Stanford's Football Sports Performance and Shannon Turley as a Key to the Cardinal Success
First, Happy New Year to All! Alright, onto the first blog post for 2014…
A couple months ago, Georgia State’s Devin Vernick and Jacob Lonowski wrote a piece about GSU’s training regimens – “A different take on mobility training by Devin Vernick and Jacob Lonowski of Georgia State University”. The article focused on GSU’s rather innovative approach to using bands to mobilize joints especially in group settings. Well, Coach Vernick and Lonowski’s article helped shed some light in another article written in the NY Times by Greg Bishop -- “Stanford’s Distinct Training Regimen Redefines Strength”.
Stanford has long been known for its rigorous academics and entrepreneur alums. However, in the last several years, Stanford’s been surging in another ranking – football. On January 1st, Stanford reached its fourth consecutive Bowl Championship Series game. A key part of Stanford’s success can be attributed to its Director of Football Sports Performance, Shannon Turley.
Turley lends his expertise to the NY Times examining how his training regimens focus not on building strength (not necessarily directly), but on Function, Balance, and Flexibility. Bishop writes, “His approach is grounded in physics, on the premise that low man wins on contact, that to get low requires mobility and stability and the ability to apply force in the opposite direction.”
Turley noticed from his days at Virginia Tech as an Assistant that the best players were rarely the strongest in the weight room. Even Turley’s freshmen come into the program not lifting weights, but instead, focus on “body work” exercises such as push-ups, pull-ups, squats or lunges… This should sound familiar if you’ve read several Body Boss blog posts in the past where many coaches from high school to college focus, especially, on body weight exercises especially for beginners. As players progress from high school to college, many of the college player development coaches rarely know the lifting programs of their incoming freshmen so it’s important for the college coaches to establish a strong foundation with players.
Turley goes on to talk about several other key elements of his program including the following:
Stretch and stretch and stretch. Turley says his players stretch before and after lifts and practices… even stretching for fun.
Functional Movement Screen (FMS) scores. “[A] predictive, quantitative analysis of quality of movement”. The FMS evaluates seven movements and grades the players based on balance, functional, overpowered, dysfunctional, and injury prone. The FMS even evaluates based on symmetry (or asymmetry) – if a particularly side of the body is more adept than the other.
Yoga. Again, stressing the need for balance. Development of opposing muscle groups without over-focusing on one side or the other.
In the end, Turley was described in the article as being “innovative”, and similar to Coaches Vernick and Lonowski at Georgia State, with a different take on Strength and Conditioning rather than what the norm may be or what the perception may be. The need to not directly focus on strength, but instead, focus on the various other elements including those captured in the FMS enable Turley and the Stanford football program to have great success both on and off the field.