Hey good morning. I appreciate you taking the time out to
listen to a blowhard like me speak. The greatest thing that Scott did for me was
not put anybody behind me so I can go off on my tangents and hopefully we can
get some good information out to you all. There's numerous people to thank when
you're up here. No one gets up here by themselves. First I want to thank the
NSCA -- in particular Peter Melanson, Scott Caulfield, and Boyd Epley -- for reaching out and giving me the best opportunity I've had as a speaker in the
United States. This is the first time I've spoken at
the NSCA national conference so the honor is mine and it's an extremely
humbling experience. Two -- my wife who's been on this long journey with me for 23
years, the ups and downs to coaching. I live a real-world life. I'm a coach.
I travel my family to six different states, been fired, rehired, that's life. That's
coaching. Without her, I don't know if I'm standing up here today. To my two sons
who didn't choose this life, they've had to fight adversity and they've won too.
The people who have put me here are the people that I've been affiliated with and who have allowed me to raise my level of coaching.
Who have challenged what I believe in to make sure that I can justify to you why
we do what we do, because that's the key to a successful coach, especially a
strength coach. Who gets in a pitty pat fight with sport coaches over why you
do what you do? If you cannot justify your programming, you're going to lose to
the head coach. They're giving you your clients. Some of you have not figured that
out yet. And I've been blessed with some of the best people to work with. Some of
them are in here today. It would take me over an hour to thank
everyone. They know who they are, but more importantly, I thank you for coming in to
listen. Hopefully what we do today is to reaffirm some things. This is not science.
This lecture is not science, I'm the most practical guy in the room. What I'm gonna
give you is 23 years of working the floor, writing programs, making certain
things that people want to make complex extremely simple. This is a give and take
lecture. I'm going to give you every part of information that I can, and for any
question you ask that I have the answer, I will give it to you. But my expectation
is for you to take something. In this day and age, too many people want the
information but don't want to learn it. That's why you see my slides have no
written information. Why? Because if I don't know it, I shouldn't be talking
about it. I want you to take the information that applies to your world.
How do you do that? By writing it in your words, because then you can bring it
back and interpret it your way and make it successful. It's a simple as that. That's the art of
coaching, is make it yours and believe in it and have the passion and the heart and
the ability to go out and prove the value that you believe in work
regardless of the setting you're in. If you are familiar with our programming, I
call it "complex simplicity" because I wanna take everything that's been brokered
to me and make it as simple as possible. Why? Because it's easy to interpret. We live in this world now, the terminology, I mean ... There's ninety different ways to say hypertrophy now. You know what that is? Just get them big. There's ninety different ways to talk
about maximal strength. Get them strong. It's not that hard. For me, I'm always
looking for ways to reiterate to the people that work for me and then to
athletes, who when they ask questions, I can give them an answer that
they can understand. Not looking at me like, "look at Coach trying to big-time me."
This is my interpretation with the help of many others. I reserve the right to be
wrong. I'm not here telling you, "Oh, don't listen to no one else today, I have
all the answers." I don't have all the answers. This is an evolution of 23 years and
it's still evolving. That is why I think we've had tremendous success whether
we've trained ten-year-olds or NFL all-pros. We continue to evolve. Our weight
rooms are our labs and fortunately for me I've had five great labs with some of
the best athletes in the world. So we've heard these terms before -- micros,
mesos, or macros. Everybody has their interpretations of them. What I'm gonna do, and more importantly for the young practitioners, is to show you what 23
years of experience has given to me. Hopefully I can share this with you all
and you can take something away from it. First: micro cycles. Everybody knows the typical
definition -- it's your standard weekly training plan. We classify ours by
letters, and we have come up with, we have five distinct microcycles. What we call
week A is an alternative microcycle. That's very simple. I've lumped everything
into this one microcycle. If you have a specific way you train your athletes -- whether it's 4 days a week, 3 days a week, Olympic-based, powerlifting-based,
CrossFit, high-intensity, one set to failure -- that is your dynamic and that is
your structure and methodology. The alternative microcycle is when you get
completely away from that and you do whatever you want. That makes no
rhyme or reason, it comes down to that. Or it might be in my case where I trained
guys three days a week in the weight room and we do a four day week program.
That would be what I consider an alternative microcycle. Or if I'm in the
middle of a long period of time where I can link cycles together and I know my
guys need a break, I may throw an alternative one after a cycle where we
don't do anything. We might even get out of the weight room and do strongman
stuff on the field all week. So the basic definition for us of an alternative microcycle is very simple: anything that doesn't comply with your
organized structure of your usual plan. The next four are termed but mean nothing as an
individual microcycle until they're linked together, and that's baseload,
deload to reload, and performance. As standalones, the definitions really mean
not much, but when you start linking them together, that's how they tie in.
