The semester is coming to an end here at Pierce. Therefore, it was time to retest the football team. Results after 6 weeks since the pretesting took place:
Average increase per player – Back Squat: 48 pounds
Average increase per player – Bench Press: 19 pounds
Average increase per player – Clean: 10 pounds
I was very impressed with the squat results. We really worked on lower body strength with squats – bilateral, split stance and unilateral squats. I personally do not put much merit on the bench press, but it was nice to see about a 20 pounds increase across the board. I thought for sure we would have more successful results for the clean. It is a very technical lift and what we saw was a huge increase with athletes who had very little experience performing this lift before. At the same time, many of the athletes who have been performing the clean for many years (through high school) had very little improvement. This could be do to a few different factors: taught incorrectly how to clean in the first place (many times this is true when high school football coaches are not trained and educated to teach Olympic lifts), athletes did not take the first 4-5 weeks of the semester serious when we only performed skill transfer complexes (jump shrugs, RDLs, front squats, light weight/bar only Olympic movements), and finally it could be my fault because of program design or coaching effectiveness. Either way this will improve with the next group of incoming freshmen.
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