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| What I Learned at The Joe Defranco Seminar By Paul Vaillancourt On July 20th 2007 my wife and I rented a car and headed for Wyckoff NJ. If you have never heard of Joe Defranco, then you’ve probably never heard of Wyckoff either. Hidden away in the garden state industrial park is the most intense athletic training facility in the world, better known as Defranco’s Training Systems. Joe has trained hundreds of athletes and I’ve yet to see anything less than spectacular results with Joe’s clients. The results are so impressive that Joes video clips have become famous on Youtube. If going to hear Joe speak about training athletes wasn’t enough, we also were going to hear from Dave Tate and Jim Wendler. It would take me way too long to describe why these guys are the best, so if you haven’t heard of them, you best get your ass to www.elitefts.com and do some book learnin’. We were as excited as little kids at Christmas to be attending a seminar put on by ELITE FTS at Defranco’s. After the eight hour drive from Renfrew Ontario to North Jersey (as the locals call it), we checked in to our hotel and then headed out to find The training facility, it was only Friday night but I wanted to make sure I knew how to find the place. After many wrong turns and stops for directions we pulled into the parking lot of the Garden State Industrial park. I was pumped to be in the same parking lot that all of those punishing prowler and sled session take place. We walked up to the open garage door, and… the only way I can describe it is that is was the most intimidating situation I’ve ever experienced. The hip hop music was way loud, a couple jacked up looking guys were standing by the dumbbell rack looking as thought they had just finished training. Another group of people were huddled around one of the power racks, seemingly having a round table discussion. I spotted Joe and Dave Tate in the group around the power rack. Wow, Tate is F!@#$ing huge. I guess we were just standing in the doorway like a couple deer in the headlights, and all we got back was menacing glares. Jim Wendler stood up from the group around the rack and gave me the stare of death. We promptly got the hell out of there and went back to our hotel. The next morning we arrived back at the training facility shortly before 9am. After the initial experience I was picturing us not being anywhere near hardcore enough to set foot in the place and expected to be one of the few “small” guys among many monstrous power lifters. I felt more at ease once we inside among a pretty normal looking group of strength and conditioning coaches. After roaming around and checking out the incredibly sweet set-up of equipment Joe had, we settled on a bench as the seminar was about to begin. My intro was so detailed that I’ll just stick to the point form version of the important points that I learned. (This is all that’s important anyways) Most common programming mistakes when training athletes, according to Joe Defranco. -Getting too fancy. Keep it simple, get good at the basics. Use body weight exercises. Get as much as you can out of the least amount of variety. Then you have something to move up to when you start to plateau. -Programming is not the most important aspect of training, attitude is. -Look at the total amount of time you have with your athlete, and focus on results that you can realistically achieve in said time period. -Focus on the next step in the road. Don’t be greedy with your expectations. EX: if you have a 225lb bench, don’t worry about 315, focus on getting 250. -Getting too complicated with your explanations. When you are teaching a training skill, pretend you are talking to 6 year olds. Keep it simple. -Don’t worry about weak points, just get stronger and build muscle mass from head to toe. -Know how to break down your indicators. [If you’re teaching people to squat, you better know how to spot breaks in their form and know how to fix the problem(s)] -Use the three main lifts as indicators and that way you are testing your athletes all the time. This makes it easy to see progress or the lack there-of. -Dynamic Effort doesn’t mean bands and chains. If you can’t push an empty bar fast, why in hell would you need to add bands and chains? In some cases the best DE work can be in the form of jumps, sprints, plyo push-ups and med ball throws. -Remember that the athletic season is the de-load for most athletes. Use every week possible during the off-season to get stronger and better conditioned. I asked Joe to give me the three most basic points to look for when starting a 40yd dash. Here’s what he told me; 1) Utilize back foot push on the start. Make sure your runner is exploding off the line by pushing with both feet. It’s common to see the back foot look “light” and barely be touching the ground. Make sure you push off of both feet. 2) Keep a 45 degree shin angle on the start. If your shins are pointing straight up, the runner will “pop” up on the start, rather than driving forwards. “Make sure the shins look like 2 darts pointing down the track”. 