That's how you develop cycles. But for us, the base is the introductory week of a
cycle. We're going to introduce new exercises, we're going to base our
workouts off of possibly new training maxes. Generally the density or the
tempo of that week is a little slower because there's going to be a little bit
more teaching going on. Then we have week L, which is our load. Generally the load week would be the
second week of a link progression. The programming is generally the same but
the sets, reps, and intensity is gonna vary. Generally, intensity is gonna raise up
from the base week and mostly reps and sets can change based off the setting and
based off your set and rep cycles. Now here's where we flip flop and when we talk
about linking together you'll see we have what we call the deload to reload
cycle. This is your ability to super- compensate and we'll talk about the two
variations to what I call complete cycles and how we utilize this. In the old terms -- and it's very simple -- work them hard for three weeks, give them a week to recover, work them hard for three weeks, give them a week to recover. That was a stand-alone
of basic linear periodization, and I'll talk about when I learned about a
performance cycle later, when I took a USOC Olympic lifting class. But deload to
reload is generally going to be a reduction in volume and intensity. Most of
this stuff is review, but the exercises generally stay the same -- we're gonna cut
down the load and we're going to cut down the intensity. Then finally what I call
performance used to be called the second load. I call it performance because
that week of the cycle is what I say that's go time. That's the highest level
of intensity of our big lifts and we're going to push to max. We are not
afraid to go off the script because when we finish a cycle I want to make sure
we've gotten the best effort from our guys in the weight room or on the field in our running programs. But our basis comes off these five microcycles
and then it's up to us to learn how to differentiate loading and parameters
based off what the goals of cycles are. Within these microcycles comes your
daily sessions and this is the more specifics: How are you going to lay out
your weeks? How many days a week do you think are necessary to lift? How many
days do you think it is necessary to run? Then running is broken down
into linear speed, lateral speed, conditioning; which is broken down into
COD drills, interval training, and then for us we have another day we call
explosive development. Which is when we pretty much do our jumps and throws. All
this factors into these micro cycles, then it's how do you order these
sessions? In our setting I always prefer to run athletes before they lift, for numerous reasons. One, the conditioning aspect and the
running aspect shows up more in their sport than the lifting does. Two, I
believe in power endurance, maximal, submaximal strength endurance -- I want my athletes to be under some state of fatigue when they enter the weight room
because at the end of the day, any one of us who trains athletes, the
ultimate goal is, what I like to say: last fast and play stronger, longer. The teams who
can maintain a high level of conditioning late and a high level of
strength and power late are generally of the ones that will break over the top
and beat a team if everything else is even. There are times no matter how well
you train them and you play against a team that is just trained as hard as
you have and they can out athlete you, you better hope the ball bounces your way.
I'm very fortunate I trained a lot of good people. I worked at
Arizona State for seven years. For seven years we lost to USC. That was when USC
was rolling national titles every year, had some of the best players in college.
Now I coached two of those guys that were on that team, and we were talking,
and they told me flat out, they said, "House (that's my nickname) it didn't
matter how good you train those guys for ASU, we had way better players."
So remember that. We can only control what we control in program design. We
control general physical fitness measurables. We can get a guy bigger, and I'm sure everybody in here can do that. We can get a guy stronger. We can get a
guy faster. We can get a guy to jump higher. But then we have to turn them
over to their sports specific coaches and they have to take that athleticism
and hopefully create a better jump shot, teach them how to rebound. How many guys here train basketball players? How many of you have improved their vertical jumps
but you really don't teach them how to rebound? That's where sometimes we
lose some of the translation of what we're trying to accomplish. You can
improve that athlete's vertical jump four inches, which should give him an
advantage in his previous ability to rebound, but if you don't teach him
positioning, boxing out, his reaction time when the ball comes off the rim, it will
never show up. When you're talking about exercises to choose from, everybody I've
ever heard said, "Well, we gotta power clean." Some people may say, "Well we gotta do plyos," but let me just tell you this: when you're designing your programs and
picking exercises, just because you can doesn't mean you should. I believe
every exercise is tremendous but if it is not applicable -- and part of it is the way you
teach it, making it applicable -- that has no value. I go to the power clean
because I've come full circle with it and I know a tremendous amount of people talk
about it. If you do not perform the power clean correctly, it's not transferring
explosiveness. The jumping jack, bounce it off your thigh, straight leg deadlifts
off the ground, power reverse curl does not transfer into explosiveness. It
transfers into an extremely strong individual that has no technique and is
looking to have serious, serious issues with your training staff. So take a step back when you're designing
your daily plans and picking your exercises, and give your athletes a chance to be successful. Our daily session evolves based off of
our running. Everything we do goes back into the strength room. Depending on what
part of the year it is depends on how we structure our weight room for these
microcycles during the daily sessions. One of them that we have just created,
we just figured out a way to even make our programs more efficient, is
flip-flopping different tiers. Our program is based off of three days a
week total body work, and we have a tiered
program. Tier one is the priority. Tier two is the major. Tier three is the minor.
Tiers four and five rotate from tier 1 and 2. Those are what I call strength
mobility exercises. That's where you'll see a lot of the single leg movements and
a lot of dumbbell work for upper body, as well as relative gymnastics strength for
upper body. Then we have posterior shoulder, posterior chain, and neck. Most of you have been out there, you've heard the saying, "If it's very important, you should
do it every day." We do a lot of things every day, we just do a tremendous amount of variation every day. When we do not run first -- like during the in-season plan --
tiers 4 and 5, neck, posterior chain, and posterior shoulder, which when we do come off the field will go tier one, that has now become our pre-activity prep. We
flipped that up top and that becomes our pre-activity prep. Why? Because the first
two movements are going to help prep tier 1 and 2, and then we always want to do some type
of what people call pre-hab work. We're always going to posterior shoulder,
always going to do neck, and we're always going to do posterior chain. I'll be
honest with you, the more and more I learn about neutral spine, posture, joint centration is a new thing
that I'm learning, and how the head position is important in all movement in
sport, I don't know if any athlete shouldn't be doing some type of neck work.
I'm not talking about blow-up, get a 24 inch neck on a tennis player, but I am
talking about some type of stabilization. When we keep talking about neutral spine,
neutral spine, neutral spine, you know, positive alignment and all this, but yet
we always tell our athletes to look and pinch the cervical spine ... well I do that
right now, that kinda hurts. So that's something I think we should talk about
with all athletes doing some type of neck work. But that's just the gist of a
daily session for us, and again this is our five terms we use for our microcycles.
One of them is a standalone. The other four have to be linked together to
have some type of ability to be successful and relate to a progress and
progressive state of training. Now we've linked them together, what I'm gonna do
is what we've usually familiar with. This is a standard 4-week mesocycle. Now
we're on to our mesos. In almost any texts that we've read, from Stone and Fleck when
I was at the late eighties just starting as a strength coach, to Bompa, to Verkhoshansky, most people always base things off of the standard 4-week
monthly cycle. This was the first way I learned how to write programs, a three
up, one down approach. You baseload, then it was another load, reload, then we go on
from there. What's the next goals? For me personally I like the word performance
because that for me means, and that for my athlete means, that's the week that we expect things to change.
