This article is written by my Australian friend Peter Upham. Peter owns Shire Speed and Strength but also has coached, played, and S&C coached American style football for many years. He’s a student of sport history and loves talking about the theory behind training. Two of his kids have received scholarships to play at the University of Hawaii, and that’s where our journey begins.

GENERALLY FOOTBALL
by Peter Upham


Its playoff time for the NFL, College Football has reached its climax, and so as we have just bypassed the Perihelion (the furthest point from the Sun of the Earth’s orbit), those players are also the furthest point from football summer camps and the heat of preseason training.


An athlete does not just ‘do’ their sport. The athlete, does what is necessary to enhance their general abilities whilst they continue to master the technical-tactical skills of their game. For football, like most sports, this was not always the case.


In 1976, Terry Albritton would set the world record in the shot put at the University of Hawaii’s Cooke Field in an all-comer’s meet. The same year, Bill Starr published ‘The Strongest Shall Survive.’ Bill was the Strength and Conditioning coach at Hawaii and would hand over the job eventually to Albritton. Previous to that, he had been the Strength and Conditioning coach for the Baltimore Colts.

Terry Albritton

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Hawaii would become a hotbed of strength training activity. It was the training base for the 1977 IPF World Powerlifting Championships before the team headed to Perth, Australia; the SHW division won by 70’s Big co-captain Doug Young. It was the location of the first 700lb bench press in competition by Ted Arcidi in 1985 at the Budweiser World Record Breakers and the second ever 900lb deadlift by Doyle Kenady. Jim ‘The Anvil’ Neidhart, who was a very competitive thrower before turning to the WWF and ‘The Hart Foundation’, spent time there training; a peer of Albritton’s. The place was not the barbell Mecca of Dayton, Ohio or Venice Beach but it has its place.


The book, was and is, a compendium and anthology of barbell training for football preparation. It was published at a time when strength training for football required a concerted push. Coaches were still largely fixed in the ‘barbells = big/bulky/slow athletes’ epoch, and Starr’s book provided a definitive text that outlined the lifting skills and programming with football players in mind. It also advised on diet, and 5 editions later you’ll still hear it referenced in S&C circles for football preparation.

The Strongest Shall Survive promoted ‘The Big Three’; Squat, Bench and Power Clean. Here was a simple prescription, a 5×5 arrangement of Light, Medium and Heavy alternating lifts. It pictorially explained the lifts and described their use and implementation. Its usefulness set it as the gold standard for many years and it’s rightfully known as a classic.

Football drills at SSS

Starr’s book was written for the very large football population, but the exercise prescriptions in it are general training. Did it mean that if you’re doing ‘The Big Three’, that you were preparing for a football season? Of course not, we know what an obviously fatuous observation that would be, but what about the corollary? Do I need to do those lifts to prepare for football?


There are 3 main influences for exercise prescription; Therapy, Commercialism and Performance. In sport, Performance should be the main influence but there’s gold-in-them-thar-hills! And if you can appear to be providing some sort of elite specialization, then there is a large population out there willing to listen to you and be separated from their money to reach their goals. People prefer it if they feel like a unique special snowflake and the S&C coach wants his team to be taking the shortest cut to better physical abilities. So General preparation has, by Commerical interest, become muddled and rail-roaded into a specialized endeavour.


The football player has a grueling calendar. For large parts of the year, both in competition season and in the Spring practice period, technical-tactical training must be given precedence. Additionally, the fatigue of this practice makes progress in the development of general capacities like strength impossible for anyone but the novice/low intermediate athlete. This leaves us with shortened periods to enhance General capacities like strength, speed (in the main movement pattern running), agility, flexibility and so on.


If the football player is only able to use two blocks of time for the development of general capacities then can he afford for it to be complex?


The strongest and most powerful athletes, those who can move more weight further with less support and in less time, have relatively simple exercise prescriptions that only vary by load. Find a Powerlifter or Olympic lifter and they basically do a few things; but do them really, really well. An Olympic Lifter will Front Squat, Back Squat, Clean, Snatch, Jerk and do some pull ups. Exercise variety usually comes in the form of components of those lifts. It is not unusual however to see vastly complex prescriptions being given to football players.


What would happen if you had athletes who only had a couple of short training blocks in a year, who were asked to implement the entire realm of Commercial interest exercise prescription? Flyes and cables and presses and swings and lunges and jumps and twists? and Lions and Tigers and Bears oh my!


Well you’d end up with barbell mechanics like this (how are these PR’s quantified with the hands of 6 spotters on the bar?).

And this (WTF is a ‘Whip Snatch’? Isn’t that what you wouldn’t want to do?).

And this (how about the mental toughness to ‘master’ those few barbell lifts you give lip service to pal?).

And these are by no means the most egregious. I leave it to the fair-mindedness of the reader; does a football player who cannot squat to a legal IPF depth really need to worry about Bulgarian split squats and box squats with bands and chains?


It seems to me that if you can snatch, you don’t have mobility problems. If you can squat 400lb you don’t have weak legs. If you can deadlift 500lb you don’t have a weak posterior chain, you can’t! But browse the uploads of just about any football program and honestly, do you see barbell competence? Those numbers are not exceptional at all but how many football players can actually do it? If we matched the genetic potential of the talent pool with proper coaching we’d have a lot better result than 500lb quarter squats and 105lb power snatches with a clean grip.


Bill Starr’s book shows the complexity is in the movement pattern, NOT in the prescription. I have always found that it’s more a case of leaving things out than including more in a program when it comes to athletes. Starr’s prescription leaves out the deadlift; a known stressor that the football player may leave out so he may get through his important technical-tactical training without that extra fatigue to adapt to. This is an omission worth noting.


Training, for the general strength trainer, the recreational strength trainer and the competitive strength trainer starts with the mastery of what works for all athletes and evolves through the variance of resistance, not with variance of selection.


The Hawaii story brings this article full circle for me. I have been fortunate enough to send 2 players to play football at Hawaii, and I hope in the future there will be more. Its unusual and notable because, coming from Australia, this doesn’t happen very often. In fact, those two are the only two who have ever played locally and then gone straight to play at a FBS school on scholarship; and they’re not punters! We’re slowly taking your game over, and no, the irony of an Australian writing on a US based website about football is not lost on me. The BCS Championship game has an Australian on each roster, and although we’re mostly punters, we’re just starting at the bottom and working our way up to total domination.