Wednesday, June 2, 2010

Interview with Dr. Jacobs

Q: Tell the readers a little bit about your background.

A: Like a lot of other folks I started off in this field as an athlete. I was what some would call a slow gainer. I never really got to big but I gained some size and power. I went off to college and started to accumulate some injuries. I tried to walk on and did not make it so I started to train some more and realized I loved it and stuck with that and walked on to the track and field team. I threw shot and discuss for a while and then discovered and fell in love with powerlifting. I graduated with an undergraduate degree in physical education. I ended up being conned into working at a local gym that really did not exist. I lived in the closet of the gym for three years, after the first year I owned the gym and turned it into a successful powerlifting and bobybuilding gym. After that I went back to school and finished my Master’s degree and got a job as a strength coach at a small university and took on the responsibilities of the whole athletic department. After that I decided to take a grad assistant spot at the University of Tennessee for one year and after that I became an assistant strength coach at the University of Miami were we one a few national championships and had an extremely successful team. I also worked in the private sector and spent twelve years working with the Miami Project to cure paralysis. Now I am a professor at Florida Atlantic University.

Q: Tell me a little bit about your time with Dave Pasanella?

A: Dave played two years at N. Arizona and then transferred to Georgia Tech and played two years at fullback and then became there strength and conditioning coach. I was an outside consultant for him and his program. We also had a business together called Superior Performance, which was one of the first Sports Performance facilities in the country. Unfortunately Dave passed away and it never took off. We set up a camera so we could analyze the athlete’s squats on a big projection screen while they performed them and were able to fix things a lot better that way. This was by far the best component to our success in the weight room.

Q: If you could design a weight room for high school athletes, what would it consist of?

A: With high school athletes number one is to not get involved with the fancy glitter. The best investments are sound bars and weights. Solid benches and a bunch of power racks. Power racks are the most efficient. In the 1980’s at UCLA I saw a modular system where they just had a rack and an adjustable bench with a power bar and a pulling bar with bumper plates and free weights. That’s how I would set it for high school athletes a place to do squats, bench, chins, dips, and pulls. Start with the basics and don’t get caught up with the machines.

Q: What is your philosophy on training football players in the high school setting, start with the weight room and the go into on the field speed and agility training?

A: Now we know that there is this joker called the force velocity curve and with the concept that when pushing the most weight we are usually moving the slowest and if it is lighter we move our fastest, but we will never be at our fastest speeds, so we’ll have a lower force production. In the concept of specificity we’ll infer that if we want to move fast we can only do that when we are moving light weight. The truth is that most developing athletes using slow crude strength training bet. 3-8 reps moving relatively at a slow pace will increase their force production at all velocities. For developing athlete’s you need to focus on three factors technique, technique, and technique. Stay with in your technique and push like hell. Patience, because if there was a better technique than what you did on your first rep, than you should of used it on your first rep. Second thing which I learned from Doug Furnas from when I was at the University of Tennessee is to not set unrealistic goals. If your program tells you to get five reps you get five reps. you never miss a rep. In powerlifting the goal is to go nine for nine, if you look at the very best they tend to be very consistent. So I would say the first step is to use slow and controlled movements and to keep your goals in a progressive nature but in a realistic frame so you get your reps. and third if you are going to do power work in the gym make them basic power movements. I don’t think Olympic lifting is a realistic activity for most coaches to share. Olymipc lifters do multiple sessions per week and there is a lot of technique involved. With high school athlete’s I prefer to use a power pull or a high pull as opposed to dive bombing under a bar. The idea is that we do strength, hypertrophy and some power work in the gym. We do not do speed work in the gym, we do that outside, we don’t as much overloading. We will not go any higher then 10% of bodyweight. You can do this with a weight vest or pull a sled. We want to turn our gains into speed and do more movement oriented tasks. I think that the best training for lateral movement is a game of pick up basketball. This will make them work harder and be more competitive when it comes to speed and agility training.

Q: How would you go about conditioning high school athletes? Start right off the bat or wait until the season is approaching?

A: It depends on who your athletes are. I would say no more than two weeks and those two weeks will be an active recovery workouts. The time for aerobic exercise is when you retire; if I saw a ball player running or walking they would be punished. I believe in the old school periodisation. In Jan. you are starting a strength/hypertrophy phase up until spring ball. Once spring ball comes around you will turn it into an in season maintenance phase. Once spring ball was over we would go into a strength phase until summer started. Over the summer we focused on power/speed/strength, but we did not do any running until the fourth of July. It only takes six weeks to learn the neural aspect of running for the big fellas. If it was a speed guy it would be a little different maybe go let him run track or maybe 10 weeks. This will prepare them to go all out at camp.
Q: Is there such thing as sport specific lifts in the weight room or is just hype?

A: The only sport specific movement for football is playing football. In training we want to manipulate the factors we think are important. Those factors are going to be related to joint movement and lines of resistance. It should be sport similar movements and velocities. It is impossible to train the shoulder at the velocity of throwing the football. You don’t want to just work the movements that are most predominant in the sport because you can 95% of the time you do but the other 5% we get in odd angles people get hurt, so we want a wide variety.

Q: Would you train each position diff.?

A: No, I remember several times to the dismay of Coach Johnson we had Vinny Testeverde coming out of the squat rack with 500lbs on his back. Everybody squats, kickers all the way to defensive lineman. There might be some slight changes but in general most of the movements are the same. No matter what the sport they all have to move straight ahead really fast, occasionally they have to stop and change directions and every one of them will get hit. The more heavy damage and pounding you cause your body through in training the more we develop the capacity to generate and recover. Any time you get DOMS you are developing the capacity to protect yourself. Now with that being said I would change things slightly with throwing athletes and cut out the overhead pressing, but everything else will generally be the same.

Q: As far as recovery what would you have your players do?

A: Number one factor of recovery is to get enough sleep. The 8 hour’s of sleep generalization is inadequate. The average person should get 9. When I competed and I was training heavy legs I would need to get at least 12 hours of sleep. Preparation before you train is vital; this includes prehab, mobility, and stretching. Getting out and doing other things performing daily activities. Sitting in a whirlpool and having cold water therapy.

Q: What was the biggest hurdle you had to overcome with your players?

A: Themselves, psychologically these guys would defeat themselves before we even started. We had to work on cognitively restructuring the brain and to do that we had to talk about the issues. You can have All Americans still hearing that voice from there Dad that said he was too clumsy or weak. Until we talk about that and bring it out it would limit them. We would start by setting goals in the gym; we would try and get more reps or lift a heavier load. Everybody had to write everything down. We found that was quite effective reinforcement. Number one it showed them somebody gave a damn because I wrote each workout out by hand. We did not have excel back then so I wrote all 315 athletes workout sheets. Then we would adjust on the fly and set goals for each phase on what we expected them to accomplish. After we did that in the weight room it was a lot easier for the position coaches to prepare the athletes. So be sure to set them realistic goals.

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