Week one -- week B -- week one of the cycle we're re-establishing ourselves, we're learning the program, getting used to new exercises. Week two, raising it up, ramping it up a little
bit, watching our tempo get better, watching the density of our work get
better. Week three in this particular model, hey
let's go. Because what I have learned in training is we don't have a whole lot of
time, and you'll see that when we talk about annual plan. We don't have a lot of
time with our athletes. Rules have given us a window that's so short, we've got to
be very very precise. The days for me particular of setting one week aside to
do just pre-testing or post testing are over. I don't have that ability. I've
gotta work every type of testing I can into my programming. Generally that might
happen every week with jumping, but with lifting its gonna fall within 1 to 4
weeks of either the week 3 or week 4 in a performance block. Regardless of
what's on the script, if a guy has the ability to keep going, we're taking them
off the script and we'll talk about how we do that in some of our examples. I am not afraid to give a guy a chance to set something extremely impressive as far as
his own personal records or her personal records. If it's a good day, I'm taking
advantage of it and hopefully those good days fall on the days I wanna go off the
script. If it's a bad day, they just stay with the program and then we would go
reload to deload, drop down, give them a chance to recover.
move on. Typical complete traditional work. What I
try to do with my programming and when I work with numerous strength
coaches under our umbrella, is I want all
terminology to be the same. I want it all to be the same. I give you a tremendous
amount of creativity and ability to pick what you want, but I want you, if you come
to me and I say, "Hey what are you guys doing?" and you say, "I'm on week 3 of a
complete traditional cycle." I automatically know it's a four-week
cycle and the performance week is week three. Just like if you tell me then
we're doing the maximal strength phase, I know what my terminology is, and what
percentages you're at. So when you're developing your plans for your staff,
make sure you're aware of that, because what happens is when you give the
ability to create and everybody's using their own terms, now you lose the
uniformity when that coach can't make it and you've got to take over their teams.
You have no clue what that exercise is because you may call it something else. You
have no clue where they are when you're talking to them about program. I'll talk
to people that say so-and-so is going on vacation, it took me three hours to go over one
week's program. Three hours? It should have took you five minutes. Here's the card, here's where we're at,
here's what we got as far as the individual differences we may have with some of our
athletes coming off injury. Out the gate. If you're spending more than five
to 10 minutes talking to a staff member who you may have to supplement or they
may have to supplement you, if you're going on vacation or going to be out, you may want to rethink terminology as part of the group. This is the easiest and
simplest. This is how we learned, this is how I learned everything when I first
started, was the standard three up, one down 4-week mesocycle. In 2002, we brought out Mike Conroy, who I think is one of the best
Olympic lifting coaches in the United States, to give us the sport
performance certification that they were offering at that time. It just
started out, I think it was the first year they did it. This was the very first time
I heard what was called a "performance cycle" and it goes off some of what I
believed in about using that performance week to wrap someone up. You'll see
the only difference of the weeks is now after week two you deload to reload and
then you end the cycle on performance. As a former college football player
and a competitive lifter I jumped all over this because this made sense. Why am I, and my basic thinking was this, why would I want to end the cycle on the
recovery week? I want to end it on the big week. I want guys ending that cycle knowing they got something accomplished. When you look at it from that super
compensation, if you really brought it on the load week, do you have
enough time to go right into a performance week? If you're pushing it
the way we do, you don't. There's times we have to do it that way, because we don't have enough weeks in a year to link it together, and then we've gotta make
slight adjustments to the base and load weeks because we know we're not deloading the reload before we get a chance to go off the script. To me, if you
add the ability to write 4-week programs and cycles, I highly recommend if you're not trying this, to try it out and just see what happens. I think you'll
be very very pleased with the result of your performance week. Again, terminology. You come to me and
say, "Coach, we're doing a complete performance mesocycle." Very
simple. Four weeks, performance week is last, and we're going
to get after it. I'll show you why I like this even more so when we link
things together. It never really hit me until I got to see things out on a
plan. I'm old school, I got two giant grease boards in my office, graphs and exercises written all over the
place and I just sit there and stare at it for hours trying to figure
out ways to make my athletes the best they can be. It's not about oh I could
write the greatest program in the world because I promise you, you can write the
greatest program in the world but it might not work. You can write the simplest program in the world and it blows up. Art. I'm an artist. I like being the art strength coach. OK
now, here's a problem, and I bounce around a
lot. What generally tends to happen with the young strength coach happened to me.
You fall into the trap of, everything has to be based off of the complete mesocycles. You have to do everything in 4-week blocks. And maybe if we were in a
country where we had school was sports and everything was sport first [laugh] and
everything else underneath, you may be able to get away with it. But with us,
most of us live on academic calendars -- or in the professional ranks, collective
bargaining agreements. Nothing is perfect so there's an imperfect way that we've
gotta learn to train. The very first time I got caught in this trap was in 1994, and
I'd been writing program for other sports at that time, but in '94 I got to
be the head strength coach at Boise State and run the football program.
