I agree, mostly, with how this SC thinks. Especially the bolded parts. There's a big difference between power and strength - and the good S&C programs reflect that.
"I Don't Care How Much You Can Bench"
There aren’t a lot of bells and whistles on The Farm; the Stanford program focuses on simplicity and execution. “I don’t have a lot of secrets or gimmicks,” said Turley. “There is an old school way that probably works. It’s been working for a long time.”
Turley does not have some sort of magical formula, nor are his players putting up Zeus-like numbers in the weight room.
"I don’t care how much guys can bench squat or power clean," Turley said. "It has nothing to do with playing football. Football is blocking and tackling. It’s creating contact, avoiding contact and gaining separation if you are a skill guy on the perimeter. That’s football."
What they are doing is building one of the most comprehensive and successful player development programs in the country through highly specialized training, personalized by position and player.
Stanford’s player development team focuses its efforts on injury prevention, athletic performance and mental discipline—in that order. Basically, the Stanford weight program doesn’t worry about having the "strongest" guys in college football. It focuses on football strength, technique and making sure the best Cardinal players stay on the field all season.
“This is an unusual and forward-thinking focus,” said
Will Carroll, the Sports Medicine Lead Writer at Bleacher Report. “I guess we should expect that from Stanford. Most teams use the weight room and even advanced tools like Alter-G treadmills, SwimEx pools and the like in a caveman fashion. It’s all get bigger, get faster, which is easily measured. Injury prevention is more subtle.”
The guiding principle is “do no harm,” and Stanford has been wildly successful in doing so. In the six years since Turley took over the Stanford strength program, games missed due to injury has decreased
87 percent.
“That kind of drop is stunning,” Carroll explained. “I think most programs would be happy with 10 percent. For an NFL team, that kind of drop would be worth a win or more, as well as about $20 million in lost payroll.”
For those who say numbers in the weight room are important measure of success on the field, Turley would counter with the example of Stanford’s 6’5”, 313-pound All-American guard David Yankey, who Turley says can barely bench his own body weight.
‘‘He’s got to have some pop, I get it,” said Turley. “But isn’t the rate at which you strike more important than moving a bunch of weight around really slow?”
Turely explains that bench press and squat goals don’t even factor into his thinking when he designs a workout for a player. He is concerned only with a player’s ability to move as he needs to on the football field.
For an offensive lineman like Yankey, this means the mobility and stability of his shoulder, the stability of his core and the mobility of his lower body. Optimizing those characteristics allows him to get low and quickly apply force in the direction he intends to move, thus fulfilling his role as a blocker.
Stanford’s focus on injury prevention over athletic performance, along with the absence of the almighty record board in the weight room, sets its program apart from other powerhouse programs (yes, Stanford is a modern-day powerhouse).
