like a Northwestern, or Boise State, have won with good but not great athletes, who are intelligent, and well coached, and have achieved success. “Our profession makes the best impact in fashioning players who finish games well. You do not do it just by weight training. You develop speed, endurance, the ability to repeat those things over and over again,” Taylor says .

John Taylor oversees a state of the art facility that will be twelve years old in July. When it was built, it was considered one of the three largest in the country. “The building is 13,500 square feet. It has $1.5 million worth of facilities in it.” That includes 23 Olympic racks – safety squat racks – in it, a complement of dumbbells that run from 2.5 pounds to 150 pounds in 2.5 increments, and scores of other pieces, including machines and aerobic exercise equipment. Primarily, we are free weights” Taylor says.

Free weight is the basis of Mike Burgener’s development program at Rancho Buena Vista High School. “We have at my school a philosophy we call ‘Yes to the Fourth Power.’”

“Second, we do free weight exercises. We rarely use machines.

“Third, we try to train multiple muscle groups at the same time and multiple jointed exercises. For example, if I do a snatch, I do a triple extension which is ankle, hip and knee extension. Basically, it’s a jump with the bar bell in my hand. I have to secure that weight over my head, then stand up with it.

“Fourth, we want to train explosively 75 percent of the time. That leaves us with 25 percent of the time being able to do non-explosive exercises to build up strength. Like bench presses.”

Most important to Mike Burgener is never forgetting who he is coaching. “I have trained some Olympians, but my basic work is with normal high school kids who pick up a sport and want to be stronger and have fun doing it.” Unlike the major colleges with their deep-pocketed contributors, Burgener does it himself. “I raise the money. A thousand dollars here. A thousand dollars there. I do clinics and every dollar I get goes back into that weight room. A high school weight room is not the University of Notre Dame’s weight room.”

But Burgener has enough to train willing young athletes. “It’s all I need to make a great weight room.”

Larry Lilja has existed and thrived as a conditioning and strength coach for a quarter century in the Big Ten pressure cooker. He must call on his athletes to do no less than his conference counterparts ask of their charges. “We would like our linemen to bench press at least 400 pounds; free squat 600 pounds, and power clean anywhere from 385 to 400 pounds. It’s a bit less for other positions.

“I’m a big believer in the use of free weights because of the balance and control you need to execute a lift,” Lilja says. “We have some machines out there, but the key to any good off season strength training program is not so much the development of strength but the development of power. The ability to apply as much force as possible in as short a time.

“Although we do bench press, squats, and military press to develop basic strength first, we do need to convert that into power. Free weights lend themselves to exercises that are more ballistic in nature. You see the power platforms out there. We do a lot of hang cleans, power cleans, overhead jerks,” Lilja says.

Speed, as Lilja sees it, is the dynamic partner of power. “We are big on polymetrictraining. When it comes to speed development, most programs in the country use polymetric training. It trains not only the muscles, but also the nervous system – how quickly you can get a muscle to contract, how quickly that nerve impulse can initiate a contraction. Polymetrics involves jumping up and down off boxes, bounding down the field and the like. We have some 300 pound linemen who can touch the rim with a basketball after doing an eight week session.” The key lifting element for Northwestern’s Lilja as it is for Taylor at New Mexico State or Burgener at Rancho Buena Vista High School is the power clean. The power clean is the ballistic, explosive lift that a player must handle in games when he is trying to clear the way for a ball carrier, or on defense, knock aside opponents as he moves to the ball. “It starts from the floor. You lift the bar to your shoulders in one motion, a quick, explosive lift. Form is very important. There are progressive lifts” Lilja says. “Almost everyone who excels in the power clean is a very good football player.”

As important as football is to the professional prosperity of any strength and conditioning coach, it is not the only sport. And, warns John Taylor, too many youngsters are over training when they need to play the games. Doing so, he insists, will improve their performance as athletes. “Kids are capable of lifting at any time. Kids should be playing, especially those younger than 13,” Taylor says. “The 13,14,15, and 16 year olds are the first years where benefits accrue to weight training.”

“Play different games to develop varied movement patterns. Soccer, for example, to the expense of everything else, is not good. High school summer training programs are turning out specialists like colleges. By doing just that, they are not developing well rounded athletes,” Taylor says. “They would be better if exposed to more activities. But the high schools demand full attention to their football players and so forth. It is a dilemma.”

“You still have to run. Sometimes we lose sight of the fact that you have to run. Most of us who have been successful at the collegiate level know that the biggest and strongest who can’t run can’t play the game,” Taylor says.

“Technical and tactical come first. You have to know how to learn the game to play it and succeed. Otherwise you will be sitting on the bench. Then you have to build good speed and agility. Then you have to have power and strength. That’s our priority order.”

Most important, all strength and conditioning coaches instill form and technique in their athletes as they run through their regimens of lifts, jumps, and reaction drills. Injury causing mistakes in those drills are a strength coach’s nightmare. “You never want to lose a kid in the weight room. You sure don’t want to face the coach with news like that,” Larry Lilja says. Amen.

DOING MORE WITH LESS
Mike Burgener has been a serious student of weight lifting techniques since he enrolled at Notre Dame in 1964 in Ara Parseghian's first recruiting class. As a high school physical education teacher and strength coach since 1978 at Rancho Buena Vista (California) High School, he has, by necessity, been forced to operate on a limited budget. He does it by sinking every dollar he earns at clinics back into a weight room that otherwise he could manage if he had to operate solely on the $1,000 budget provided by his school district.

“I have nine platforms. All free weights. Bumper plates, three benches, three power racks, and three inclined benches, kettle bells,” Burgener says. “It’s all I need to make a great weight room. My stuff is functional.”
Mike Burgener bases his model on a system devised by CrossFit, a California a training system conceived and run by Loren and Greg Glassman. “It's a program that can be used anywhere. The Marines and Navy Seals are using it,” Burgener says. “I know that it works in physical education.”

How does it work? “It's a highly intense PE program, based on functional movement. It cam be as simple is pushups or burpees to snatch, clean and jerk in weights. It's good stuff,” Burgener says. “That’s where Olympic lifts come in. They are considered the gymnastics of weightlifting. You have to have great flexibility doing these lifts. You have to have unbelievable core strength and be strong.”

As Coach Burgener sees it, the secret to making young athletes, not body builders, is to stress the fundamentals. “I try to stay away from bench pressing and go with functional strength movements. I find that kids tend to injure their shoulders with the heavy duty bench pressing,” Burgener says. “We do a lot of military pressing, or push pressing, using your legs to lift the weights over your head. We do heavy squat. Most are snatch and clean and jerk with the movement patterns. Overhead squats, front squats, things like that.”

Most important, certainly at the high school level, is to make weight lifting fun, not a chore, not a mission to get bigger and become a pro. “My basic work is with normal high school kids who pick up a sport and want to be stronger and have fun doing it,” Burgener says. “Here’s the bottom line. How many blue chippers are there out there? I have to work with the non-blue chippers who want to take weight training and make themselves better. They have to practice their sport, but they want to go to the nth degree to make themselves better and, if they get injured, to restore themselves better and faster.”





NEW BOOK!

AFM Videos Streaming Memberships Now Available Digital Download - 304 Pages of Football Forms for the Winning Coach



















HOME
MAGAZINE
SUBSCRIBE ONLINE COLUMNISTS COACHING VIDEOS


Copyright 2024, AmericanFootballMonthly.com
All Rights Reserved