The state of affairs in the National Football League (NFL) will affect more than the financial health of professional football players. We really have no idea when the league will get it together and work out a new Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA). Even after the two sides reach an agreement, players will have lost valuable time in the team weight rooms and on the fields with their teammates. How will they stay in the specific physical shape required to play the game well?
Were there no lockout going on, many professional players would already be gearing up for formal team strength and conditioning programs/organized team activities (OTAs) or receiving injury treatment or rehab by trainers or team doctors.
Several football players have said that they will continue working out until a CBA is in place. I applaud them. They may use this time of uncertainty to organize workouts with teammates and personal trainers while they are not allowed into their team facilities. (Of course, professional athletes, even during down-time, are 95% more fit than the average American!) But I can’t see how these athletes can become as football-ready as they would if they were in a formal team environment.
Serious formal emphasis on fitness during the off-season was not always the case in the NFL. I spoke recently to former Washington Redskin Frank Grant, a wide receiver for the team from 1972 through 1977, about the training of professional football players in general and we began talking about what the fitness training was like “back in the day.”
“Even when I went to college there was little to know about weight training whatsoever,” Grant said. “In preseason or before the season, we might jog a couple of miles and think that would keep us in shape for the season. There was no regular or consistent weight training system. As a matter of fact, my school had one Universal Gym. We’d go in after practice and kind of do whatever we thought we should do. No one knew anything about how many reps to do, or circular training … you kind of did what you came up with.”
Grant was drafted by the Redskins out of Colorado State University-Pueblo (known at the time as Southern Colorado State College) in the 1972 NFL Draft by then head Coach George Allen (one of the few draft picks Allen didn’t trade away for a veteran!). He told me that the real reason he was in any shape at all going into the July training camp that first season was because he, being a track & field star at CSU, had just finished the track & field season when he was drafted.
Going into a team mostly made up of the “Over-the-Hill-Gang” – a bunch of wily veterans like Diron Talbert, Ron McDole, Speedy Duncan, Richie Petibon, Jack Pardee, Charley Taylor, Roy Jefferson, Billy Kilmer and Sonny Jurgenson (who was 38 at the time) – Grant was a rookie in every sense of the word. But he was lucky enough to come into the league in decent shape from his track & field season.
“The one thing I brought from college – I’d run two years of track when I came to the Redskins,” he said. “I had just left the track circuit. My last track meet was the latter part of June and training camp started in July. I was really in good shape when I got to camp having run track for the previous five or six months.
“When I got to the professional level with the Redskins, most of the guys at that time were older ball players and it was kind of relaxed in regard to training. George Allen had traded for a bunch of veterans and there wasn’t a lot of emphasis on weight training. Not [many] ball players in the Redskins had [lifted weights] at all. They’d come up doing it their way. I mean, my rookie year, we’d do a little bit of this and a little bit of that. And most of the older guys, they’d think, ‘Well, I’m already in the pro level. What the hell do I need to do all this other stuff for? What’s it going to do for me now?’”
It wasn’t until a few years after Grant’s rookie year with Washington that the idea of team-wide fitness training came to Ashburn.
“It was my second or third year when the Pittsburgh Steelers won the Superbowl,” Grant explained, “and one of the things that the Steelers attributed their success that year to was an off-season weight training program. Even being the stickler that George Allen was, he was not opposed to hearing someone else’s road or way to success and applying it to his program. He immediately applied a weight training program [to the team]. He brought in trainers and instructors to develop a training regimen and schedule for the ball players.”
However, getting the team to the next fitness level wasn’t going to be as easy as writing up a schedule.
“I was a rookie. Now unfortunately, for a lot of the vets at that time; the older guys who had grown up without that type of system, they never got the right type of training. What they’d do – after practice they’d go in and put on [the weight that] they thought they could lift and they’d get in there and…,” (Frank starts growling and imitating lifting motions here) “…they’d do a couple of reps and leave because they considered that was what their workout was going to be.”
The lack of knowledge and information about how to work out properly quickly became clear to both the players and the league. In all likelihood, not only was the lack of knowledge and experience in specific training an issue… it was apparent that personalities and egos were part of the equation as well.
“We had a couple of guys throw their backs out trying to do squats,” Grant continued, “which they’d never done before. We had several injuries due to the fact that they were trying to get into lifting weights, which is something that George Allen was now requiring.
“We had something that was supposed to be good turn into something bad for some people who just didn’t understand how to do what was expected of them.”
I had to question where the trainers were during these ‘workouts’ and the answer illustrates how far the league – all of society, in fact – has come with regard to the specifics of how to use the equipment and the techniques to gain strength and conditioning. The trainers were there…. they just did not know what they know today.
“There were trainers [that] were still learning themselves,” Grant said. “There were trainers there insisting that, ‘Yeah, I can tape your ankles… Yeah, I can tape your knees… I can tape your shoulders… all that kind of stuff. But they weren’t trained in regards to giving you an outline or a detailed weight training program and most of the guys were already older guys –trying to start at the maximum weight because they didn’t want to take the time to build up [their strength] by [starting with] light weight and then [moving up] to the heavy weights. They wanted to start out with the heavy weights so they could say ‘I’m just gonna do three sets of this and then leave.’ That led to torn muscles, bad backs and other ailments.”
This early attempt at weight-training, combined with the lack of better uniform equipment, different rules and a different mentality, might certainly have contributed to the physical ailments that many retired players are dealing with now. These conditions, in turn, have contributed to one of the issues that is being negotiated today by the NFL and NFLPA into the new CBA: that of long-term health insurance and benefits for both current and retired players.
While many NFL players will continue to work hard during the lockout, I am concerned that a CBA may not get negotiated in time for them to receive an adequate amount or the right kind of strength and conditioning training before the season begins. If the negotiations go on too long, OTAs, mini-camps and training camps will be so shortened before the regular season begins, that players will not be in the necessary shape to play the game without undue injury. It is not unimaginable that they will be rushed onto the field for the first game of the season, no matter how much or how little strength and conditioning training they have been able to participate in. This is risky. And I haven’t even begun to discuss what how it might affect the quality of the game.
Grant’s stories illustrate how important the off-season strength and conditioning is to the players and, if the NFL can’t do something about getting a CBA negotiated in a reasonable amount of time, these athletes will suffer physically as well as financially.