If you're a football guy you know, OK here's your shot, you gotta go. I write
this beautiful program up on paper, 3 up, 1 down. We pre-tested week 1, 3 up 1
down. We're going to test, you know, ten weeks, right? I lay it all out, all the
exercises, got all my cycles right, all jacked up. Well, spring break fell week 8. Think them dudes are staying week 8? No. And that's what we'll talk about later in our annual plan --
uncontrollable factors of a periodization model that in our society
are very, very important. That's the number one thing we find out. So there's
gonna be times where you're going to have to elicit a response in less than four
weeks. When that's the case, I remove the deload to reload week. I'll
have to find ways within a three-week incomplete option to manipulate certain
things in the lower tiers or in the pre and post activation work we do, to build
in recovery whenever I can. So when in doubt, you've got three weeks
to train them, drop the deload to reload and wrap them up, and you'll see again when we link them together how it changes. For us, this is an incomplete
meso option. Many meso option -- and this happened to us in the NFL based off
the way our rules planned out our phases -- sometimes you only may have two weeks to get something done. I still believe if you plan properly and design
successfully you can elicit a slight response in two weeks, especially if
guys are coming off a long break, which in my in my situation now it does. In
that case I consider this a mini meso and now I've dropped the deload to reload
and the performance. Now some people may say, "Why do you drop the
performance?" Because the athletes that I've trained my whole life are not
weightlifters or powerlifters. If they didn't have to, ninety percent of
them wouldn't. What we also forget is their number one ability is the sport they play. If you
don't train Olympic lifters or power lifters, lifting is a second tier
activity to them. Where a powerlifter may be
experienced enough to go performance, performance, performance, performance,
because they're rotating exercises, my guys, my athletes, need the ability to get
acclimatised to the movement. I learned this the hard way when I was at
Arizona State. I got caught up in the Westside deal. I was a powerlifter, I saw
the results. I tried to move into that whole max effort rotation stuff and what
I found was guys were getting too banged up, luckily no injuries. But guys bodies were getting too banged up, they weren't prepared for that. They weren't mature enough as lifters. They weren't
mature enough as athletes, and some of them from a mental mindset really didn't
want to be in there anyway. so I dropped the performance. I can get good work with
a base and a load, and you can too. I promise you. I saw it this year with our
off-season program down in Charlotte that we got a lot done in two weeks. Now I've
got high-level guys that can respond real quickly, that helps, but I promise
you at any level you can get things accomplished with proper programing. Now I want to talk about linking. Now you'll see these things start
to fall in place. I pick nine weeks because of the example I gave you on
myself while I was at Boise State. An odd number of weeks to train. These are examples I have used on numerous occasions. I wouldn't put it up there if I didn't use it. That's not fair to you. This
was what I would consider our typical programming when I was at the college
level and the rules changed and they implemented discretionary time. When I
first started out as a college strength coach, we had from the time finals was
over to the time they reported, to train athletes. 99% of the time,
really, nine out of 10 -- 90% -- nine out of ten times that I wrote a summer program
under those rules, we had 12 weeks. We had 3 full four-week cycles. Man, that made me feel really, really good about what we were doing. Well what happened was NCAA flipped the switch on it and now they said you are only allowed to have an
"organized program" nine weeks counting back from the time you report, and you
must give them a mandatory one week discretionary time. For the most part we
were very fortunate that the way our schedule worked out, 4th of July week was
always week 5, and that also generally was the little mini break between summer
session one and summer session two. That's easy. There's your alternative week because most of the guys may scatter. Some guys are leaving, some guys are coming in, so for
us, we developed a plan where we had two 4-week performance mesocycles. Mesocycle one was based off of a little bit more
long-term volume. With that I mean, in the running program would be 300-yard
shuttles, gassers, building up our anaerobic capacity. In the weight room
with our core lifts would be fours, fives, and sixes for multiple sets. Mesocycle
2, now we're preparing more closer to the season, we're running multiple
position-specific plays up to 75 to 80 plays a session. Short sprints with short
rest intervals, mimicking the time of play of a football player, in
particular. In the weight room we were doing multiple sets of one's and
two's at high percentages -- 80, 85, 90 percent -- because our goal now was to
raise our power endurance. Very, very successful model. We were very fortunate,
our guys responded very, very well with it. Here is another model that was used. This
was for when we worked with coaches who wanted us to give the guys off the very
week before they had to report, which is very common. So what we did is we linked
two 4-week performance mesocycles and then dropped it off. Now I want you
to study this model and you'll see why I like a performance block slightly more
than a traditional block when we're wrapping up our performance weeks in a
couple of slides shortly. OK here's a little variation, three up, one down, then a performance cycle at the end. Give them the week off, report to camp. Here's where I wanted to get at. When we look at this --
and again my interpretation, I reserve the right to be wrong -- but as I continue
to study different graphs something hit me about why I really like the
performance cycle even better than I thought I did. When you look at this
particular graph ... You see how I kind of put these slash marks on the deload to reload and the base, to me that's like I gave him 2 deload to reload weeks in a
row. I'm not doing that because they get enough discretionary time and time off.
Unless I really have to, I'm not doing that for the guys, or the women, or whoever I
train. This concern I felt when I looked at this, this even made me
feel better when I have a nine week cycle and I do three incomplete mesocycles. Because now the base of cycle two really links into a deload to reload from
cycle 1. So somewhere somehow when you wave up and wave down you're going to
find ability to deload to reload when you're not even thinking about it.
Believe me, this isn't something that ... I've been doing it for twenty-three
years, I figured this out in the last two and a half years how to make sense and
how to relate it to people where they can understand. It's not perfect but some of the things I worried about, kind of make me feel a little better. At the end of the day I wrap you up and
after that performance week you're getting a chance to recover, especially
when you change the cycles. Because like I told you, we're a high density up-tempo
program. I can get done 66 to 70 sets of work in less than an hour with our
guys. I'm not talking about foo foo stuff, I'm talking about a program that
could have 10 sets of cleans with four warm-up sets, six sets of box squats, three
sets of row and press, three sets of lunges, three sets of three sets of glut hams,
three sets of neck, three sets of posterior shoulder ... my guys never stopped cuz I
believe in the conditioning aspect. The 1RM is great for us to utilize
as a training sense but the 1RM is irrelevant in sport except if you're a
track and field athlete and a thrower that has a tremendous amount of recovery
time before an event. Most of the athletes we train have very few time, excuse me, very few
abilities to recover in a short period of time. My football players have less than 32
seconds to get back on the field and ask for an explosive component to win a play.
We are going to train with a slight sense of fatigue and move the heaviest
amount of weight possible so they are extremely confident in their ability to
maintain the highest level of power endurance possible. It's a tremendous
way to improve lean body mass. OK here is a unique way of looking at a
nine-week program and this is how we structured our off-season program in
Charlotte with the Panthers. This is specifically based off of the
uncontrollable factors that I have in planning. Our off-season program is
regulated to nine weeks. During that nine weeks there's three distinct phases.
