Here is what Pete Carroll, one of the most successful college football coaches in the country, said on CBS News’ 60 Minutes:
“A great coach once said that the best players don’t always win, the players that play the best do. That’s why we work so hard. That’s why we train so hard. That’s why we focus so much on practicing better than anybody’s ever practiced before.”
To practice better than others, it helps to have more time and more energy than others. That extra time and extra energy come from not doing wasteful exercises in the whole training program (both conditioning and practice). They come from running a thoroughly rational, state-of-the-art training program—not a “run-of-the-mill” program where mental inertia rules and inefficient exercises are used because “others do them.”
The greatest reserves of time and energy usually are in the conditioning part of a training program. Why? Either because the least mentally agile are put in charge of the conditioning, or coaches consider their players too dull to learn more than the most boneheaded approach to conditioning. Hard to believe? I would not believe it either, but once I taught a football player from a known California team. I asked him how much he lifts in a barbell squat, and he didn’t know what a squat was. It turned out that the strength part of his conditioning was done on exercise machines, so he didn’t know techniques of free-weight lifts. Coaches were not bothered by the loss of additional benefits to the player’s coordination, flexibility, and overall strength endurance that could be developed by working this same amount of time with both free weights and body-weight strength exercises.
