WAVE THEORY

One of the most famous track coaches of all time, Bill Bowerman, believed that moderate daily training would never result in world records. He said that hard days were never hard enough and easy days were never easy enough. 

I was reluctant to use the word “hard” in the above paragraph. Football coaches are obsessed with “hard”. They are also obsessed with “soft”. There’s probably some psychoanalysis that could be done on this hard and soft issue, some double entendre for sure. Manly men are hard, “others” are soft. Football is where boys become men! Football is the last bastion of toughness for American males! Since I’m not a psychiatrist, I will leave these studies to Freud, Erikson, Jung, etc. 

Instead of Bowerman’s hard and easy, I like to think of it as high and low. In football, specifically, I like to see football as alternating “performance days” and “fundamental days”.

I call this “The Wave Theory” of training. 

Instead of practicing “hard” (there’s that word again) with lots of “hard work” and “high effort” every damn day, I believe you need to incorporate performance days into your practice week. To do this, you must set those days up with “low days” where you teach, coach, strategize, and practice football fundamentals with no intention of going at game speeds. In fundamental practices, there should be a blinking neon sign in your head saying DON’T BURN THE STEAK… DON’T BURN THE STEAK… DON’T BURN THE STEAK. This is essential to the Feed the Cats approach to coaching football. 

Let’s take a look at the approach of football programs that I vilify.

Monday: short practice with coaches angry about all the damn mistakes on Friday night, followed by punitive conditioning for points allowed, missed tackles, and turnovers in the previous game. A 60-minute film session follows, where the anger starts to boil over. A couple players cry.

Tuesday: three hour practice, hard of course, with coaches ranting like madmen about effort. Practice ends with tons of conditioning.

Wednesday: three hour practice, again, hard as hell. Coaches scold players for being SOFT. “Fatigue makes cowards of us all.”. Practice ends with, of course, more conditioning because the players were lethargic and lifeless. “The beatings will continue until morale improves!”

Thursday: high speed pre-game but coaches think players seemed sluggish and lacked enthusiasm “Damn, we haven’t conditioned enough!”

Friday: The big game, where the dumb team beats the dumber team. Coaches drink a lot after the game, either celebrating or drowning their sorrows.

Saturday: “Embrace the grind!” 7:00 AM practice to do 30 minutes of “recovery running”. Coaches are suffering from terrible hangovers.

Sunday: After another night of heavy drinking (hair of the dog!), coaches consume several energy drinks and meet for six hours preparing for the next game. After the meeting, coaches discuss family problems and upcoming divorces. 

When I went to Franklin, TN, in 2004, it blew my mind to be taking my mattress to Franklin High School for the first week of football practice (considered “camp”). All varsity football players slept on the gym floor, coaches slept on the floors of the PE offices. I literally was sleeping at my new school before I ever taught my first Chemistry class. We were on the field for over six hours, in player meetings for two hours, and suffered through staff meetings at night. Football coaches truly believe in outworking the competition. HARD WORK is the one and only key to winning. Rise and grind!

Somehow we placed 2nd in the state of Tennessee in 2004, losing to Riverdale in the TSSAA championship game. Success reaffirms the process and the bullshit continues. 

18 years later, I see schools in our area (Chicago area) trying to get the most out of their 25 allowed contact days in the summer. Athletes show up at 7:00 am and go home at noon. Football coaches complain about their low numbers and wonder why basketball players resist football like it’s the plague. 

Nothing in the previous 396 words would be a part of a football program that I would endorse.   

Buckminster Fuller said, “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” So, what would the new model look like? 

There are alternatives to my practice week but this is the one I think fits high school programs best. Monday: Fundamental. Tuesday: Performance. Wednesday: Fundamental. Thursday: Performance (45 minutes). Friday: Game. Saturday: Off. Sunday: Off. 

No conditioning… NONE. Tired is the enemy, not the goal. 

Stop running from drill to drill. Yes, your practice looks good when there’s constant movement, hustle, and effort… but a constant state of fatigue lowers outputs. High output is the key to winning games. 

Two-way players play ten minutes of high-output football on Friday night. Why do we think that three hours of running around slowly in practice would even remotely train kids to play fast for ten minutes. Vince Anderson says, “If your practice does not look like performance, you are detraining performance”. John Wooden said, “Never mistake activity for achievement”. Traditional football practices are all activity and no achievement. 

Players should do nothing on weekends. Encourage sleep. Encourage kids to watch college football on Saturday and the NFL on Sunday. Create an eagerness to get back to practice on Monday. 

No in-person coaches meetings on weekends. Let coaches work at the times that work best for them AND THEIR FAMILY. Communicate by text, phone, and through shared Google Docs. Communicate with players the same way. Send them important video clips. Like players, coaches need to rest, recover, and become eager for a return to practice. Steve Spurrier said, “Tired coaches make bad decisions”.

No team film sessions. 

Incorporate a brief speed workout twice a week (check out my “Atomic Workout” on YouTube). Let the Atomic Workout (16 minutes long) replace the stupid warmup that football teams do. Record sprint times. Get faster throughout the season. (Speed is a wonderful barometer of health.)

In performance day practices, make sure there is an internal wave going on. Separate high sessions with fundamental or teaching sessions. High efforts are not high outputs. High outputs are built on a foundation of recovery. 

At the Track Football Consortium in Ankeny, IA, Iowa State coach Matt Campell talked about running game-speed clusters of five plays followed by five minutes of those players getting coached as a new offense ran five plays. This accomplishes high outputs. The recovery session allows coaches to coach, players to learn, and sets up the next high session. I can’t say this loud enough, YOU CAN’T HAVE HIGH OUTPUTS WITHOUT RECOVERY. 

My good friend, Dan Casey, is an innovator. Dan actually incorporated a halftime during his practices. Why not? Games have halftimes. Are games soft?

In the winter, I would pursue speed and power, period. 

In the spring, I would encourage every kid that could help the track team to run track, unless the coach is a distance guy who believes in the Clyde Hart 20 x 200 method of training. If your track coach “feeds the cats”, it’s a no-brainer. 67% of NFL players ran track in high school. The ones that didn’t were almost all basketball players. The idea that football players should simply lift weights in their 9-month off-season is the Neanderthal approach to athleticism. 

In the summer, I would train four days a week, no Fridays, Saturdays, or Sundays. Once again, I would pursue speed and power along with getting a jump on the season in terms of football fundamentals and installing offensive and defensive schemes. No conditioning. Instead, add a sprint capacity workout once a week in July. Don’t burn the steak. 

“I think you often have to think about what doesn’t have to be there, rather than what does.” ~Charlie Francis

Please read Greg McKeown’s “Essentialism”. 

Speed Kills. 

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This article was written for HEADSETS, Volume 2, Issue 3, the online football magazine produced by Kenny Simpson.

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The Football Articles:

♦ New Ideas for Old School Football Coaches

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♦ Football: Differentiating Sprint Practice and Non-Sprint Practice

♦ A Football Coach’s Guide to Feeding the Cats

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Bio: Tony Holler

♦ A coach’s son for 62 years
♦ 41st year of coaching (football, basketball, track)
♦ 38 years of teaching Chemistry
♦ Writer (approaching 300 articles) – book coming in 2022
♦ Co-Owner of Track Football Consortium (along with Chris Korfist)
♦ #1 Best-Selling DVD 2019 and 2020 – Championship Productions
♦ International speaker
♦ Two sons coaching (Alec and Quinn)
♦ Owner of “Feed the Cats”
♦ @pntrack
♦ tony.holler@yahoo.com
♦ 630-849-8294