Strength Report – 10 Common Errors in Football Strength & Conditioning

The profession of strength and conditioning coaching was formally established in the United States 35 years ago with the formation of the National Strength & Conditioning Association. The aim of the NSCA was to merge science and practice to legitimize our roles and to separate us from other fitness-related “experts.” After all this time, one would expect an evolution in the quality of programming and coaching but it isn’t evident in the practices of many strength and conditioning coaches.

Instead of sound programming based on exercise science and practice-proven ideas, there is a proliferation of weight training movements and conditioning regimens that don’t significantly transfer to football.
   
I believe the reasons for this are the following:

1. Strength coaches are often influenced by the commercialization of information. Each year, there are new pieces of equipment and packaged “philosophies” that are extolled by their manufacturers and marketers as being vital to the performance of football players. Too often, strength coaches gravitate to the new and different at the expense of the tried and true.

2. Many head football coaches are ignorant of important training principles and confuse style with substance. As a result, strength coaches are hired based on their in-your-face coaching personalities and how “hard” they can make workouts. When this is the primary criteria, anything that causes pain and extreme fatigue is good; anything else is lacking.

3. The process of educating strength coaches is still limited in the U.S. Most university exercise-science curricula concentrate on clinical aspects of training and have a decidedly cardiovascular fitness bias. The lack of extensive schooling in the theory and application of strength training can’t be overcome by any of the certification processes available. Unless individuals aggressively pursue this information on their own, they will be under qualified for the task of training college football players.

4. Some strength coaches are just lazy. It’s easier to mindlessly copy other coaches and to organize workouts so their days are shorter than to research the facts and meticulously organize their programs so they will be successful in developing the physical attributes that we know contribute to players’ successes on the field.

    While the training process is complex, with many variations of a theme possible, it’s a misunderstanding or complete ignorance of what that theme should be that has to led to bad practices in the training of football players. And while it’s not my intent to list all of the principles that theme entails, it can be summed up with one word – specificity. What specificity means for the athlete is performing exercises that have the same character as the more common sport movements. That character can be defined by: 1. Type of muscle contraction; 2. Movement pattern; 3. Range of motion; 4. Muscle fiber recruitment; 5. Metabolism (what energy systems are predominant); and 6. Rate of force development. The military has a maxim – train the way you fight; fight the way you train. That sums up the concept well.

Football coaches have enough to keep them busy with recruiting, coaching, and research of strategy and tactics. They don’t have the time to understand everything about the construction and implementation of their strength and conditioning programs.  Instead of a comprehensive but tedious list of principles, I’ve made a list of 10 of the more common errors, and my rationale for getting rid of them. It really boils down to that simple concept of specificity.

1. Prescribing high reps to failure,
or close to failure.

Football is a game of high power output. The longer the efforts, the lower the power production will be. Also, with more technical movements like the snatch or clean, which are outstanding movements for the development of power, high fatigue will cause a breakdown of form and a greater chance of injury.

2. Organizing the team into large lifting groups.

You cannot properly teach anything but the most simplistic and non-specific workouts when you’ve put 30 or more athletes in the weight room at one time. Accordingly, the large-group format is accompanied by a circuit of bodybuilding-type exercises that require little teaching rather than the explosive, total-body movements that are teaching intensive. Coaches usually orchestrate these workouts from a distance, blowing a whistle to indicate station changes. These mass workouts use the same weight load per station instead of carefully prescribed resistances based on each individual’s strength level and possible injury limitations.

3. Making “pain” the primary objective.

You can hire just about anyone to inflict pain. It requires no thought, expertise or effort to make people hurt. “Pain” workouts are characterized by the reps-to- close-to-failure approach and longer sprints with short recovery that have no metabolic specificity. Football requires explosive muscular efforts and largely short-term anaerobic capacity.

4. Rating your coaching performance by your “intensity” and the volume of your voice.

Coaching “intensity” is a somewhat hallowed concept in football, but it’s important to be yourself as a coach. Athletes respond to many styles of coaching but few respond positively to being screamed at constantly. After a while, it diminishes the message and it’s that message (instruction) and the plan that matter most. Also, if he’s organized his groups for maximum teaching efficiency, the strength coach is instructing for 8-10 hours each day. Consider the effect on your physical and mental reserves if each day you were coaching your position at high “intensity” for that long.

5. Using “gassers” or other runs of similar distance to condition your team.

The average duration of a football play falls in the range of 4-7 seconds. These efforts are executed with high movement speeds and power outputs. The average recovery time between plays averages 35 seconds, not counting extended rests from time-stoppage. This is a work-to-rest ratio of about 1:6. Why then use conditioning runs of extended duration, lower speed and power outputs and with a work-to-rest ratio of 1:1 or 1:2? Unfortunately, the rationale is usually “pain.” That pain is not preparing your players for the demands of the game.

