Strength Coaching in America: A History of the Innovation That Transformed Sports

Abstract

Debates about strength training as a means of improving health and augmenting sport performances remain to this day a topic of popular conversation and scientific inquiry. How much muscle is too much muscle? Is augmenting strength to achieve maximum athletic performance through the use of performance-enhancing drugs safe and healthy? These are the types of questions that drive conversations online and throughout the pages of popular health-and-fitness magazines, documentaries, videos, and academic research journals.In the second half of the twentieth century, college athletic departments around the country placed an emphasis on strength conditioning programs to gain advantage. In Strength Coaching in America, the authors examine the historical, social, and scientific factors that led to the development of strength coaching within sports. They argue that the primary responsibility of this new profession was to improve an athlete's strength, power, and agility so that the athlete could achieve maximum performance during competition. The emphasis on strength conditioning by teams at all levels, the authors conclude, has transformed the landscape of sports and physical culture.The authors argue that, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, medical doctors expressed concern about heavy weight lifting and muscle-bound athletes. Medical doctors Arthur Steinhaus and Peter Karpovich cautioned the public during the 1930s on the desire to achieve too much muscle through weight lifting and stated that the place for a muscle-bound strong man was “in a circus” (39). Robert Hoffman's Strength and Health and Joe Weider's Your Physique magazines pushed back against this rhetoric by featuring personal stories from athletes testifying to the success they had achieved on the playing field after lifting weights. The magazines and scientific research during the 1950s and 1960s converted many to the idea that “research evidence is abundant to advocate the desirability of strength improvement as one essential for man activities and sport skills,” as expressed by physical education scholar John Piscapo in a 1967 article (95).Along with an emphasis on scientific and mathematical research, Cold War pressures converted many in the public and on college campuses to the idea that weight training as a part of “physical culture” was important when trying to keep up with the Russians. When former soldiers flooded college campuses after the passage of the GI Bill, the authors argue that they wanted to continue their weight training. Rudimentary weight rooms quickly became commonplace on campuses around the country for those looking to achieve greater strength, power, and speed through the use of strength training.Sports teams have a competitive and financial incentive to research and implement innovative methods and strategies that might help them gain an edge over their competition. College football programs, most often the highest revenue-generating athletic team on campus, played a vital role in promoting and developing weight training as a strategy. When the University of Nebraska decided in 1969 to place Boyd Epley in charge of the football training program, making him the nation's first full-time college strength coach, the hiring showed that college football programs were beginning to grasp how strength training would help them gain an advantage over their opponents on the football field. Epley's “Husker Power” program had immediate positive results on the field, and the authors argue that the program soon became the standard of strength training for athletic departments around the country.Epley went on to play a major role in the formation of organizations that served as a forum for those in the strength training and conditioning fields. In the 1970s, he formed the National Strength Coaches Association in an attempt to share the “Nebraska Way” with strength coaches across the country. The organization grew as a number of individuals outside the realm of strength coaching joined the ranks. The organization became the National Strength and Conditioning Association (NSCA) in 1981 to reflect this change. The organization advocated the use of strength-training machines and year-round training programs modeled after periodization training methods established by Professor Leo Pavlovic Matveyev. Strength training coaches soon split off from the NSCA and formed the College Strength and Conditioning Coaches Association (CSCCA) in 2000. The authors argue that Boyd Epley wanted to dissuade the split, but after being convinced, Epley became a member of the new group's board of directors. In the twenty-first century, the CSCCA advocates the use of functional training and has embraced the emerging CrossFit movements.