Jul 13, 2017Four Pillar Program
Every strength and conditioning program needs structure. It can be easy to spend all your time focusing on what exercises to do and what movements to focus on, but equally important is having an organized approach with a clear philosophy in mind. At the University of Kansas, football strength coach Zac Woodfin has done this by dividing his program into four pillars: mindset, movement, nutrition, and recovery, as detailed in an article for KUSports.com.
By targeting these four areas, Woodfin, who is in his first season as the team’s strength and conditioning coach, has already helped the players improve. And it hasn’t taken long for him to make an impact get buy-in across the board.
For Woodfin, everything truly starts with mindset, the first pillar. And he divides mindset into three catergories: belief, overcoming adversity, and positive energy.
“If you teach the mindset well…it will set the stage for everything else,” Woodfin told KUSports.com. “If your head’s right, everything else should follow.”
“You have to believe not only in yourself but in your team’s ability to have success and to win championships,” he continued. “If you truly, truly believe that you can be great and your team can be great that will set the stage for the movement, for the nutrition, for the recovery.”
The next pillar is movement. This means that the team spends a lot of time focusing on dynamic stretching and cardio work. Flexibility is the goal, and the players do yoga with a professional instructor every Wednesday, which is their day away from the weightroom. It didn’t take long for players to notice the benefits of this added flexibility.
“Once you get through that first week or two of it, getting out of those pains, where you can really set in and get deep and really involve yourself in the stretch, now it’s a complete difference in how you feel leaving the weight room, how you feel at home sitting in bed,” junior center/guard Jacob Bragg told KUSports.com. “I don’t feel sore anymore. I don’t have any back pain anymore. I’m sure a lot of guys are like that, a lot less daily aches and pains. He takes the time and his staff is dedicated to preventing injuries and staying healthy.”
Nutrition is the third pillar of Woofin’s training program, and his philosophy is pretty simple: stay away from processed food.
“The most simple nutrition education I’ve ever given to anybody is if it’s walking or growing on this earth, that’s what you should eat,” Woodfin told KUSports.com. “Simple as that. That’s what God put on the earth for us to eat. Everything else was created in a factory with chemicals and wasn’t truly designed for the human body to eat and a lot of it’s addictive, because it tastes so good.”
The fourth and final pillar is recovery. For Woodfin, sleep is the part of recovery that he stresses most to his players. After sleep, he also encourages players to use a variety of other recovery methods, such as hydrotherapy, hot and cold tubs, eating certain foods, and staying hydrated. Though all of the pillars are distinct, they are also intertwined, and Woodfin is sure to stress the role that nutrition plays in recovery.
“If we eat well and we hydrate well, it helps our body regenerate itself at a faster rate,” he told KUSports.com. “Recovery is all about doing the things that give us the best chance to be consistent. What I like to say is work plus rest equals success.”
