My off-season football Program and would just like some thoughts on it

[glow87]

little background on me, I am a former College Athlete, a decathlete at Texas A&M. I have a bunch of certification like USAW & NSCA-CSCS, along with a degree in Exercise Physiology. I coach at Atascocita High school just right outside of Houston on the North East side of town. I am a believer in Rip but also understand the merits of the Olympic lifts I have trained with a local USAW Coach Tim Swords, and have competed in Olympic lifting a little. I have Dead lifted 655 with just a belt, squatted north of 600, pressed 250, cleaned 400 once...., snatched 270. I believe that strength lost in a lot of high school lifting programs, So when I was given the chance to run the off-season program I thought it was prudent to come up with a program that would cure the issues of our players lack of strength and to make our coaches understand that we cannot be explosive if we are not strong first. Here is the general outline of the program I have came up with.

We do a 3 station rotation with the strongest groups starting on the first lift listed

Monday - Squat/Bench/Deadlift

Tuesday - Press/Power Clean/ Plyo's & Speed work

Wednesday - Front Squat/Bench/ Clean Pull

Thursday - Push Press/Hang Clean/ Plyo's & speed work

Friday - Squat/Bench/Deadlift

Weekly weight progression (I'll use this weeks % as an example)

Monday - 5 x 5 sets with 3 of 5 at heaviest % (Ex. 56/67/78/78/78%)

Tuesday - 5 x 5 sets with 2 of 5 at Heaviest % with more of a focus of the speed of the bar (ex. 56/59/67/78/78%)

Wednesday - 5 x 5 sets with building up to the next percentage (ex. 56/67/74/78/82%)

Thursday - 4 x 5 sets with building up to the same percentage, this day is about Speed (ex. 56/67/74/82%)

Friday - 5 x 5 sets with 2 of 5 being at the heaviest % (ex. 56/67/74/82/82)
The following week we will start with 82% on Monday building to 85%

As the weeks progress I will drop the reps and have weeks of repeated % to allow the kids to adjust to the change in volume.
There is more to my program but this was the general outline and just wanted to see what some educated people thought of it. Enjoy

[veryhrm]

not a coach, not that strong, never played football.

That looks like a pretty intense program, but:

In the terms we use around here... are all these kids intermediates already? The coaches around here don't like to talk numbers (for some good reasons) but just for orientation if their squat worksets aren't in the upper 200's or low 300s (and more for the biggest guys) they can prob make much faster progress on something like SS no?

As much as i think he's nuts about various things, i like the graduated program that Matt Reynolds talks about in his "building an empire" article. The kids start off simple (modified SS) and then they move to weekly and monthly programs as they get stroger. What you have here looks like a monthly program which is overkill for a lot of them esp since you imply that they're not already strong.

Also, are the guys ready for everyday training like this. I think you might burn them out mentally and possibly physically if you torture them too much too soon.

Oh, and as a tactical matter: pull-ups. Do youhave those in there? prob not posible for the bigger guys, but good to balace those presses (along with all the "pulling" you do have).

[glow87]

I understand the terms you are using I have read both practical programming and SS the newest addition. Yes we have do auxiliary lifts after school and much of the lifts are pull-ups or some type of pulling motion nearly everyday. As far as the intensity of the program itself, we started very light in the progression (in the 60% range) when we started off season, so they have been slowly being towards higher and high percentages. As far as the everyday lifting, the Tuesday and Thursday lifting sessions are relatively light compared to Monday, Wednesday, Friday, the whole point of those days is speed, speed, and speed. We are going on are 4th week of off season and I haven't seen any physical burn out as of yet, but you gotta remember these are 15,16,17 year old kids, they can bounce back quite fast. I thought I might start seeing some fatigue this past week on their 5th sets but they looked great and even looked like the had a lot more in the tank which goes back to my point of their youth being a plus. Also as the percentages push up into the higher 80% the reps are going to drop quite a bit decreasing the volume significantly. Mentally, we want them tough, that is straight from the head coach so can't argue with him on that. As far as being already intermediate kids, most of them have received some type of training in the past, whether it was worth a shit or not is beyond me but I have always felt from personal experience and from training large young groups in the past, trying to progress through the week slowly and in a stair step fashion is pretty effective. The progressing through the week the way I have it I believe makes the percentages and reps I ask them to get do-able. Another good aspect I didn't mention is that the freshman have their own period which allows me to modify the workouts for them since a good portion of those kids are in the beginner stages. As we push into the spring and get closer towards spring ball, we will cut back on the volume some more. Thanks for the tips and the suggestion I greatly appreciate it.

