Specific Training, Specific Results

Author

Tim Cortazzo
June 25, 2024

I’ll never forget it. Freshman Football Season was coming to a close. The Freshman Team played on Thursdays right after school. We all wore our bright yellow jerseys to school on game day. 130lb 9th Grade me walked through the high school hallways with my jersey sleeves rolled, held together by a set of wristbands that I pulled up to my biceps. Take those wristbands off and I’d look like a wizard the way the sleeves hung. Every morning on my way to class, I would stop by one of the varsity football coach’s classroom to talk some ball. “Timmy, you got the safety on those guns?” he said as he laughed. “You know, you can make an impact on Varsity next year… BUT… you need to get bigger. At least 170lbs by next year.” “40 POUNDS!?” I thought in my head. “How the hell am I going to pull that off?” and that’s when he said it, “YOU NEED TO LIVE IN THE WEIGHT ROOM!”

I went home later that night and told my dad what coach said. We needed to get a plan together ASAP! My dad smirked and said calmly, “you’ll be fine.” To that point in my life, I had been lifting. We had a weight room in our basement. My dad had this 4ft long, brown dowel rod that he kept in the corner of the room. A couple days a week we would train. I did cleans and squats with the dowel, push-ups, and pulls on this old school lat pulldown pulley machine that converted into a horizontal row. The next morning, I came downstairs to eat breakfast with my dad so we could organize my plan to play Varsity Football next season. He had 3 books laid out on the counter: A 3 page packet made in Microsoft Excel, “How to Run Faster,” and “40 Yard Flash.” The 40 Yard Flash book came with a VHS tape as well… WTF DAD? (I would never say that out loud, probably get punched in the chest), but in my head I said it… “Coach said I need to get big!” My dad turned to me and said “well then you better eat your breakfast.”

My mind was in a blender. The older kids lift weights in the off-season, I am going to run more? Didn’t make sense in my 15 year old brain, but my dad had a plan. “It doesn’t matter how big you are if no one can catch you.”

Here is the crazy thing… This was back in 2003. 20+ YEARS AGO!!! And today in 2024 I still hear coaches and parents preaching the same exact thing… “Want to play football? You need to get big!” Coaches randomly throwing out arbitrary weight goals, telling a 15 year old sophomore that he needs to pack on 30-40lbs by next season. And lets face it, majority of kids, parents, and sport coaches do not understand the science behind nutrition, training, and ultimately performance (nor do they understand puberty). So the kids and their parents run to GNC to buy tubs of mass gainer and immediately to LA Fitness for a gym membership. THIS SHOULD NOT BE THE NORM… IT DOES NOT HAVE TO BE THE NORM…

This is not meant to sound anti-weight room. I love the weight room. Strength is one of the foundational building blocks. And never ever would I frown upon a parent buying their kid a gym membership. The change in body composition, the health benefits, the confidence, EVERY kid should have a gym membership. You can miss me with the mass gainer… I just do NOT always love how the weight room is used for athletes. Let me explain.

The traditional/old school year round training program looks like this:

  • Winter/Spring - “Football Lifting Starts in January!” 3-4 days per week in the weight room. Squat, Deadlift, Bench. GET BIG! Last man standing Plank finisher at the end.

  • Summer - 3-4 days per week in the weight room. Add “conditioning.” Run the track, County Fairs, Gassers, Step over and run around bags.

  • Fall (In-Season) - 1-2 days per week in the weight room. Add some extra Snake Runs on Saturday Mornings after Friday Night games.

So yes, a lot of teams are literally living in the weight room. And I’m not saying this is entirely bad (that schedule is pretty bad)… I am saying that it needs to be better.

HOW DO WE FIX IT?

Understand that the weight room is simply a tool. It’s one piece of the puzzle. Until they put a rack and a bench on the 50 yard line and decide the game by whoever has the highest team bench press & squat max.. then we need to treat the weight room as such - A TOOL. The new phrase floating around Twitter/X right now is that “Strength is an expression, not a measurement.” And I hate caving into the new, black and white, overly complex S&C jargon that some coaches shoot off to sound smart.. But this one is SOOOO simple, and makes a ton of sense. We know that getting big does not mean getting strong. We know that just because an athlete can lift heavy weights, does not mean they express strength well in their sport. Again, strength is an expression. In the weight room, we express our strength through lifting X amount of weight on a specific exercise. Are there some correlations? Of course, but in a world of “it depends,” this also depends. This does not mean find sport specific movements and do them in the weight room, we can talk about that another time.

Field, Court, and Ice Sports are games of movement, speed, change of direction, power, strategy, skill. With that many different attributes contributing to who wins and who loses, I think it’s absolutely crazy to ONLY spend time in the weight room. If you do not use it, you lose it. If you do not lift weights, you can become weak (also an expression for some 😂), if you do not sprint, you can become slower, if you do not shoot a basketball, if you do not hit, catch or throw a ball, the list can go on forever… and that alone tells us that to get specific results, then we must train specifically.

Over the next few weeks, we will take a deep dive into what I think a year-round training program should look like. We will check out different off-season and in-season training ideas. We will talk about why “getting big” and gaining 40lbs might not be the best idea for an athlete. (I started every varsity game that next season by the way.. lead the team in catches, yards, and touchdowns at a WHOPPING 145lbs.. Far less than what they told me to gain..)

AND… I will also be revealing my first ever online course. I am excited to share my thoughts and ideas and I am thankful that you are here for the journey!

Talk soon,

Tim

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