Winning In The Weight Room (23 pages, PDF)

Your players already spend an enormous amount of time in the weight room — preseason, in season, and after the season to stay in shape. Winning In The Weight Room is a Gridiron Strategies Special Coaching Report that takes on the harder question: whether those hours are building football players or just building lifters. As the report puts it, anyone can walk into a weight room and come out stronger a few months later, but you are trying to build football players, and the difference is in the details of your strength program. Hank Schrader — a National Strength and Conditioning Association Certified Strength and Conditioning Specialist and former defensive coordinator at Bellevue High School in Bellevue, Washington — walks through setting up a football-specific strength plan and executing it, then devotes the second half to the conditioning side most programs get wrong: sprints, agility and pattern running built around the energy system football actually uses. This is a digitised edition of the printed 23-page report, scanned with a searchable text layer, so you can pull up a chart or a drill on a laptop or phone in the weight room.

What's inside

• Six components of a strength program. The six critical steps that form the whole strategy: determine your goals and standards, determine where your program is now, write a year-round plan that supports those goals, implement it, find the shortfalls and set short-term goals to address them, and improve the program every year.
• The closed-kinetic-chain principles the plan is built on. Emphasise legwork, initiate all exercises with the legs, eliminate muscle-isolation exercises — explained through the leg extension vs. leg press vs. squat comparison, and why football players train with their feet on the ground. Athletes need strong bodies, not strong parts.
• Injury-prevention and progression charts. Chart 1 lists strength and flexibility exercises by injury site — ankle, knee, groin, back, hamstrings, wrist, elbow, shoulder, neck, shins. Chart 2 gives a basic → advanced → more advanced exercise progression joint by joint, ankle through the multiple-joint Olympic lifts.
• Six tests to measure where your program stands, recorded by academic class: bench press, squat and hang clean 1-rep maxes, vertical jump, 40-yard dash and the pro agility (20-yard shuttle).
• Conditioning standards by grade and position group. Percentile tables for 9th/10th grade and 11th/12th grade backs and linemen across pro agility, vertical jump, handheld 40, hang clean, bench press and parallel squat, based on Boyd Epley's system (Charts 3–6).
• Four periodized training cycles with complete lifting splits. Off-Season I (9 weeks), Off-Season II (9 weeks), Preseason (9 weeks) and two separate 7-week In-Season programs — each chart giving the phase (hypertrophy, basic strength, strength, strength-power), max reps per set and highest percentage of 1-rep max for every week, plus the day-by-day exercise list and the goals for that cycle (Charts 7–10).
• Realistic numbers for setting short-term goals — how much a 1-rep max can improve over a 6- to 10-week program at three workouts a week, how much lean body mass a player can add per week, how much flexibility can improve in 10 weeks — and what to check first when a player misses his goals (adherence, progression, injury, nutrition, rest).
• Why most football conditioning trains the wrong energy system. The ATP-PC system explained in coaching terms: training at 20 seconds or less enhances it, work past 30 seconds starts de-training your players, and the 90/10 ATP-PC to lactic-acid split for football cited from Edward L. Fox's Sport Physiology — with how to divide conditioning time and how long rest periods should actually be.
• What makes a player fast. The five speed skills (acceleration, maximum speed, braking, change-of-direction, reacceleration), the five characteristics of fast athletes, the Nebraska staff's breakdown of a 40-yard touchdown run that took 7.02 seconds, and stride-length and stride-frequency data behind three concrete goals for taking time off the 40.
• Position-specific pattern-running drills. Diagrammed drills with full movement descriptions and six set orders each for wide receivers, defensive linemen, defensive backs and linebackers, plus the rest intervals and set times for each week of a nine-week progression.
• A year-round conditioning plan, including eight weekly preseason conditioning charts (Charts 11–18) laying out warm-up, personalised drills, power work, speed sprints, volume sprints, flying 30s and 40s, gassers, dynamic runs and 300-yard shuttles, and an in-season speed and agility week with four agility stations.
• A conditioning evaluation form you can photocopy to track strength, speed, endurance and agility by player, with ratio columns for the three lifts.
• “24 Lessons Learned On The Way To A Championship.” Schrader's preseason, regular-season and post-season lessons from the undefeated Washington 3A state championship season in which he served as defensive coordinator — off-season attendance standards, the January staff self-evaluation, developing scout squads, letting players build their own goal pyramid, rehearsals, film study, first-round playoff surprises, handling a post-season media blitz and preparing for a televised state final.
• “Evaluating Your Players With A Point System” by Brian Jackson, head strength coach at Crestwood High School in Sumter, South Carolina — a Power Index formula that scores bench press, power clean, squat, 40-yard dash, 20-yard dash and vertical jump against body weight so the heaviest lifter is not automatically the best athlete, with award tiers and a worked sample table.

Who it is for

• High school head coaches, coordinators and strength coaches who run their own weight room without a full-time strength staff and want a written, year-round plan instead of turning players loose after practice.
• Coaches who need testing standards and goal numbers by academic class and position group — the charts are built for 9th/10th and 11th/12th grade backs and linemen.
• Coaches whose conditioning is still laps, gassers and long runs, and who want to replace it with sprint, agility and pattern work matched to football's energy demands.
• Junior high and middle school coaches, and anyone coaching very weak or inexperienced lifters — the report specifically addresses where the leg press and other supplemental exercises belong before an athlete progresses to the squat.
• Coaches looking for a simple, fair way to score and rank athletes across lifts and running events, and an evaluation form they can start using this off-season.

Format note: this is the digitised edition of the printed Special Coaching Report — 23 pages of articles, charts, diagrams and forms with a searchable text layer. It is not a video and it is not a playbook.