Phase one is strength and conditioning only -- they can only work with the
strength and conditioning coach. Phase two is strength and conditioning and now
coaches can do individual work with their position groups. Phase three is OTAs, which for us is like spring ball. Our athletes can go out and do teamwork to certain
rules within that, but they go out and do team prep and then within that four-week
block is mini camp. So we'll have a week of 3 OTAs, a week of 3 OTAs, a week of 4
OTAs, and then we wrapped up with mini camp. So once I'm given those parameters
and then once we meet with the coach and the athletic trainer and lay out how our
football plan is going to be, then I lay out the weight program. I always wait to
hear what the running plans are going to be, whether I get to design it
wholeheartedly, or input from the coaching staff with their fieldwork will
determine how we write the programming. So it's a very unique and complex situation,
and that's why synergy and communication are also key, and programming design. For
us, our deload to reload week was week four
because that was mini camp. One of my cohorts and colleagues in the
NFL is sitting right here -- we play them twice. We didn't lift that week. They had mini camp: two practices a day, two days one practice,
and then the program was over. Our guys are gonna scatter. Meetings all
throughout the day. That was an optional week for us. If you wanted to go
in, bonus for me, bonus for you. But if you didn't want to
go in, I completely understand, after watching how hard our guys work on the
football field. That's something that you gotta take in as a planner. I planned it in.
I knew, hey, when they go to minicamp, the good chance is, they are not working out. Now in other programs they may say, hey, we still want them in, we'll adjust. In ours, we're
gonna get our football work done. When that happens, you as a strength and
conditioning professional, you have to be the one that keeps an eye out on a
player. I always watch practices and I always want to be one step ahead of
where I think the player's going to be from a sense of fatigue. I never want our
guys broke down, ever, so I'm always going to program one cycle above and ahead so
I'm always ahead of the game. So our guys are not like, "Man, I'm worn out, do I have to work out today?" I never want
to be in that situation. So that's where big picture, looking at studying the
dynamics of the sport you work with, that's what fills in all the color.
That's a whole different discussion. My thought process today was to give
the long planning. Too many people don't understand it funnels from big to small
rather than small to big. I'm showing small to big to work on definitions and how
things link, but everything starts big to small. In some cases if you work
in a college atmosphere, it's huge, because you have four or five years of
development with hopefully the same athletes. Here's yet another model. This model
I kind of played with. I was like, well, if I do get to lift him, do I want to just
blow him up for good? Because my guys, when they're done with nine weeks,
they're gone for another 6. So sometimes here's where, you know, you get that
knuckle head strength coach meathead in you -- well, if I do get to lift them, maybe I'll
just blow them all up during mini camp and just fry them because I'm not going to see them for six weeks. But that's pretty stupid, that got thrown out the window. I
made that decision. But as a lifter and, you know, you're a weight coach, man,
you know we gotta grind them up and spit them out. Those days are over, man, we got to develop these guys and let them know we care about them. They don't care how
much you know until they know how much you care, so that model was ridiculous and
stupid. I'm honest. I'm the most honest guy you'll hear. I don't care. If I'm
wrong, I'll tell you I'm wrong. If I don't know the answer, I'll tell you where I get it. I
have a whole network of people I can call. You should have the same. I know
what I know. What I don't know, I hire that person. If I can't hire him, he's on my
speed dial so I can call him or her. Now we start linking them together. This is
where I talk about partial annual plan examples and macros. What I showed you was what we have in yellow. I know some people talk about the macrocycle being
the year. I call that the annual plan. For me, macros are the linking of mesocycles
that form a unique and distinct program. What I've done, which has made
it very simple for me, is I named programs based off the seasonal
equinoxes of the year. So, for example, this is called the spring two program
developmental stage on-site. Why is it called spring? Because the dates of the
program fell between March 22nd and June 22nd which is ... I think it's 20, 20-some, it might be a couple days off. That's the spring equinox. June 23rd to I think
September 22nd is summer. September 22nd to March 22nd is considered winter, and then
March 22nd through spring, or fall, excuse me, September fall. So when we talk about programming as a group and someone tells me we're in the fall
developmental program, I know where they're at. Instead of, you know, this whatever
cycle. I dont want to know that. I want things simple. I want my pro - I want my
players to know this is the program we're on. Spring two means I had to separate
spring one -- which was a cycle that we had, hopefully, you know, when we
send our guys home with the information we're allowed to send, was the cycle
before we got him on-site. That's off- site. Our macrocycles and even
sometimes our mesocycles are always going to be named within the equinoxes of
the season. The only time it's not is during the competitive stage when we go into a typical, we're either in the pre-season, in-season, or what I classify post-season and rejuvenation stage. When we get to
playoffs, that's championship season. Post-season to me means it's over. Championship season means we're
chasing a ring. Regardless of what that ring is, is it a high school state
championship, is it a district state championship, is it a Super Bowl ring, is
it a specific bowl game? How many guys are out here as college
strength coaches that go to a bowl game or play offs? Totally different dynamic
than I'm used to speaking to. In your cases, you go to the playoffs, what are
you chasing? Championship ring, every week, no time off. If you're in a bowl game and
the best place you can go to is, you know, the NSCA Bowl, then you're
training to be the NSCA Bowl champion. Because that's the best you can be that
year. This actual chart is the chart that's up on one of my grease boards. What we do is we have, you'll see, we have alternative stuff coming out
which was our summer off-site. Now our guys disappear again. Well I know the
week after they're done with minicamp is probably going to be an alternative mesocycle. You'll see why I just flip the deload to reload week, because that was Fourth of July week. I'm sure most guys are going to be on vacation with their families. Then we
come into training camp and we start our pre-season program. OK this is a model
of what I call the annual plan. This was our first year at Louisville.