3) Keep your head down. We all know that wherever your head goes, the rest of the body will follow. So keep that head down in order to stay low and keep driving forward. Those were the 3 most basic ones, but he also expanded on a few other important points. -Keep your hip slightly above the shoulders -keep a flat back -hand placement on the start line should be directly below or even behind the shoulder. (If it’s out in front, it acts like a “kickstand” preventing the runner from driving forward. -“Come out like a dart” I asked Joe to explain a few ways to improve one’s vertical jump -Remember that the descent is the most important part of the jump. The faster you go down, the faster you come back up. -Only go down to ¼ squat depth. Any deeper is wasted movement. -Keep your feet inside your hips. -Arms down, arms up. The arm drive adds momentum to the jump in both directions. -Do weighted box jumps. -Rest 1 full minute between jumps. -“Just get F@#$ing stronger” Joe was asked about how to approach “In-season” training for athletes “You have to find a happy medium, because it’s usually either way to much and most often, not enough.” It should be dependant on how much “action” the athlete will see during the competitive season. If he/she is a sophomore playing only one shift per game on the varsity team, they can pretty well maintain the same training protocol as the off-season. But if it’s the starting running back, who carries the ball 40 times per game, you need to back things off some. “What happens with the guys that play a lot is that they try and keep training the way they did in the off-season and then end up worn-out, so they quit training all together, instead of just adjusting what they were doing.” “The guys that only play once per game also don’t train, just because it’s the competitive season and end up losing all the gains made over the off-season.” The following are just random points that got covered during the seminar. (The format of the seminar was “open forum” so sometimes we got way off topic.) -You have reached your “MAX” on any lift, when your form breaks. (I found this to be especially important when working with younger lifters. Less bad habits will be developed.) - If you want to be a “badass”, you have to be badass all the time. Being really dedicated to training over the summer, or just in your junior year is not enough. You have to bust your ass all the time. It takes many years of total dedication to become the best. (I have a personal story about this point; we have a real “stud” of a football player that trains with us at our gym in Renfrew. He’s got mad skills in just about every sport he plays, and is a natural athletic “freak”. For the past 2 years he has trained his ass off and has always been very dedicated to practicing his skills. And this summer, before heading off to try-out for a University football team, he dropped the ball. I would have expected him to put everything into high gear in order to achieve great things in his rookie season. But instead he put in a less than impressive off-season. He may be pissed at me for writing this, but it’s the truth. I’ve heard every excuse out there, and guess what. It’s all bullshit. If you truly want to be a champion, you make time to train and everything else is secondary. I confident that he will still make the team, and probably get plenty of playing time, but the point is, if he had stuck to being a “badass” and dedicated the summer to becoming a complete freak, he would have lit up the league as rookie and who knows what other achievements it would have lead to.) -Make sure you don’t have a lot of missed lifts while training. It develops the habit of failure. -Joe’s athletes perform 3 conditioning sessions per week. 1 strongman session, 1 prowler session and 1 tread-sled session. -Remember that everything done in a weight room is general. There is no such thing as sport specific weight training. (Olympic and power lifting are the exceptions) -Let sport specific skill be part of the warm-up. This is a good opportunity to practice specific movements. Get to know the position coaches of the athletes you train, they can tell you what types of drills are going to help build specific skills. The seminar seemed to be over way too fast, even though we were there for almost ten hours. After the open forum discussion broke up, I stuck around to try and absorb as much good info as I could. It is very true that the best info is always shared in the casual conversations among the experts. An added bonus to this seminar was the Strongman competition between the top Defranco athletes. A group of Joe’s best High school and college athletes battled it out in the July heat in 5 different strongman events. These guys were had insane conditioning. As a strongman competitor myself, I was thoroughly impressed with what these guys did that afternoon. The events were not extremely heavy but all required ferocious mental attitude, great conditioning and more strength than your average “athlete”. |
