Penn State Sports Magazine
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far more important benefits to a pro- gram built around multiple sets of ex- ercises with free weights and Olympic- style lifting: • Developing speed. Lifting a barbell enables an athlete to accelerate and decelerate the speed of the movement, something that's impossible on a ma- chine. And exercises such as squats and power cleans are explosive move- ments that increase power, which in turn increases speed. Those exercises can't be done on machines. "It's much easier to do explosive training with free weights," said Gary Hunter, a strength-training expert and professor at the University of Alabama- Birmingham. "And since football is a power sport, development of power is very important. … You also have much more flexibility as far as developing movements that might be specific to an actual sporting movement." • Improving coordination and bal- ance. Machines work each muscle individ- ually. But on a foot- ball field, players don't use each mus- cle separately. Mus- cles and joints work in concert with each other. Making a cut on the field, for example, re- quires ankles, knees, hips and all of the connecting muscles to move together. Free weights, unlike machines, build up the necessary neural connections. Explained John Miller, assistant pro- John Beale to a higher incidence of ACL tears. "You're not training the muscles to fessor of kinesiology at Penn State and a certified athletic trainer: "If you train your muscle to work slow, if you train it in an isolated fashion, when you go to do a functional activity – run or cut or jump – the nervous system is not going to be able to contract the muscle at the right time with the right intensity and coordination with other muscles, as well." Or, as Stankiewitch put it: "When you squat, you have to tighten up your abs. Your core gets stronger; your abs get stronger. Your whole balance gets stronger. coordinate with each other," Miller said. "One of the major reasons you tear your ACL is that if you're going to cut, your knee collapses to the inside. … With the functional strength training going on now, the idea is if you dictate good form, the trunk, hip, knee and ankle all work together at the same time. It keeps the body in good alignment." These benefits aren't breaking news. Miller said physical training facilities started to get rid of isokinetic knee machines, on which patients did leg extensions and presses to recover from knee injuries, in the late 1980s and 1990s. Hunter said major college programs have been using functional strength training for the past 15 or 20 years. "I'm pretty surprised that Penn State was using a foundation that was ma- chines," he said. Sixty years ago, few football players trained with weights. Strength training had a bad reputation among coaches, Hunter said, dating back to the late 1890s, when the "old-time strength men" promoted their mail-order training programs by warning prospective clients away from barbells, which would make athletes slow and burdened by oversized muscles. Unlike the programs hawked by the strongmen, of course. "The analogy," "So maybe if I go out and block a linebacker this year, instead of maybe him hitting me and me falling over, maybe he hits me and my balance is good. So I can stay on my feet and still make the block." • Reducing injuries. Training mus- cles and joints to work together reduces the chance that one muscle will be overtrained. An imbalance in muscle strength is one cause of injuries. Machines have two other drawbacks. Athletes can make only one movement in one plane – machines don't allow for variation of movement – and that can lead to overuse injuries. And machines are designed for athletes to do one set of lifts to exhaustion, which increases the size of the muscle but doesn't nec- essarily build the density needed to absorb continual punishment. While the correlation isn't absolute, some research has shown that exclu- sively training on machines may lead CRAIG FITZGERALD "Our job is to maximize every player. We don't think about who the player is or what the newspapers say. ... Our job is to train the living heck out of them."