You'll see where we have competitions, evaluations, and
discretionary period. That's what I was talking about when I brought up
uncontrollable factors of the periodization model. Once we've lined out
our phases and we've lined up our dates when we come
back to school and so forth, the first thing I'm doing is writing
in all the holidays, semester breaks, and what week that we are going to give them
for discretionary time. The next thing I do is I write in all our competitions,
what dates are games, are they competitive, and then I start writing in
when we're gonna do certain things in the lifting or on the field work. This is
just a general outline. We'll have our running emphasis during those phases and then
we'll talk a little bit more about quadrennial work. Then the different
colors are different levels but this is the base model. This is the first thing
we do. We actually start working on this the in-season of the previous year so
that when we come back to school, we're ready to roll and we have a plan based
off of what level our athletes are at and how we did overall in the
uniqueness of our programming. All those little initials and stuff, that's very
specific to the way we train. I'm sure people are doing similar types of things. For us, our athletes really don't need to know it. Some of them do. Most of the time this is
strictly for the coaches to know. So for example, if I'm this head strength coach
and my number one role as football, and you work with us and you're volleyball, if
you give me your plan I'll know everything on that sheet because everything is in an umbrella terminology approach. It makes life simple, I promise you. OK what
is this? I threw this up. It's a crude -- very, very crude -- graph of a standard deviation model. I threw
this up there because I'm tired of people talking about, "Oh, you
write cookie-cutter programs." I'm talking about in general, all you hear about. Everybody
writes cookie cutter programs. Well here's what I'll tell you in 23
years -- if you're a real coach and a real practitioner and you coach on the floor
every day, there's no way you're writing a very specific program for every single
athlete you coach. Because if you are, you aren't coaching and you're just handing out papers. What you'll learn over time and experience is this, and it goes back to
some of the stuff now where everybody's screening athletes. Every year you have a group of
athletes. You see the dynamics change. Most of them -- most athletes and most
people in general -- are going to fall into a bell curve, and that's how we've
developed our quadrennial plan. I stole the quadrennial plan model off the
Olympic model. If you work at a college or university setting, or a high
school setting, I highly recommend you look at long-term athletic development
for your athletes. The first thing you gotta do is correct numerous deficiencies and you won't even
have to screen them. The overall reduction of injuries will
be out of sight and you can pat yourself on the back on that because you will
have a direct correlation with that. Our society is in a rush. Everybody wants to break bread and pay
$200 for this eight-week miracle program so their kids can be explosive in eight
weeks. That's not happening. It doesn't happen like that. The process and the adaptation that
we have as a human body, it's long-term. You have to be willing to work. You gotta
be willing to put in time. You know how I found that out? Because I was one of those guys who we all started and Coach over here, I know he started the same way. You bring
freshmen in, don't know their names, and I'm talking more specifically in the
football model. What's your name? Oh I don't care, you gotta max squat. You don't even
know if they ever squatted. Well you gotta max bench, you gotta max clean, I
need your numbers. I need your numbers. Guys are getting hurt before you even
know their name. Then they're training the same exact program at seventeen as your
22-year-old senior. Somebody's not getting the right work. If you're
writing the program for the 17-year-old, the 22-year-old is not getting the right work
and if you are writing a program for the 22-year-old, the 17-year-old is getting hurt.
Hey, I'm honest, I did that type of work because that's how it went. I didn't know no better. We did that for a long time, then I was like, man, this ain't right. I
mean, I said it for years. How we asking these dudes to bench press, can't even do a push-up? Why we asking them to squat when they can't even get to parallel without any bodyweight? We missed the boat. We have rushed athletes into the weight room
without taking the time out. Who we trying to impress? Ourselves? What's the number one
goal of why we train our athletes? To protect them, right? But yet we're our own
worst enemies when we get carried away in the weight room by doing things that
our athletes aren't prepared to do. I'm at fault for that, I'm not going to lie. But I
got smart. The bell curve. It's very simple, what I found is -- and again it's skewed -- but
the majority of your athletes at the same age are gonna fall somewhere within a
bell curve and most of them are going to fall within a typical 2 standard
deviations which is approximately 85%. Is that correct for you guys with math? Let's say I'm at ninety percent. 90% of my freshman are going to have all the same
issues regardless of gender and regardless of sport. Weak core, weak hamstring, and weak posterior shoulder. I do the functional movement screen, I like it. It gives me some interesting dynamics. But at the end of the day, when we start looking
at all the results, what do we find out? Weak hamstrings, weak posterior shoulder,
weak core. And now I'm getting more in tune of ankle mobility and stuff. Well guess
what? If I know that's a fact, why aren't I training those kids to get
better at that without training for specific tests? Here's my problem with the
movement screen stuff. Guys are like, oh they got a movement screen of 9, they can't train until they get whatever, and then they're just working on the movement screen stuff and
then they get an eighteen and they still cant squat because they haven't been
training. They've been training to beat the tests. No different than combine prep,
no different than any coach who is training their kids to pass
their running tests. If you tell me your running test is 300
yard shuttle, I'm going to train you a lot different than if it's 110. I'm going to train you a lot different if it's 40. I'm going to train you to beat the test. It has nothing to do with football
because as soon as we go to our first team period, it looks like our guys didn't even condition all summer. So I'm going to develop a holistic plan. That was our
goal and the first thing we did -- and this is a big shout out three assistants who
really took this off and ran [three names] -- those guys pretty much were my block zero guys. They took our freshman
classes, they developed a strategy, that was really
outside the norm because now we're talking about college football players,
which is a little different than the other sports. Football coaches are different.
For the first six to nine weeks that our freshmen entered our program they
didn't touch a weight. That's hard you. You gotta have a great head coach to do that. Six to nine weeks, our guys didn't touch
a weight. Why? Most of them couldn't do a pull up, most of them couldn't do an iso back
extension hold for more than 15 seconds, their hip mobility was awful, and I mean
even a simple ... couldn't touch their toes, couldn't do an iso hold lunge without tipping over but yet really they should be squatting, benching,
and cleaning, right? If you're going talk about, "We've got to do right
by our players," I'm going to have those kids for five years, and if they're really great
football players, they're gonna play anyway. I've seen it,
we've all seen it, whether it's an 8th grader going into 9th grade who's never
lifted a weight and he's better than anybody you got . That kid's playing varsity. Never lifted a weight but he's the best player you've got, you're playing him. You bring a freshman into college and he's never lifted a weight in high school because he's
played seven different sports but he's the best player you've got, you're playing him. So why not teach him right? Because I can guarantee you this -- if that guy is that
good without lifting weights, and you get him from doing five pull ups to 10
pull ups, doesn't that make him better? That's lifting weights, it's just using
internal resistance versus external resistance. So this graph to me just
dictates how we plan our quadrennial plan with our athletes. Regardless of
sport, you look at the dynamics of the athletes you coach and you watch the
unique progressions. Now like we said, like this gentleman right here helped me out, you got your 5% on either end but all of our guys go through our block progressions.
