How Professional Football Has Positively Impacted Your Next Workout
With the NFL pre-season underway, I reflect on my time working as a strength and conditioning assistant in the NFL.
I had the privilege to be mentored by Minnesota Vikings' head strength and conditioning coach, Steve Wetzel (head strength and conditioning coach for the Vikings from 1992-2003 and then for the Arizona Cardinals from 2004-2006), who was revolutionary in his approach to the strength and conditioning of athletes.
Simply stated, we did things very differently compared to the rest of the NFL. Much of what we did was based on the new scientific research on strength training, while much of it was based on common sense (which was all too uncommon, at least at that time). Wetzel was one of the longest tenured strength coaches in NFL history. What is more interesting is that after his NFL career, he pivoted to an incredibly lucrative personal training career – training “normal” people using the same principles.
What follows are ten principles that made us different from the rest of the NFL. You'll notice, although a Discover Strength client is generally not an NFL football player, many of these principles inspire how we think about exercise for everyone. To be clear, these priorities were uncommon in the 1990s and they are still uncommon among athletes and a wide variety of trainees.
Safety first. Every decision we made was with the long-term health and safety of the player in mind.
We focused on training the neck muscles first and foremost to prevent catastrophic injury.
We never did a barbell squat. We didn't want to vertically compress the spinal column by putting a heavy bar on a player's back.
We never did a power clean or an “Olympic Lift.” The excessive forces involved in these exercises increased injury risk.
We lifted and lowered the weight slowly, trying to eliminate momentum. This contributes to more muscle fiber recruitment (and of course, makes the exercise safer).
We rarely used free-weights. Most of the NFL assumed machines were for novices; we understood that your muscle doesn't have eyeballs; we simply have to contract against resistance and the resistance could come from a machine, a free-weight, or manual resistance. We invested in sophisticated strength training machines that allowed us to target and fatigue all of the muscle structures in a safe and efficient manner.
We only strength trained two to three times per week (for 30-45 minutes).
We performed only one set of each exercise. We didn't waste time with 3-5 sets for each muscle group.
We performed single-joint movements and multi-joint movements. Instead of focusing on squats, deadlifts, and bench presses, we placed an exact equal emphasis on leg curl, leg extension, adduction, calf raises, shrugs, biceps curls, triceps extensions, pullovers, pec flies, and lateral raises. We still did leg press, pull-downs, and chest presses, but every workout also included a balance of single-joint exercises.
We avoid so-called “sport specific” or position specific exercises. The motor learning research is clear: We can't mimic sport movements while lifting weights and expect a positive transfer to athletic performance. With just a few exceptions, a golfer, marathon runner, and NFL football player can and should follow a very similar strength routine.
We never used conditioning or exercise as a punishment. Instead, exercise was looked at as a stimulus (and a privilege) to change our body and performance; so, we wanted to do the right amount of it. If you didn't play well, that doesn't mean that your pectorals need more exercise (push-ups aren't a punishment, they are a privilege!).
If you had an injury, you still strength trained. We could use a variety or machines and protocols to make sure that each player's body continued to get stronger, even if they had been injured during Sunday's game. Many strength coaches in the NFL and college football said, “if you can't pick up a barbell due to an injury, you can take the day off.”
Every player was personally trained. The team didn't come into the weight room to lift weights as a group; instead, each player had a 30–45-minute time slot and the strength and conditioning staff trained them 1-on-1. This was based on the emerging research that direct supervision meaningfully improved all strength training outcomes.
Smart, logical, science based… But uncommon and unpopular.
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