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.”
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