[MattJ.D.]

Not to sound condescending but when exactly are they supposed to recover on that workout? And those athletes are going to be deadlifting multiple sets twice a week? That just seems like a lot, a whole lot. From what I've read, speed work in the weightroom (ie speed benching, squats, dls) is for very advanced lifters, doing very light weights compared to max and if at any time bar speed drops you stop because its too heavy for "speed work".

Edit: it seems like you're making this way too complicated for a bunch of intermediate/novice lifters...all them percentages and then some weeks you're going to have repeated percentages of last week but less reps(what are you using to dictate that?, when to keep the weight the same for two weeks) seems too complicated...and just me personally but I can't imagine deadlfting anything relatively heavy multiple times a week would last very long before the lifter gets burned out...especially with all that other cleaning and squatting

[glow87]

The dead lift max is based off their squat maxes and most people can dead-lift more than they can squat. Recovery once again you must realize these are kids in the age range from 15-18 they tend to recover very quickly. The Tuesday/Thursday lifts are not very heavy in relative terms to the Monday/Wednesday/Friday lifts, and Wednesday is lighter than Monday or Friday and is a change up in the type of lifts with Front squat and Clean pull which is much lighter than their dead-lift but slightly heavier than their power clean (130%). So when it comes to recovery those Tuesday/Thursday workouts rarely fatigue them, and it is working a different energy system than max strength, its speed strength or power, but once again as we get heavier and closer to spring ball the amount of reps will drop and we will drop to 3 to 4 days a week of lifting. Again thanks for the input.

[MattJ.D.]

I read the part with their ages, I just don't believe it..I'm not qualified at all though and have only read a few books, just voicing my concern

[glow87]

Matt,
Trust me I understand were you are coming from when I started coaching high school I always thought the volume was crazy that coaches had kids doing, but as I trained more and more of them it was quite remarkable how much they could handle and come back the next day ready to go. I'm not saying as this off-season progresses I don't run into problems due to the volume but it seems like they are handling it quite well the only day the tell me personally that is rough from their point of view is Friday. Like I said we will drop the amount of days we will lift as we get later into the spring and spring ball. after the end of this semester I am going to re-evaluate the program as a whole, really enjoy the input from y'all.

[Beau Bryant]

Not sure what you are asking. It seemed like you wanted thoughts on the program in the original post but I'm not sure.

I do know of I benched a kid three days a week and pressed or push pressed a kid the other two days and someone injured a shoulder I would need a pretty good explainations why I was pressing them 5 days in a row. Maybe as you say the percentages mitigate this (I didn't look this close).

What are you doing for plyos and speed work? Is it ok if these interfere with your strength program in December, 8 months or so out from the first practice?

[veryhrm]

