Evolution of Strength Training – My Personal Journey – Part Two

After graduating from Fresno State I went to University of California Santa Barbara for my teaching certification. While there I was fortunate to take a class from Sherman Button on conditioning athletes. It was his first year at UCSB, he was ahead of his time with the material and concepts that he presented. It was a great class because of his comprehensive approach to conditioning built around weight training. The two textbooks for the class were especially helpful. Pat Oshea’s book “Scientific Principles and Methods of Strength Training.” and “Foundations of Conditioning” by Falls, Walls and Logan. As a class assignment we had to design a yearlong comprehensive training program for our chosen sports. I put together a program for track and field that incorporated all components of training. It was an initial attempt at periodization, but most importantly it forced me to look at weight training in a new light. I had to integrate the strength training with the skill and conditioning requirements of each event. Today that does not seem like anything special but in 1969 that was revolutionary. I was also now a coach as well as an athlete. I was responsible for other people. I had to teach them skill and have them ready for competition, so I had to pay attention to the big picture. Strength was only one part of the equation, although a most important part.

That spring, in my first track coaching assignment, I got the opportunity to coach one of the best athletes I have ever coached, Sam Cunningham. He became California State Champion in the Shot put that year and also an All American football running back. He was 6’3” tall, weighed 225, he could run the 100 in 9.7, but by my thinking he was “weak, “ because he could not lift much weight in the weight room. Yet he had tremendous explosive power. This led me to begin to ask the question: How much strength is enough? A question I would continue to ask throughout my career.

In the fall of 1969 I began training for the decathlon. I did all my strength training with Curt Harper, a world class discus thrower. Working with Curt we trained on a varied program that involved Olympic lifting and power lifting. I got very strong in terms of measureable strength in the weight room. The only problem was that the work in the weight room was not transferring into performance on the track and in the field. Once again I begin to question the whole place that weight training had in the program. Three things led me to modify my approach 1) The writing of Ken Dougherty in his books Modern Track and Field and Track and Field Omnibook, especially the latter. In these book he talked about concepts that would latter evolve into my thinking on special and specific strength. 2) Training for the decathlon in Santa Barbara gave me the opportunity to train with some of the greatest athletes in the world. I saw how they trained. Watching and getting to know the foreign athletes that trained there also gave me first hand exposure to the European methods of training that up until that point I had only read about. This exposure to the Europeans let me to question the traditional approach that we were taking. They seemed to spend less time in the weight room, when they did come to the weight room they were not as “strong” as we were, but they seemed to be able to do a better job of expressing their strength. They engaged in more varied activities like jumping and all types of throws. 3) In the fall of 1971 Pat Matzdorf, from University of Wisconsin, moved to Santa Barbara to train. He had broken the world record in the high jump that previous summer. His strength training was different. Bill Perrin, the track coach at Wisconsin, and a real innovator designed his program. It involved what they called simulation training, which consisted of specific strength training exercises that worked on various parts of the whole jump using a variety of methods including weights and rubber tubing. He also utilized depth jumps in his training. This was my first exposure to a systematic application of plyometric training.

From 1969 to 1973 I coached at La Cumbre Junior high school in Santa Barbara, California. It was first hand experience working with growth & development in the pre-pubescent and pubescent male athlete. There was not much equipment, even free weights. The strength program consisted primarily of push-ups, pull-ups, dips, rope climb and gymnastics. At this age, with the tremendous linear growth that was occurring body weight exercises were very appropriate loading. I felt that we the key objective was to lay a base of athletic fitness that they could harness when they went to high school. Although at the time I felt somewhat shortchanged that we did not have more weights, in retrospect I was on the right track.

Another key milestone in the evolution of my ideas on training in general and strength training in particular was the1972 AAU Learn by Doing track & field clinic in Sacramento, California. Many of the top track & filed coaches in the country were in attendance. The opportunity to interact with them was invaluable. Two of the “Learn by Doing” stations were devoted to plyometric training which was new and revolutionary at the time. Each evening there were presentations by Polish triple jump coach Tadeusz Starzynski, he presented the whole spectrum of his training program for triple jumpers which had produced Joseph Schmidt, three time Olympic Gold medallist. It obviously involved a lot of jumping exercises, but it included medicine ball work and some very specific weight training. Once again there was nowhere near the extent of weight training we were having our athletes do and the weight training that was done was much more specific. This experience had profound influence on how I trained my athletes for explosive power from that time on. I immediately incorporated his concepts and ideas in my personal training, as well as with the athletes I was coaching. The results were a tremendous increase in explosiveness and speed.

In 1973-74 while attending graduate school at Stanford University I also had the opportunity to coach the jumpers and decathletes. This gave the opportunity to apply what I had learned with more mature male athletes. It was also the opportunity to work with Payton Jordan, the track coach at Stanford who was a pioneer in weight training. He had worked with a man named John Jesse who authored many books on strength training for sport. Jesse was way ahead of his time in the application of strength training to prevention and rehabilitation of injuries. Doctor Wesley Ruff, my adviser, encouraged me to do research in the area of strength and power training, which I found very helpful. This helped me to better understand the scientific reasons for the things that I was observing as a coach and experiencing as an athlete. In my research I discovered an article in by Yuri Verkhoshansky on the use of jumping in training. He delineated the different training effects of short jumps and long jumps. This article had a profound effect on my own training and with the athletes I coached. Now there was a system and a context for the Plyometric work.

In 1975 –77 at Santa Barbara high school was my first experience working with female athletes. I did not make distinctions as to gender, they were athletes. They strength trained with the boys. In fact we learned that the girl’s derived even more spectacular benefits than the boys and that they needed to continue their strength training throughout the season or the drop off would be dramatic. The strength training was an important part of the program regardless of the event.

Before the late 1970’s there did not seem to be the distinctions between all the styles of lifting. You just put together an eclectic program, you were not labeled a free weight guy, an Olympic lifting guy or a HIT guy, you just trained athletes. Two things changed this: 1) Olympic lifting ascendancy in the late 1970s which I believe resulted from the spectacular gains made by the Bulgarian weight lifters. The Bulgarian methods were thoroughly detailed by Carl Miller in his book “Olympic Lifting Training Manual.” The Olympic lifting movements had always played a major role in weight training for improving sport performance, but things seemed to change in the late seventies. There was an attempt to blindly copy Olympic lifting training protocols without any apparent regard to it’s relationship to the whole training program. Just because an Olympic lifter, who does nothing but lift, is able to lift up to five times a day does not mean that a football player or a basketball player who has to run and jump and do other training should attempt multiple lifting sessions in a day. Olympic lifting for sport performance is a means to an end. If you are an Olympic weight lifter then it is as end in itself, because those lifts are the performance standard. For a while I bought into the focus on Olympic lifting, but then I took a step back and looked at the big picture. I was not coaching Olympic lifters; I was coaching track and field athletes in a university setting who had limited amount to train. I had to use an eclectic system of strength training that would give me the most bang for the buck. Around 1979 in the course of doing some biomechanical of my runner at Shriner’s Hospital in San Francisco I met a physical therapist that practiced the classical concepts of PNF (Proprioceptive Neuromuscular Facilitation) as taught by the originators of the concept Knott and Voss and Dr. Kabat. This really opened my eyes. She talked about PNF and diagonal rotational movement. I was not quite sure what to do with it, but it got me thinking and analyzing what we were doing. Everything was too linear, so I begin to rethink what I was doing in strength training. It started the evolution in my thinking away from traditional methodology to less traditional multi-plane work. It led me to look for other forms of resistance, to in essence get out from under the Olympic bar and broaden the approach to strength training.