Sports Performance

I’ve found that I have the best alone time when walking my dogs on a nice morning. A few days ago, it was unseasonable warm here in Pennsylvania, and I was spending some quality time with two of my dogs. I started thinking about training.

I put this program together to try and maximize strength and mass as much as possible. I am a believer that you need to get stronger to get bigger. And also just want to be strong, but also large a lean.

The 4.30 journey is a story that every athlete who has had to run a 40-yard dash can relate to. It is my journey from running a 4.66 40-yard dash as a freshman in college to running a 4.30 for the New Orleans Saint scouts and the New Orleans Arena 1 football team.

For several months, I’ve been doing Jim Wendler’s 5/3/1 program. In it, Jim talks about doing exercises for assistance that build muscle mass. He advocates doing several reps of dips and pull-ups every week. At one point, I believe he states we should do 50 dips a week weighted or 100 dips a week with just body weight. If memory serves, he advocates doing something similar with chin-ups or pull-ups.

You’ve just spent an hour doing a grueling full body workout. Your body is spent from deep, heavy squats, weighted chins, and max effort incline presses. So what do you do now? How about loading up the bar for deadlifts? Why not do them with an underhand grip while you’re at it? Or while standing on a low box?

With the beginning of football season, the long anticipated excitement for the early powerhouse match ups has finally arrived. Coaches get their first look at new players, and fans can see what they can expect from their favorite teams.

“I tell ya. His legs are as strong as an ox, but he throws a punch like a 7-year old girl!”

Years ago, when I was regularly conducting seminars, I began to notice a common element in many of the university weight rooms I’d visit. I’d always see towels folded over the tops of power racks and taped at their ends.

For those not familiar with the sport, rugby union is a professional, widespread sport in Europe and countries in the southern hemisphere (Australia).

This article isn’t going to make me any friends, but hopefully it will open the eyes of some people and help them look outside their fields of thought and expand their thinking. During the last seventeen years, I’ve been exposed to several concepts and ideas as they pertain to strength and conditioning, including Olympic lifting, powerlifting, core training, assessment based training, Western periodization, Westside methods, tempo and volume based workout regimens, and others.

Plyometrics have been a part of most athletic development programs for many years.

Where the hell did we go so wrong when it comes to football speed training? When did it become acceptable to pass off the hard work that entails training for football speed and replace it with fairly easy cone drills and gadgets?