6. Buying equipment or using a training
system because, and only because, a coach
of a successful team is using it.

Many factors contribute to the success of a football team – recruiting, coaching, tactics, physical preparation. Singling out one as the sole or primary cause of that success is difficult. As strength coaches, we believe we make a difference, or we wouldn’t have chosen this profession. However, we don’t help that cause when we ignore the pertinent information and forego critical thought in choosing how we prepare our players.  It is the reason some coaches choose to shake heavy ropes (a very non-specific, largely muscle-endurance workout) and/or have their players balance themselves on balls for “stability”. Stability in sport is a much more complex attribute than the ball advocates appreciate and has been shown to be developed best by constant practice of sporting movements.

7. Considering your primary responsibility is to build “mental toughness”.

“Mental toughness” has been defined different ways but the general theme is the psychological quality that allows one to perform at peak effort and efficiency in high-pressure situations. Coaches who believe that this quality is enhanced by extreme physical work are hard to convince otherwise but have no evidence to support them.

I believe that this approach will not significantly change a player’s genetics and years of upbringing. If you want a mentally-tough football player, recruit him. I will concede that it will help you identify who has the capacities to endure and suffer pain well but I’m not sure that’s the same quality as being able to focus and perform in a critical moment in a game, which is more important. I’ll also wager that the guys you identify as “mentally weak” in your pain drills are the same ones who have issues with the daily discipline of being a student-athlete.

Regardless, the issue is that the strength coach’s job is to advance football players’ physical abilities to perform at a high level and these types of workouts seriously compromise that goal. The extreme fatigue caused by these types of workouts has been shown to appreciably lower strength, power and speed levels during the period they are administered and has led to serious injuries and medical conditions such as cardiovascular collapse and Rhabdomyolysis.

8. Devoting an inordinate amount of time to special “Core” exercises.

Some legitimate concepts have been hijacked by so-called fitness experts and distorted or exaggerated beyond reason so they can be packaged and sold. Training the “core” or trunk muscles is one of them. Yes, it is important to have good strength in the mid-section of your body. Without it, your spine will not have the support it needs during heavy loading and the force you need to generate through the hips and knees will dissipate on its way through the trunk to the chest, shoulders and arms. However, the myriad isolative and high-rep movements prescribed by the “core” believers are as nonsensical as using a leg extension machine for leg strength. What is interesting is that most of these people would concede the superiority of a squat over a leg extension because of the integrative nature of the multi-joint squatting movement vs. the isolative nature of the leg extension. Yet the same logic doesn’t apply when it comes to the mid-section.

Nothing in football is isolative. One of the core tenets of sport-specific programming is to train movements, not muscles. It is the coordinated and complementary action of many joints and the muscle/tendon systems that cross them that must be trained and in a matter consistent with the major sport movements. That is, range of motion, speed of movement, rate of force development, etc.

When athletes perform large range of motion, explosive exercises, they cannot eliminate the trunk from the mission of moving the resistance with great force and velocity. More important, those muscles are used sport-specifically – as a link in a coordinated chain of movement that is similar to those movements required in football.

9. Training for “bulk”.

This is an old and persistent buzzword. Its origin is in the pervasive bodybuilding culture in the U.S. Most coaches would define “bulking up” as an increase in muscle mass. The best way to do that is to follow higher-rep schemes with slow movement speed and come close to failure. What happens when you do this is a selective recruitment of slow-twitch muscle fiber and the increased body mass largely comes from what’s called sarcoplasmic hypertrophy.  This is an increase in the non-contractile proteins and the semi-fluid plasma between the muscle fibers. It is typical of bodybuilders and doesn’t correlate to increases in explosive strength and power.

Yuri Verkhoshansky, the Russian sport scientist, wrote: “The highest correlation between muscle mass and strength is observed in those cases when strength is maximal and the speed at which it is displayed is of secondary significance. The connection between strength and bodyweight decreases as the speed at which strength is displayed increases; it does not have importance for explosive types of exercises.”

If you want to improve your athlete’s power, which is the primary strength quality needed by football players, you must use relatively high loads and/or high rates of force development. If you want bigger players, you are better off recruiting them and then training them for function rather than structure.

10. Confusing “simulation” with “specificity”

This error is generally well-intentioned in that it’s an attempt to follow the specificity principle. But trying to exactly copy a sports-movement pattern with significant weight can confuse the neuromuscular programming such that the result is negative. An example would be to have a quarterback throw a medicine ball in a passing action. The explosive Olympic-style movements meet all of the specificity factors and transfer well to sprinting, jumping, blocking and tackling.

It’s time for the strength and conditioning profession to progress from tradition-bound and emotion-driven programming to a principles-based approach if it is to have legitimacy. If football coaches understand some of the false notions that are represented by the list above, they can hold their strength coaches to higher standards and improve the readiness of their football players.

About the Author: Mike Gerber is in his third season as the strength and conditioning coach for UNLV football. He previously was the strength and conditioning coach for the football program at Montana for four seasons. Gerber also was the owner of Mike Gerber Sport Strength and Strength in Motion. He also coached at Middlebury, Yale, and Syracuse. Gerber received his Bachelor’s Degree from Maine in 1981 and his Master’s from Syracuse in 1991.