Some may go through faster than others. That's not cookie-cutter, that's huge
group coaching. If you coach large groups, you see similarities. That's how we
develop a long-term quadrennial approach to programming. If you have the ability
to where you know you're going to have kids for four
to five years, rethink. Look at your model. Your model's
not wrong, but you can slowly develop things. Like the number one exercise for
us, for freshmen or beginners, is the high handle hex bar deadlift -- trap bar
with the high handles. Here's why, and it goes back to mobility and
screening. I know the majority of the athletes that I get have very poor
hamstring strength and hip mobility. I believe in the deadlift. We do a lot of
things from the ground. If you're going to be a power clean coach then you have
to learn how to deadlift because you will never clean more than you deadlift.
The confidence that brings, and the strength in the posterior chain, and in the
upper and mid back, that the deadlift brings, will bring that athlete extreme
confidence when he approaches the bar. But I already know through my screening
process and everything else that 95% of those guys would be in poor position if
they had to approach the height of a standard barbell on the ground. I know
that, but I also know that I'm not going to just work on hip mobility without
getting them stronger. I'm a strength guy, I got to get them stronger. Everything, I believe,
comes on strength. You want to get faster, get stronger. You want to jump higher, get stronger. You want more lean body mass, get stronger. You want to be in better shape, get stronger. You don't wanna get hurt, get stronger. So I'm going to get them strong, but I'm also going to get them strong smart. When you use the high handle hex bar, the
kid's in a better biomechanical position, and because it's about
four inches greater in height, you can get them in a great position, build strength
while you're still doing all your movement work to improve their mobility.
Now I've combo'd it up. I'm training them smart and I'm
progressing to another phase of lifting. Everything you should do is, you should
look at where you want to be and break everything down. Every exercise can be
broken down into certain components. No more so than Olympic lifts. The one thing that Mike Conroy taught me about long-term planning and the Olympic
lifts is this: What do we really want from the Olympic lifts? Triple extension,
am I correct? Am I correct? But then how many of us allow our guys to get to here
and then do something crazy to where they never extend their hips? How many have you done it? Don't be afraid, because I know you've done it. I can come in your room right now and I guarantee you somebody's gonna do it, because they're worried about, "Oh I gotta
catch this weight to get on the board." Well let's worry about transfer, because that
same guy goes out to the field and now comes back to you, "Coach you said, Johnnie, clean 340." He can't even get off the line of scrimmage. Well yeah, because he never learned how to
extend his hips. You can get a tremendous amount of work off of clean pulls and
high pulls working specifically on triple extension, without ever catching a
clean, and at the end that's the transfer you're looking for. Slow the process down. Why thrown them right into cleans when that's just part of an Olympic movement? Build your long-term process. Look at an exercise, break it all the way down, and slow-cook these guys.
I spent six months in a facility training in the private sector,
so now I can even relate to those coaches who trained at that at
that particular setting. I understand that situation of, well look,
we may not have them that long. But you know what my goal was? I'm gonna have them that long because I'm gonna do it right. I'm not selling the old "Hey for 200 bucks, I can
get you right in 8 weeks." I'm selling, "Hey after eight weeks, if you want to come
back we're moving to week nine." Your goal in that place, "Hey I get him in and
you gotta sell." I wasn't very good at it. I had
to get them in the door and coach the hell out of them so they would come back,. But I didn't like selling, "Oh and by the way, it costs this." because I don't like it, I wasn't good at it. But when I got them in the door they were signing up because they saw the process. My goal was this, no different than when I'm at
college or high school, was I'm gonna show them how well I am, that this is gonna be a ten-year relationship with these people. They're gonna be the best of the
best wherever they're at. Whether it's at their high school or going to college. I
tell everybody who works in the private setting, after being there, your number one goal
should be this: that when your athlete goes to their school -- whether it's their
high school or you're training athletes for a long period of time, you've got that
relationship set, and they go to college -- that that college strength coach calls
you and tells you you did a terrific job with that kid. Because right now most
college strength coaches would wish none of those guys trained. If you ask any one of my colleagues -- Coach would you agree? They would tell you, I'd rather them not train at all
then what we're seeing when they come in. That's your challenge to the private
coach. Be that guy. Be that person. Be the one where that coach says, "Hey, who trained you? You are right." Be that guy. It's long-term. I don't care
what setting you're in, you have to look at it from long-term. In a private
setting, it's long-term, you gotta build that relationship. You gotta believe in
everything you can. It was hard for me because I had to adjust my block 0
planning because I know how parents are. "My kid isn't lift any weights? Screw that,
I'm going to this guy." Okay, and then they come back because he's hurt. I got to a point where the facility I trained out of, they called me Mr Miyagi. I was always doing so
much different stuff that they'd never seen and then when they saw the results, they were like, "We didn't even know you were training for that." Process, process. That's what
this bell curve represent, it represents a four-year process, it represents a five-year process. Every level you raise your athlete, they're gonna
change. In a very basic way, it was this for us. Block 0, we've got to get them to be
able to move with their own body weight, that simple. Relative strength. Block 2, improve their
maximal strength. Excuse me, Block 1. Block 2, introduce explosive
strength. Block three and four, tremendous amount of variation working on strength,
power, endurance, and a whole unique array of things in the weight room. Running was very similar. Running's a little bit different. Except for the plyos and the jumps
and throws, the running was slightly generalized more. In the lifting, you
gotta be able to break it down. You have to be able to break it down. I'm way over
now, I'm in trouble. Block 0 was our beginners, and then Block 1 was our first year.
