Old School Goes New
Sports Training Methods Change Rapidly
By Steve Sampsell

He's 68 years old, a western Pennsylvania sports legend and about as "old school" as it gets.

After more than five decades coaching and playing football-as a coach with the Steelers, an All-Pro running back for the Steelers and, before that, standout careers at Penn State and Jeannette High School-Dick Hoak knows "old school" from first-hand experience.

He was in high school and graduated from Penn State in 1961, long before athletes knew about personal trainers or plyometrics. Even with the Steelers, training methods were often rudimentary.

"We did jumping jacks and pushups. The big thing was up-downs. Because Vince Lombardi did them and his teams were good, everybody did them," says Hoak, who led the Steelers in rushing three times from 1961 to 1970. "About the closest we got to weightlifting was getting down on all fours and carrying somebody for 20 yards.

"We did pull-ups and things like that. Toward the end of my playing career, we were doing a few more stretching exercises, but it was still pretty straightforward-a lot of the same things we did in high school and college."

Shortly after his retirement as a player, Hoak joined the Steelers coaching staff. As a result, he also knows "new school" because he watched ever-changing training methods reshape the athletes themselves and even team practices during his 35 years as a coach before he retired in January 2007.

Early in his career, training camp at St. Vincent College meant six weeks of work before the first exhibition game. So, players came to training camp to get in shape for the season.

Later in his career, players arrived at camp just two weeks before the first preseason game. As a result of mini-camps, off-season workouts, "organized team activities" and individual training regimes, players came to camp already in shape and ready to compete for playing time.

"It really started to change in the 1980s, when Dick Vermeil went to the Eagles," Hoak says. "He started paying veterans to come into town to work out and that developed into mini-camps and training sessions, and everybody else started to copy that approach."

In the "old school" world, drinking water was a sign of weakness. Players popped salt pills and worried about getting bloated.

In the "new school" world, everybody hydrates and the big business of sports drinks provides enough of a market for many brands (Gatorade, Powerade, Life Water, Vitamin Water and more) to craft everything from a controlling stake in the market to at least a productive niche.

For all pro athletes and coaches, and even their college and high school counterparts (who inevitably imitate the approaches and methods they glean from the pros), a commitment to weight training and conditioning methods that feature more flexibility and stretching represent the biggest changes during the past two decades of athletic competition.

HOLLYWOOD REALITY

Ironically, a glimpse at "new school" methods provided by Hollywood some 23 years ago has become a reality for almost all athletes.

In 1985, many mainstream sports fans and the general public watched "Rocky IV," which made more than $300 million worldwide and became one of the most popular sports movies ever. While people who envisioned "The Jetsons" as the future might have been disappointed as they grew older because flying cars never materialized, "Rocky IV" was almost a preview documentary for athletes.

In the film, Russian fighter Ivan Drago completed his workouts while running on a treadmill and wired to computers. He punched mechanical punching bags while Rocky Balboa dragged his overweight brother-in-law through the snow in a sled, hefted wooden beams, pulled rocks on a pulley system to replicate weights and ran up the rocky mountainside.

Sure, it was only a movie, but the "new school" approach has become commonplace on the campus of any major college sports program or pro team.

Companies all over the world have sprung up with products such as "horse pills" that athletes can swallow that allow their body temperature to be monitored during workouts. Those devices became especially popular after the death of former Minnesota Vikings lineman Korey Stringer in August 2001.

Other companies produce clothing and training products that incorporate wireless electronics in the fabric itself to measure an athlete's activity, heart rate, respiration rate and more during a workout.

The San Francisco 49ers recently started using a dozen of those products from Zephyr, an Australian company with a sales office in California that markets its products to athletic teams, extreme athletes, military units and police departments.

The technology allows athletes to be monitored in real time during a workout. Or, a removable sensor from the fabric may be loaded into a cradle attached to a computer and, using a specifically designed software program, users may download the information from their workout to a spreadsheet on the computer.

"Something like that would allow a team's conditioning coach or trainer to follow an athlete's progress during workouts off campus, or simply chart their progress over a series of workouts," says Grant Davis, a Wexford native who serves as director of North American sales for Zephyr. "For example, a college athlete at Pitt or Penn State could have a workout to complete if they were away from campus and after their workout they would upload their information on the computer.

"Then their coach could see what they were doing in terms of heart rate, respiration and other tangible, specific areas and advise them where they need to be, or how to adjust their workout. It allows specificity, not just training based on a hunch or some routine that's always been done."

SPECIFICITY

Specificity definitely represents a "new school" approach, in every sport.

Conversely, former Pirates pitcher Bob Walk spent a career working between his starts, with light running and occasional throwing, just because that was the way it was always done. He was clearly an "old school" guy.

A former All-Star pitcher who now handles play-by-play duties on radio and TV for the Pirates, Walk sees daily examples of how the approach of pitchers (and all ballplayers) has changed.

"They go into the weight room every day, and their running program is actually overseen by the strength and conditioning coach, not the pitching coach, who was in charge for us," Walk says. "We just ran laps in the outfield. Now you see little orange cones out there because they have a plan.

"Probably from when I started, the biggest changes have been in calisthenics-nobody does jumping jacks anymore and they use those big rubber bands for stretching-and the weight room. There are weight rooms everywhere now. It used to be there might be one set of dumbbells in a clubhouse, and it was almost like they were there for decoration."

Still, while Hoak and Walk agree athletes seem for fine-tuned than they were in their playing careers, they remain unconvinced those current athletes are in better shape.

"Have they become better as a result? No," Walk says. "Guys still pull groins and seem to get hurt. It seems like they spend more time than ever on the DL, too. The game was better 30 or 40 years ago, but there's not turning back the clock on things that have changed."