☕️ S&C Daily — Now You're Flying

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Notre Dame opened Shields Hall last week, a football building that cost north of $100 million. Strength coach Loren Landow got about 4,000 square feet more weight room out of it, and the piece he wanted was a 27-yard ramp at a seven percent grade at the back of the room.

He uses it the way a hitter uses a weighted bat. “Picture it like a batter in the on-deck circle: They put a doughnut on the baseball bat to create the need for greater motor or muscle recruitment,” Landow said. “You take the doughnut off and now you’re flying.” He can run a rep on the ramp and turn straight onto the flat turf between the squat racks, which is the other thing he asked for. The rest is mostly upgraded versions of what they had, plus the newest DARI Motion system for reading movement patterns.

The recovery side got the bigger investment. A cold tub, infrared sauna, hyperbaric chamber, dry float, hydromassage and red light beds are all in-house for the first time, and most of it is self-service off a prescription from the performance staff. Head trainer Rob Hunt would not oversell it. “It’s probably going to help you maybe five to 10 percent in that space,” he said. “But that’s a pretty large piece when it’s accessible and available and you can use it regularly.”

Scott Sinclair has run Georgia’s strength program for eleven seasons under Kirby Smart, a stretch that has produced 21 first-round picks. Asked this week which of his players are the biggest freaks, he named two and then said Georgia has largely stopped testing for it. “The one rep max testing that I might have done in my first year of coaching, we don’t do it now,” Sinclair said.

What he runs instead is submaximal. The power clean test goes to 92% of an estimated one rep max for one or two reps. Bench and squat sit at 85% for three sets of two. “We’re training football players,” Sinclair said. “We’re not putting a platform or a squat rack on the 50-yard line and whoever squats the most wins the game.”

John Mateer got big enough this offseason that people accused his photos of being AI, and ESPN used it to reopen an old argument about how much muscle a quarterback should carry. His program is mostly defined by what he leaves out. No straight-bar bench and no curls. No hang cleans either, because catching one means taking the load through the wrists and shoulders he throws with, so he does the pull and leaves out the catch. What he adds is rotational work, plus daily stretching of his lat, teres major, infraspinatus and T-spine. He is the same 224 pounds he was last year and says he feels less stiff than he did then.

Coaches mostly agree that too big is a real thing. Kansas State coach Collin Klein still holds his program’s quarterback bench record at 395 and says flatly that he was muscle-bound. Oklahoma State’s Eric Morris has watched quarterbacks get too big through the chest and shoulders and lose their mechanics. Mateer says it too, and his word for it is stiff.

The evidence cuts both ways. Tim Tebow won a Heisman at 236, and an all-SEC teammate says he benched 225 for 26 reps as a freshman. Then there is Pat White, who set the NCAA rushing record for a quarterback while Rich Rodriguez spent four years failing to get him over 180 pounds. Rodriguez had just finished saying he does not want a skinny quarterback. “He never got slow either,” he said. “So I don’t know.”

NHL training camps no longer require fitness testing, and the Maple Leafs’ new vice president of sport performance, Andy O’Brien, thinks the field lost something. The old objection was that a test unrelated to hockey gets misread, or that players end up training for the test instead of for the game. His counter is that he has watched it run the other way far more often. For every player put at a disadvantage by a misinterpreted number, he says eight or nine gained opportunities from a good one. Sam Reinhart tested around 69 on an estimated VO2 and Gustav Forsling in the 70s. When a coach sees that, the thought is he can use the player more.

Part of his case is that the reading has gotten better. When he came into the league in 2005 you could count the trainers on one hand. Now, he says, there are 20 to 25 people in an NHL locker room, and teams have spent enough on those departments to interpret what they collect. Losing the testing at that point is, in his word, unfortunate.

The Rangers added five people to their performance staff, and two of the jobs did not exist before. Matt Price arrives from the Kings as director of sports performance and will run the department. Matt Hawkey comes in as manager of performance data science from the Seattle Sounders academy, with a PhD in sports and performance analytics. Mike Wagner replaces Kyle Czech as head strength and conditioning coach after a season assisting in Washington and seven years running strength for the Hershey Bears.

One piece of context on the timing. Quentin Dolan became team president in July, and before that he oversaw player performance and science for the organization.

An F-16 flew over Air Force’s fall camp practice on Saturday. The pilot was Nate Walker, who played fullback for the team in 2009 and 2010. “Does anyone else start practice this way?” head coach Troy Calhoun asked.

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