Tommy Moffitt: Molding Champions through the Moffitt Method

Today on the Athlete One Podcast, part two of my sit down with retired football strength and conditioning coach at the University of Tennessee the Miami Hurricanes and the last 22 at LSU. He won three national championships under three different coaches. We discussed the importance of strength training for young athletes and the Moffitt Method strength training program that you could bring to your school or as an individual workout. Tommy Moffitt next on the Athlete One Podcast.

Welcome to the Athlete One Podcast. Veteran high school baseball coach Ken Carpenter takes you into life's classroom as experienced through sports. Go behind the scenes with athletes and coaches as they share great stories, life lessons and ways to impact others.

This episode of the Athlete One Podcast is powered by the Netting Professionals Improving Programs One Facility at a Time. The Netting Professionals specialize in the design, fabrication and installation of custom netting for baseball and softball. This includes backstops, batting cages, bp turtles, screens, ballcarts and so much more. They also design and install digital graphic wall padding, windscreen, turf protectors, dugout benches and cubbies. The Netting Professionals also work with football, soccer and golf courses. You can contact them today at 844-620-2707. Visit them online at wwwnettingproscom or check out Netting Pros on Twitter, instagram, facebook and LinkedIn for all their latest products and projects. Now to part two of my interview with three-time national champion, tommy Moffitt. Coach, welcome to the show.

Thank you very much, Ken. Thank you for having me on.

But I guess the reason I really want to talk to you is because I do a lot with athletes and coaches on the show and you were the head strength and conditioning coach at LSU since 2000 at LSU until Brian Kelly stepped in as the new football coach, but under Nick Saban, les Miles and Ed Ozeron you won three national titles. Talk about the role of being a strength coach and how important a strength coach is to the success of any sports program.

Well, you know, I was so blessed with the opportunity and my wife so my wife, when we were coaching at the University of Miami and we were on the way to the bowl game and my wife and my mother-in-law were talking on the phone while I was driving to Orlando and she, after hanging up, she goes you know, lsu just hired a new coach. I bet they call you. I'm like honey, they're not going to call me. And that evening we were in the hotel room and our phone rang and it was a coach that he had just hired, that I was friends with, and so Coach Saban called him. You know, I got to talk to Coach Saban and I got the job here, and it was such a blessing to be able to come to a place where they give you everything that you need in order to be successful. I was seldom, if ever, told no, and so we had every tool and every asset that we needed to put a good product on the field, and so I spent, you know, 21 years coaching, I think, at the finest place in America. So, you know, a strength coach has to play a lot of roles. I mean, you know we did everything for these guys. You know we taught them how to eat. We taught them when to go to bed at night, when to get up, how to dress, and then you know. And how to overcome adversity. You know we taught them mental toughness and being able to focus and concentrate, you know, in a chaotic environment, and then you know that's the mental and the emotional stuff that we did for them. And then you know our job is, you know, to help to develop the power and the fitness and the strength and the speed to play this game and you know it's something that I will cherish the rest of my life. You know we trained year-round and even when the guys, after the bowl game, when they got to go home, there was always remedial work for them to do and I always told my staff and the players that the weight room was in the extension of the practice field. So we held them accountable for everything about having their shoes tied, having the right color socks on, you know, no jewelry. And you know a lot of people will tell you that the weight room is the heartbeat of the football team and I took that to heart, no pun intended. So you know we, first of all, we treated them like grown men. We didn't baby them. We held them accountable, above and beyond what was expected of them, even from their football coaches. I would tell my staff that we're going to put a product on the field that is going to win games, regardless of what happens. You know, with the X's and O's, my goal was to put, you know, a team on the field that was so physically dominant that it didn't matter if we didn't block the guy every guy on every play. Or, you know, if the linebacker ran into the wrong gap, we were still going to be able to recover and somebody was going to make that play. We trained three or four days a week, depending on the time of the year, in the weight room. We often ran almost every day of the week. You know, we would do some type of sprinting or, you know, work capacity, jogging per se or agility training almost every day of the week, and it was compulsory. We didn't allow guys to come late, we didn't allow guys to miss workouts. Now, we would excuse players, and this was part of the lesson that we taught them. We told them that you can be excused from anything as long as you call, but if you don't call, it's just an excuse. You know, we taught life skills and it was truly the most unbelievable blessing to have that opportunity In the time that I was here. I never went on another interview either. I never, you know, any conversation where somebody called me to offer me a job seldom lasted more than five minutes, because I was happy here at LSU and I never saw any reason why I would want to leave a place.

You know, and I'm a big believer, that the grass isn't always greener on the other side, so, um, Well, you were let go when Brian Kelly took over at LSU and anyone who knows anything about LSU football from what I've researched was really upset. But what really jumps to my way of thinking about how you need to approach tough situations was your response to getting the news, and that's what stands out to me because, you know, I heard, I read an article where you talked about you were having breakfast and somebody came up to you and you know was upset and you said that they didn't need to be upset. That your response is what really stood out to me.

Yes, sir, you know my mom used to tell us as kids growing up that when life gives you lemons, you've got to make lemonade. And you know, nobody died. The sun came up the next day and you know change is inevitable. No, jerry Glanville said this one time in an interview. He said that there were two kinds of football coaches those that have been fired and those that are about to get fired. So I just and then everything that I did my entire career to prepare players and I didn't realize this until after it all happened everything that I ever said or did to help prepare our players for competition, was also preparation for myself for times like that. And I'd spent so many years talking to the players about overcoming adversity and that I didn't realize that what I was doing, I was preparing myself for the day that somebody came and told me that my time was up at my dream job. And you know I love LSU. I mean I don't have any ill will toward the university or the administration or Brian Kelly, because every job that I got in coaching somebody had lost their job prior to me coming. I would have never gotten the job at LSU had Nick Saban not replaced the former strength coach with myself and that was a much tougher situation because the guy that had this job before I we were friends and so you know that was tough, a lot harder. It was harder to face him and talk to him than it was for me to get fired, if that makes any sense.