I understand the terms you are using I have read both practical programming and SS the newest addition. Yes we have do auxiliary lifts after school and much of the lifts are pull-ups or some type of pulling motion nearly everyday. As far as the intensity of the program itself, we started very light in the progression (in the 60% range) when we started off season, so they have been slowly being towards higher and high percentages. As far as the everyday lifting, the Tuesday and Thursday lifting sessions are relatively light compared to Monday, Wednesday, Friday, the whole point of those days is speed, speed, and speed. We are going on are 4th week of off season and I haven't seen any physical burn out as of yet, but you gotta remember these are 15,16,17 year old kids, they can bounce back quite fast. I thought I might start seeing some fatigue this past week on their 5th sets but they looked great and even looked like the had a lot more in the tank which goes back to my point of their youth being a plus. Also as the percentages push up into the higher 80% the reps are going to drop quite a bit decreasing the volume significantly. Mentally, we want them tough, that is straight from the head coach so can't argue with him on that. As far as being already intermediate kids, most of them have received some type of training in the past, whether it was worth a shit or not is beyond me but I have always felt from personal experience and from training large young groups in the past, trying to progress through the week slowly and in a stair step fashion is pretty effective. The progressing through the week the way I have it I believe makes the percentages and reps I ask them to get do-able. Another good aspect I didn't mention is that the freshman have their own period which allows me to modify the workouts for them since a good portion of those kids are in the beginner stages. As we push into the spring and get closer towards spring ball, we will cut back on the volume some more. Thanks for the tips and the suggestion I greatly appreciate it.

From reading this statement, esp, the bolded part, but not just that, it seems to me that you don't agree with Rip's progression theory as laid out in PP. At least your program doesn't take that into account and i think you've fallen into the trap of overly complex programming for trainees who have just simple needs.

First of all, if these kids hadn't been lifting much before, or if they had a layoff because they weren't lifting during the season... then what are your percentages calculated off of ? You can't really test them on 1RM if they don't know the lifts or haven't lifted in a while... and since they're just getting into (or getting back into) serious training then their actual capability will be increasing pretty quickly. So testing them and then programming 2 -3 months of percentages of of that test is inappropriate.

For your own training when you're squatting 500... sure over a couple of months you're going to do what you do and then get your squat to like 525 and that's a big deal. So percentages calculated off of your 500 make sense. But if these kids are squatting 150 or 185... well in a couple of months they could be getting to 225 or 300... but not with percentages calculated off of that 150.

Whether they've had instruction before or not is not important. The question is whether these kids can progress on simple linear progression, increasing weights from workout to workout. If so... then anything else is a waste of time because it will increase their strength slower... possibly much slower. If these kids (say the juniors and seniors) are squatting sets of 3x5x135 or 3x5x185 right now on your program, they're wasting their time because they could be just adding 5lbs every workout like in vanilla SS and in a couple of months they'd be closing in on 3x5x315. If we're talking guys who have 1RMs in the upper 300s or in the 400s then ok, that's where this kind of funky programming is going to be necessary, but if they were like that then you wouldn't be pissed off about there being no strength in the strength program.

Matt,
...
after the end of this semester I am going to re-evaluate the program as a whole, really enjoy the input from y'all.

That's the important part i think. How are you going to evaluate it though ? Again the thing i like about BFS (at least what i understand of it) and Crazy Reynolds' program is that it is a program that spans the kids' career. When they come in they learn the lifts and get the basic strength, then in subsequent training periods they use more complex programming as they get stronger / need it.

Anyway, rather than talking even more about things i don't know about, let me ask this: how strong are these kids ? how much are they (say the strongest couple of them) squatting , DLing and pressing ?

edit: and btw, there's been a thread on HS programming going on for a couple of days just below here (http://startingstrength.com/resource...d.php?t=356310 ) that's had some good discussion, i think.

[glow87]

The vast majority of the juniors and seniors are squatting around 300 and north of it, the younger ones like I said are on a modified program. We tested right after the season on, Squat, Bench, Power Clean, and Press. The max for Dead-lift is their squat max, Front squat is their power clean max, Clean pull is 130% of their power clean, push press is 120% of their press, and hang clean 85% of their power clean. So by testing on 4 lifts we can a chart for each player with their maxes for 9 lifts. The strongest kid if you would like to know is one young man you squats 500 ATG, benches 350, Presses 210, power cleans 300. Are running back is quite strong as well he squats 405, benches 335, power cleans 295, presses 185, but like I said we have a vast majority of kids north of 300 on squat, 200 on bench, 145 on press, 225 on power clean. So a large majority are past the beginner stages of their lifting lives. Thanks for the reply's