☕️ S&C Daily — Half That Rest

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Pittsburgh Steelers safety DeShon Elliott and linebacker Patrick Queen, both former Baltimore Ravens, broke down their old team's training program on the podcast "Not Just Football with Cam Heyward." Elliott described daily heavy lifting built around power cleans and squats, said a group of Ravens running backs got hurt from the volume one year, and said he tore his own pec doing it.

The bigger culprit, in his account, was the conditioning test: 12 shuttles of 150 yards, each broken into a 25-yard sprint out and 25 back, against a set time standard, with rest cut to half of normal. Elliott called it the worst part of the program and pinned a wave of pulled hamstrings on it.

Both players now train under a Pittsburgh system built on load management and spatial positioning rather than daily max-effort lifting. "I think the worst thing was the conditioning test by far," Elliott said. "Twenty-five yards back, twenty-five yards back, and you got to make that in a certain amount of time. You only get half that rest. That was a lot of hamstrings got pulled."

Draymond Green showed up at Michigan State as, in his own words, "the fat, pudgy guy." His first bench press session ended early. "I threw up on my first warm-up set of bench press, which was 135 pounds," Green said. He threw up for the next 20 minutes.

Green went on to sign a five-year, $82 million deal in Golden State and gave $3.1 million back to Michigan State to build the basketball program its own weight room, now the Draymond Green Strength and Conditioning Facility. Before it existed the team had a small room in the Breslin Center.

"We had some weights in there, but when we needed to lift, like do real lifts, we had to go to the football building," Green said.

In a new Tampa Bay Times story, USF head strength and conditioning coach Antonio Turner is credited with reshaping a defense carrying 18 new transfers and 12 freshmen. Turner followed head coach Brian Hartline over from Ohio State, where the Buckeyes went 37-6 across his three seasons as associate head strength and conditioning coach, and he has also worked at Maryland, Iowa State, Florida, UMass and Ole Miss. Players photograph themselves before and after the summer to compare.

"He's a loud guy. He's high energy, and everybody in the building can feel him," safety Tavin Ward said.

Tennessee running backs coach De'Rail Sims credited new strength coach Derek Owings with the changes in his room, telling reporters the group's core strength is stronger and shows up when backs finish runs and finish blocks. DeSean Bishop, coming off a 1,000-yard season, put on what Sims called "functional movement weight," more mass without losing his ability to move.

"Now when he's going in there and it's a short-yardage situation, you're seeing the pile move at a different level," Sims said.

Army West Point named Q'darr Robinson its newest assistant football strength and conditioning coach. He arrives from Trine University, an NCAA Division III program in Indiana, where he managed weight room operations for every team while running the football-specific program.

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