Block 2 was our second, three and four. First block was all body weight. Like if I was doing high school, my goal would be to get all the 8th graders second
semester going into 9th grade, and for six months do extensive body weight
mobility work, so that when you do turn them over to the high school coaches as
a ninth-grader at least they'll have confidence in their ability to move. Then
you can introduce exercise technique in Block 1 and then work on strength and
power and stuff as they get older. OK now a little bit more specific. If you
all need to go, get up and go. I understand. How many of you
familiar with Prilepin's chart? Prilepin's chart is a gentleman A.S. Prilepin, an Olympic
weightlifting coach. He came out with sets and reps of how to distinguish the
amount of speed at a certain percentage you can maintain in the Olympic lifts. I
also use it for squatting and benching and max effort work. This is how I broke it down -- most of the chart is nowhere near as as broke down as this. This is our hit chart
and it just gives us sets and reps that we can follow, and this is how we decide
for one of our programs. This is more for the coaches. What you guys want to
see is, this is how we break down volumes and intensities for our block
program. I do this because when I do train our athletes in groups, they come
in and they get their cards. They're on different blocks but they're at different
volumes. You'll see at 70% of Week B, our Block 1 guys
would either do six sets of four, or five sets of five, but down here in Elite Block 4, they're gonna do five sets of 3 or 4 sets of 3. What we tend to do is as they get older,
I do not want to necessarily "beat them up" with big exercises. They're doing more
supplemental and auxiliary work to equal out the volume. They're still going to do
big lifts but with not as much work. Their work comes into all the
supplemental stuff we do at that level. This is when we talk a little bit about
that off the script stuff I was talking about.
So here is pure data from one of our summer programs at the
University of Louisville. So week 1 the athlete's had 70% 5 sets of 5. His workout load going in was a 530 1RM max. That was a pure 1RM. We worked him up
almost like a meet, he did 530. So week 1 he does 370, five sets of 5. Week 2 is an off-the-script week for volume. So what we do is, it's prescribed five sets of 5, but
the very last week, excuse me, the very last set, we set a parameter of max 10, max 15, and that's a challenge set. We expect our athletes to do as many reps as
possible to that number. This particular athlete did his first four sets
after pre work, four sets of 5 at 405, then he knocked out 405 for 15 reps. We
go top of the thigh parallel, that's our squat depth. Week 3: deload to reload. Go
down to 385 for 4 sets of 4. Now here is the big one here -- here's our performance
week. Performance week with 6 sets of 3 at 82%. What we do is, because I want things done
under fatigue, when we know we're gonna take somebody off the script, they have
to do half of its prescribed work. So what they're doing is, for his number was
435, he's doing that for the first 3 sets of 3. If I think he can keep going off the script, then we start wrapping it up. If
it looks like he's okay and it's not a very good day for him, he stays and would
do 6 sets of 3 at 435. Does that make sense so far? But now this guy can go, so we take him to 450, 465, 480, 500, 515 for 3. What we do is the off-the-script repetition max is
the same as what we're asking for the work sets. So this said 6 sets of 2, then we would have done doubles. If it would have said six sets of 1, singles. 6 sets of 5, you guys understand where we're going with it. So that's just a model of showing real life of here is
4 microcycles of work for the back squat. This was a complete performance
cycle with two OTS weeks. Here is another cycles and cycling plan
that we use. I just started working with this the
last four years and have had tremendous results and strength and lean body mass
gains. What we've done is we've flat loaded to percentages and ramp up the
volume. This is just one model, 80%. What you'll see is we start at 80 week 1 and do 5 sets of 5. Week 2, 5 sets of 6. Week 3, we deload to reload. So we do the first three sets
and drop the volume tremendously, and then we are bringing it five sets of
eight. When we use these types of percentages, I'm not gonna lie, this
number right here is based off of the old estimated 1RM or repetition max
cycles. So you can see my goal here is, increase volume and get out what's
particularly respect. Usually if I'm going to warm up to an 8, these might be 2, 2, 2, 2. I want these dudes working; I want my athletes working. This has put on a tremendous
amount of lean body mass and reduced body fat in all of our guys. Because here's
the key: the key is if I do five sets of five in 25 minutes, I gotta do five sets
of eight in 25 minutes. That's where we ramp up the density and we get our guys
in shape. Here's one last cycle I want to show you.
This is for a high level guy. You'll see it's always in red. That's because we're ramping up high level. Now if I've got a guy for five years,
we're going to use different abilities to keep working on improving. This is
just a chain cycle that we use for squats and benches. What it is, is it's
using accommodating resistance to work top end levers. We've almost had 100% outstanding results when we test our guys on it. What it is, if we understand
accommodating resistance, you know, we do a quarter squat, we can squat more than a full squat. If we want to take advantage of that, we use chains. So as the levers change and the load increases, it evens out based off our strength curve. Basically what it is, it's
based off a five by five and then off the script. Week one we use double chain on
each side and we make sure the chain deloads. The chain has to be at 0 at the
bottom. Too many guys use too much chain and it never deloads because they just hook it, so you never get the pure percentage you need at the bottom. The next week we do
five sets of five with one set of chains. The next week we do five sets of five
with three sets. The fourth week -- the performance week -- we throw all the chains off, straight weight, and then they go for it. With upper body strength and the amount
of work the triceps need in pressing, this thing has almost been foolproof
for us with the improvement we've had. Most of the time even guys with Powerlifters, and this is where the raw lifter has to understand the difference between lifting with a bench shirt and without, is everything is going to come off the chest and then the triceps
take over, whether you wear a bench shirt or not. Most athletes very rarely get magnet
chest. They're gonna get it off. If you look at injuries, most injuries in bench
press come from shoulder and pec. But what's the limiting factor of
extending and finishing away? Triceps. We're going to work the triceps. We're going to work them into a path that helps us and more functionally, which is
a word I really don't like to use, especially with striking, with O linemen in
particular. These are just more real live results of what we did with this type of work. I
hope I didn't bore you. Sorry I want about 5 to 8 minutes over. You
guys have any questions, I'll be around. If not, thank you for your time. Enjoy the
rest of the time. My pleasure.
