Blame a former pole-vaulter who in 1969 was weight training the Nebraska Cornhusker’s injured players
SMU physiologist and biomechanics researcher Peter G. Weyand was quoted by ESPN reporter Josh Moyer in his Big Ten Blog for an article about the evolution of the speed and size of college football players.
Weyand leads the SMU Locomotor Performance Laboratory and is recognized worldwide as an expert in human running performance. An expert in the locomotion of humans and other terrestrial animals, Weyand’s broad research interests focus on the relationships between muscle function, metabolic energy expenditure, whole body mechanics and performance.
Moyer’s ESPN article, “How have players become so big and so fast? Blame a former pole-vaulter” published July 1, 2015.
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Related links
- Peter Weyand
- SMU Locomotor Performance Laboratory
- Youtube channel: SMU Locomotor Performance Laboratory
- Journal of Applied Physiology: “Are running speeds maximized with simple-spring stance mechanics?“
- Journal of Applied Physiology: “The biological limits to running speed are imposed from the ground up”
- Annette Caldwell Simmons School of Education & Human Development
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Read the full article, “How have players become so big and so fast? Blame a former pole-vaulter.”
EXCERPT:
By Josh Moyer
ESPN Staff WriterNebraska’s Boyd Epley can still remember the weight-room phone call during a warm August afternoon in 1969. He didn’t know the brief talk would forever alter the college football landscape.
For months Epley, a no-name pole-vaulter from a no-name Arizona junior college, had trained — almost inadvertently — the Huskers’ injured football players. Epley lifted weights to strengthen his injured back — using techniques he picked up from a body-building friend in high school — and the Huskers’ football players mimicked him.
Tom Osborne, then a first-year offensive coordinator at Nebraska, noticed that those injured players returned to the gridiron even better than before, so he wondered what kind of impact strength training would have on healthy players. Why couldn’t Epley work his magic on the entire Huskers team? Why not call down to the weight room and hire him as the nation’s first full-time strength and conditioning coach?
“If you’re looking for the most impactful change, in terms of progression, Nebraska’s coaches coming onto the scene like that — that was probably the single most important event,” said Dr. Peter Weyand, an SMU professor of applied physiology and biomechanics, and one of the nation’s foremost experts on human performance.
Read the full article, “How have players become so big and so fast? Blame a former pole-vaulter.”
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