Texas Sized Strength

How Jeff Madden Builds Strength and Speed at Texas
by: Matt Fulks
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Speed kills. Just ask most of the Texas Longhorns’ opponents during the 2005-06 season. That can be attributed largely to the players that head coach Mack Brown and his staff recruit. As big of a factor in the team’s success, however, is the strength and conditioning program the Longhorn players endure. Sure, endure.


“Oh, I’ve been known as a guy that works them and works them hard,” laughed Jeff Madden, the University of Texas assistant athletics director for strength and conditioning. “We’re not going to lower our standards to a guy who doesn’t want to work. We’re trying to establish a work ethic here.”

Since arriving at Texas with Brown in 1998, Madden, who’s known as “Maddog” by the chain around his neck, has helped turn the Longhorns into this past season’s national champion. Madden’s success also garnered him the Samson College Strength & Conditioning Coach of the Year award in I-A.

THE EXPLOSIVE LONGHORNS

For the majority of his 24-year career in strength and conditioning, Madden has seen the benefit of speed. While working with Brown at North Carolina during the 1990s, the two saw the advantage of recruiting players that could serve that purpose. “Watching teams like Florida State and Miami and seeing what they did with speed training and the recruitment of speed,” Madden says, “we could incorporate those things in our program, to develop our formula, our philosophy.

“That formula starts from the top with head coach Mack Brown. He and his staff recruit the bigger high school safeties and move them up to linebacker. We get the bigger linebackers and move them up to end. And we get the bigger ends and move them up to tackle. So we end up having great team speed. But it takes a long time to build that team speed. Coaches can enhance speed, but only to a certain level. A lot of it has to be God-given.”

Madden, who was certified by the National Association of Speed and Explosion (NASE) in 1988, works as hard as he can at enhancing that team speed. His theory, basically, revolves around the idea of explosive power being the link between speed and strength.

“We’re trying to get our guys as fast as possible, while adding as much lean muscle mass as possible,” he says, “and getting them as strong as they can be, while working on functional movement. Functional movement and multi-directional speed are the keys to everything for us.”

Madden says the key to working with football players is to understand that fact: they’re football players. They aren’t body-builders, power lifters or Olympic lifters. So, besides speed training, Madden employs a system of strength training and stretching, using every piece of equipment from traditional free weights to machines to heavy-duty chains to bands, and every technique from boxing to martial arts to Pilates.

“The key is that whatever your football players are doing, it’s making them better athletes,” said Madden. “You want to find different things that will help your guys become better athletes. If it won’t do that, we won’t use it. Also, though, I don’t have our guys try any routine or exercise that I haven’t first tried myself.”

Madden, who has been practicing martial arts for more than 20 years, also stresses the importance of stretching. “The more you train with weights, the more you have to practice your skill, but also the more you have to stretch to help give that muscle an opportunity to grow,” Madden said. “If you have muscles that are binding you, they’ll restrict your range of motion if you don’t stretch them out.”

Madden warms up their football players with a ballistic movement such as high-knees or back-pedals before starting the stretching routine. “To help the kids not be as susceptible to pulling muscles, the best thing really is to pre-warm the body,” he said.

There’s one more element to making Madden’s formula successful: rest.

“You have to have rest and recuperation, which is something we preach to our guys,” he says. “For instance, our lineman might have a heavy lifting day on Sunday, the day after a game, because it’s the furthest away from our next competition. That might be a day when I take all of our skill guys, like the defensive backs, receivers and quarterbacks, and have them work on flexibility or Pilates-type exercises for core movement skills. That’s better for them because they ran 100 routes and our quarterback went through 100 routes the day before. They need to recuperate on Sunday.”

GAINING BIG IN THE OFF-SEASON

The Longhorns recently wrapped up their spring workout session, which started in late January. It’s a time when, even though Madden has only four weeks to work with the football players within NCAA guidelines, the workouts are intense. The hardest time for the players, however, comes after the spring semester. During the voluntary summer workouts.

“I really feel that our largest gains are made during the summertime; there’s so much development then,” Madden said. “Our kids are working on their foot quickness, body control, core strength and multi-directional drills. They understand that’s such a key time for their development.”

Last summer, all of the returning Longhorns stayed throughout the summer. Under the strength and conditioning staff’s direction during the offseason, players work out four days a week. Each of those four days, players will lift weights. They’ll do running work on three of those days. The strength and conditioning program during the season is slightly different. Due to NCAA restrictions, a football coach has a maximum of 20 hours a week to spend with his team in an organized environment, which includes practices, games, film study and conditioning.

So, Madden has a three-day program that focuses more on maintaining the strength gains made during the off-season. Each workout, which includes one major exercise and three to four assisting exercises, is 45 minutes long. Since they run so much during the offseason, the in-season running regimen is limited.

“The philosophy for many coaches used to be to just run the heck out players until they couldn’t run anymore,” Madden remembers. “I don’t believe in that. Our players get their conditioning during practice.

And, again, they want to maintain it during the season.

“I’m more of an instinctive trainer because I’m watching them in practice to see how much they’re banging around,” he said. “If they have a period during practice when they’re banging on someone for 20 or 25 minutes, why would I go in and beat them up with weights?”

