Great Start to the Spring Semester

Athletes had a very hard three weeks of training. We spent three full weeks in our Hypertrophy phase. The Hypertrophy phase is where we are looking to increase muscle size and also build a base for this Cycle. We finished these three weeks of a Meso-cycle and I feel really good about how it went. I was a little disappointed in our athletes numbers in their squat maxes in January. I am starting to feel better about them because we made an emphasis on them for three weeks, I threw out the Bench Press after three days into the meso-cycle, hoping it would ignite some motivation in the athletes to get there squat numbers up.

I have found that the squats and its variations are the hardest the get the athletes to buy into. Myself, as an educated person and a guy who has been in the field for a while, I see the athletes that get after it in the squat rack are also the ones that run faster and jump higher, and in the game of football, they are the better tacklers and the hardest to tackle.

With all that being said about the squats, I am still a bigger fan of the Power Clean and the Snatch because of the power output they require. Power is equal to Force X Distance Divided by time. An example would be when an athlete lifts 100 pounds in the snatch. Force is 100 pounds X approximately 4 feet Divided by roughly 1 second. This equals 400 Ft/pounds per second, which is much more powerful then a 300 pound Bench Press, which equals 215 Ft/pounds per second.