I recently had the chance to sit down for a bit with a former NFL strength coach and trainer. Really smart guy. I'm not going to say who (for obvious reasons) but I thought some would be interested in his observations on how ass-backwards much of the NFL is on training/strength & conditioning.
Before I relate some of what he said, I'll get two preambles out of the way. First, the NFL suffers from a problem we all suffer from (and is made worse by being a big bureaucracy): we don't know what we don't know. Put another way, we all suffer from the Dunning-Kruger effect ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect). The D-K effect states that ironically when we're REALLY bad at something we're often so bad we can't realise how bad we are. Hence, even drivers with multiple at-fault crashes to their record think they're above average.
Second, its easy to criticize without having solutions. In our talk we very much discussed different ways of both training and evaluating football players. Given that a lot of the information was visual and complex, its hard to relate here. If there is interest, I can attempt to describe some of it. I'll suffice to say that it accords with what you're seeing from world-class strength coaches and performance researches.
To the good stuff:
1) It's insane that NFL coaches stand and hand-time the 40 yard dash.
The error margin on a hand-timed 40 yard dash can be about 0.2 seconds. One study found a difference of between 0.18-0.44 seconds ( https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20072055) which is CRAZY versus electronic timing.
This is made even worse when you're a 75 year old coach. You're in no rush to get those times, using a hand-timer just shows how stubborn and backwards NFL coaches can be. There's a huge error rate so that you're hand-time is useless compared to the electronic time.
2) Why do they do bag drills?
This: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQSgzT69d5s
There is complete clarity that you should do things in practice that mimic game situations. For example, when teaching DBs to break out of a backpedal don't use a football in your hand to break, mimic a WR getting out of his break by planting a foot and lowering your hips. This is an objectively superior way, fully backed by research, to improve outcomes and speed up learning (in large part because so much of reaction ability is mental processing, not physical).
Then why are you stepping over bags? In football, you literally NEVER shuffle sideways and lift both feet off the ground at the same time. Its a meaningless movement. Given the (literally) hundreds of football-type movements you could do, why would coaches have you do something you'll never come close to doing on the field?
3) Why are all players benching 225lbs?
This one is obvious. It doesn't measure anything other than endurance and basic preparation. You can measure basic preparation a million other ways. You're literally having your strong players waste time training for something you don't need to do in football.
There are much better ways to measure strength, power, and explosiveness than a bench press test. But even then, just changing the weight is dumb simple.
4) Why don't coaches understand biomechanics?
This is tough at the high school and non-Div 1 college level. It takes having someone on your staff who has this knowledge level which is only dumb luck on a volunteer staff at HS. But at Div 1 or the NFL, its bizarre.
Let me use an example. A DB is breaking on a route an false steps. What do coaches usually say? "Don't false step" or "break faster". In reality, the body does what it needs to do to solve a problem (in this case, following a WR). The first flaw is likely visual (mental processing). The DB is looking at the wrong spot. Second, there may be a physical impediment. For example, the DB could lack hip mobility or be slightly uncoordinated. We could go on, but the point is that in solving the problem (false stepping) its not a matter of simply not doing it - there are things going on both mentally and biomechanically that will allow you to most effectively address these problems.
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There was more, but I found these examples particularly fascinating. Certainly, there are NFL S&Cs and trainers who are using and applying this information. These aren't secrets and they're backed by research and best practices in other sports. Yet its fascinating to me that given the financial incentive for teams to train and evaluate players, the NFL struggles to stay on the curve.
Its also a good reminder for all of us, how easy it is in our personal lives and at our work to be blind and stubborn about better ways of doing things.