DEVELOPING SPEED IS THE KEY

Jeff Madden’s first exposure to speed workouts came as a player for Vanderbilt University during the early 1980s. During his sophomore and junior years, 1980-81, the Canadian track team and its coaches visited Nashville to train in a nice environment. Then-Commodore coach George MacIntyre got the Canadian coaches to work with his football players.

“I was able to learn and to live these drills that we still use today,” said Madden. “To become proficient in the drills they were teaching us and see my own speed improve at the same time, I really got into what they were saying and I wanted to learn more.”

That enthusiasm carried over to Madden seeking certification with the NASE, and then to his student-athletes at Rice, Colorado, North Carolina and now Texas. He has worked with two Heisman Trophy winners – Rashaan Saalam at Colorado and Ricky Williams at Texas, more than 100 NFL players and 16 Olympians.

“As a speed specialist, I have the guys doing the same speed work that a track and field guy would do,” said Madden, who was inducted into the USA Strength and Conditioning Hall of Fame in 2003. “I’ve just modified the workouts more for football. … We do a lot of single-leg stuff for balance. Our guys have to be able to squat at least twice their body weight or leg press two-and-a-half times their body weight in order to do any single-leg movements. We work in sand, we work on hills, we work with resistance, we work with assistance. It’s a total speed program.”

Don’t be fooled by Madden’s dedication to speed, though. He still is a huge proponent of the weight room. Shoot, he has benched pressed 602 pounds.

“Bench press, squats and power cleans are very key elements to a program. And we’ve learned that the multi-joint movements, or combo lifts as we call them, such as high pull, power clean, front squat, push presses and so on, and changing them up, makes the guys more athletic, because you’re moving the weight and you’re moving the body at the same time, as opposed to being on a bench and just pushing your arms up.”

NO TWO ATHLETES ARE THE SAME

In the weight room under Madden’s system, regardless of the time of the year, each football player will do the same basic exercises. Their abdominal and balance work will be the same to develop the core muscles. And each player will do bench press, squats and cleans. But the loads will differentiate the positions.

For instance, a lineman might do five sets of an exercise at 80-85 percent of his max. The defensive back or wide receiver will do the same exercise, but he might do only three sets at a lower percentage of his max. “But then the DB or receiver might do more functional movements with dumbbells,” says Madden. “He might do a dumbbell punch, which helps with his bump-and-run technique.”

Along those lines, even though one might assume that the receivers and defensive backs would do the same exercises since the D-defensive backs will do more exercises to help them work on the speed and movement of back-pedaling. “They still do the same step ups, dumbbell lunges, regular squat and front squat that the receivers will do,” Madden said.

The position that differs the most from the others, including the skill spots, is quarterback. Madden hired Lance Sewell, who had worked with the Cincinnati Reds’ pitchers. “With quarterbacks, we’re going to worry about shoulder girth,” said Madden. “Whether with bands or light weights or machines, (Sewell) focuses on developing our quarterbacks’ muscles around the shoulder. That way we can help avoid injuries.

“(The quarterback’s) also going to work on quick feet, his drops, scrambling. And we’ll put weighted resistance on his body as he’s doing these exercises, so he’ll have more of a functional movement routine. That quarterback, though, still needs to be strong. So, he’s still going to do bench press and squats and lunges and side lunges, like the other players.”

LEARN, LEARN, LEARN

Despite his success, or maybe because of it, Jeff Madden isn’t convinced that he has the perfect program. He knows that what works for him might not work for another coach. Nor, is his current system the only one he’ll use the rest of his career.

“To be a good coach, you have to be humble enough to be willing to change,” he said. “I’m open-minded enough to know that I don’t have all of the answers. Some of us get so narrow-focused that we have a strict program and we stick to it. I’ve learned over the years, that you have to find out what’s best for each guy.”

For Madden’s Longhorns, that means speed. At least for now.

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Madden’s 5 Keys To A Successful Program

1. Total team belief in what you’re doing. “The guys have to be committed to being one of the best teams in the country. There are a lot of folks who can print the prettiest programs and put together the best Power Point presentations, but it’s a question of whether their athletes are following them.”

2. Faithful and loyal strength and conditioning staff that “goes the extra mile to get athletes ready for their best performance.” At the University of Texas, incidentally, Madden has nine full-time assistants, six of which work full-time with football, plus six interns that work with football.

3. Accountability. “This is huge, not only with your strength and conditioning coaches, but with your athletes. Here, we have great kids that want to win and are willing to work hard in order to win. If there’s one guy that’s slacking off, his teammates will get on him more than we will. When you create that in your weight room, you know you’ve arrived pretty much where you need to be.”

4. Flexibility in training around injuries. “Johnny’s going to go out and bang that shoulder and come back in hurt. The trainer might say that Johnny can’t lift because of his shoulder. But what about his other shoulder and his legs? There has to be a rapport between the strength and conditioning staff and the training staff. That way, Johnny doesn’t atrophy on his good shoulder and legs.”

5. Communication in football department from head coach and his coaches. “This is a key I see that’s not in a lot of programs. You get football coaches that have never coached strength training before, so they do what one guy did at one place and another guy did at another place. All of those things might have worked with that team, but does it work with the team you have right now? There are plenty of different ways to skin a cat, as we say. So the strength and conditioning staff and the football coaches need to communicate to find out what’s best for the players.”

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