Move the needle

Florida’s roster didn’t just get stronger. With a focus on four cornerstone exercises, it improved its previous “max” lifts by a combined 14,443 pounds—enough muscle to pick up an African elephant. And three weeks into the season, the beefed-up Gators have become one of college football’s largest surprises. Florida has rolled to three straight wins by a combined 99 points, and enters Saturday’s showdown with No. 4 Ole Miss as the betting favorite.

From this piece.

I love this piece. It’s like the WSJ undoing the damage their idiotic piece on Pilates did earlier this week.

I call the approach the coach is taking the antithesis of the instagramization of coaching. Bring extreme focus to a few basic metrics. Build power, strength, speed and resilience. And let the athlete do their thing.

Athletic training has become a rather comical endeavor. Coming up with absurd challenges that involve doing push ups on stacked dumbbells. Or pretending to be a car and propping people on barbells and moving them around.

My second least favorite bits are stupidly elaborate warm up or ‘joint prep’ protocols that prey on fear. A warm up primes you for the session. That’s it. Mobility and stability are long term adaptations, and they come from the quality of your lifting and your exercise selection.

Least favorite you ask? Folks like Squat University that fetishize perfect posture, demonize mild asymmetries, obsess over how hip shift causes pain or put drills like the McGill Big 3 on an unwarranted pedestal. The Big 3 are fine. So are hip rotations, lateral flexion, abduction/adduction and internal rotation work. In my experience, 5-6 minutes a day of these maintains the capacity. Consistency matters, not rituals posing as comprehensive fixes.

Landmine certifications, corny looking banded speed work etc etc. The list is endless. And the evidence for plenty of this is just non-existent.

All we know is we want our athletes strong and robust. Doses of concentric, plyometrics, eccentric and isometrics in that order of volume get the job done. Eccentrics get the smallest dose, not the least respect.

How athletes use the strength and other gym skills on the field comes down to improving their awareness and quality of skill work.

An athlete gives you 4-6 hours in the gym a week. Fill those hours with things that move the needle, not things that burn time and leave them no stronger.

In our quest for an athletic edge, we mistake novelty, gimmicks and exercises that look useful for outcomes that make athletes better.

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