Yeah, definitely. Yeah, that's tough. A good portion of what I do here on the athlete one podcast is focused around high school sports. Yes talk about your probe, your approach with your sons when they were in high school. Yes, why it led to them becoming college athletes when it comes to strength and condition?

Yes, so first of all, in my entire career, I always approached every young man or young lady as if they were my own child. That was, you know, that was a core belief of mine, that I wouldn't say or do anything to anyone that I wouldn't say or do to my own child. So, and I tried to walk that walk and I was blessed. I coached high school football and string conditioning. My first job was as a high school string coach. So you know, the first thing, and I'll tell this, I told this story earlier this week. Well, let me, let me say this first there is, there was a study done in Europe and they they took over 10,000 young men and women and they tracked them over time from the time they were like eight or nine years old until they were 26 or 27 years old, and they charted their growth and height and weight. And Kettle is the guy that did this study, had a chart and I saw this like in the late 80s and at the age of 13,. There was just rapid growth and height and weight and I mean it was. It almost went straight up the line did. And then, at age 18, that line started to level off and by 22 years old it was almost flat line and that represented, you know, the growth spurt that we all know and have heard about. So when I was looking at that, I said, you know, if I were a baby, if my son was going to play baseball, I wouldn't wait until he reached puberty to have him start swinging a bat. Or if my daughter was going to be a gymnast, I wouldn't wait until she reached puberty to start doing front and you know some results in front and back hand springs. If I did, my child would be left behind immediately, almost. So I started my kids and at the so I coached at a school that was K through 12. So we started our athletes then and I started my son at about age 12. And we started focusing on the technique of all the exercises. And so here's how I was going to. I was going to tell this story but I got sidetracked with the kettle chart, because that it's so critical that you start teaching young men and young women early to begin their development in the weight room before they hit that growth spurt, because you want to be able to take advantage of that growth and because it has a huge effect on your you know your muscular system and your central nervous system and your cardiovascular system, and on and on and on. So I, when my boy, my oldest son, was probably 10, 11. Couldn't have been much more than 10 or 11. I went to academy and I bought some little barbells. And I bought some little dumbbells. I think the barbell and the weights combined the lightest one weighed like 20 pounds and then the next one, up, maybe weighed 30 or 35 pounds. And then I bought some dumbbells like two and a half, five and 10 pound dumbbells. And I came home and the boys were out in the yard playing and I went in the room. My wife's like what do you have? I was like she's following me. She's like what are you doing? I said I got something for the boys and I went in my oldest son's room. I took it all out of the packages and I just pushed it under the bed. And when she saw what I was doing, she's like what are you doing? And I said I bought some weights for the boys and she said Tommy, they're too young to start lifting weights. I said it ain't about that, honey. I said I want them. They're going to find those barbells because they grew up in the weight room, they knew what weightlifting was. And I said, honey, I want them to start playing with the weights. I don't want strength training or weightlifting or sprinting to be something that they feel like they have to do. I want it to be something that they learn and develop and appreciation for it and it's fun. And, sure enough, one day my son comes running out of the bedroom. He goes dad, dad, dad, I got some barbells under my bed. Did you get those for me? And I was like yeah, and he's like, oh, thanks, dad, and him and his little buddies and his little brother would go in the bedroom and play with the weights and it was funny. So when they started doing that, I had Will Muschamp. Will was the head coach at South Carolina in Florida and he's at Georgia now with Kirby Smart. Will lived a couple of houses down from me when he was a coach here. So we had a crawfish boil and me and Will had some plywood and I had my jigsaw and all and we sat one day and we cut weights out of plywood and then we painted them all up and stuff, you know because a bunch of bored young coaches and so I made a regular, like life size set of wooden weights for my kids to play with also. So still to this day you know two of the boys don't live here anymore, but still to this day they'll come home on the weekends or one or two nights a week and they'll call their buddies from High school and they'll show up in my garage and they still lift weights and it's a lifelong activity and it's not it should never be something that you, in my opinion, that you feel like you have to do, but it's something that you get to do and because you know it's good for you. And so that's the way I always was about coaching young kids. When I was a high school coach Especially and that was, it's the best job that I ever had as a high school, as a coach, was coaching in high school, because the enthusiasm in the energy that those young men and women have it's unbridled and it's wild and the things that they do and say is is unbelievable. And and I'm a fun loving person I mean we, you can work hard and have fun if there's direction and there's, and the players understand what the boundaries are, you know. And so, as a high school coach, I made it fun. We had a blast, and when you make it fun and you've got the music cranked up and You're high fiving people and slapping them on the back and everybody's, you know, cheering each other on, they end up working harder. Then if you were screaming and yelling at him and so I loved it and you know the key is to focus on the, the core exercises. Technique Is essential. There is no substitute for technique and fact, and all of my Training from even the young junior high and you know elementary school kids that I had then all the way through guys that you know train with me after making it to the NFL the most important part of the workout was the attention that we Paid towards technique, because of course, we know that if your technique is bad, you're going to get hurt. Number one. But then number two, the better your technique is whether it's in sprinting, jumping or throwing med balls or waiting lifting weights the better your technique is, the greater the force production and your output is, so you can lift heavier weights more efficiently and therefore you're going to get stronger and then use the more efficient you are in sprinting, the faster and the longer that you can run. And yeah, I would always tell him that wasted motion is wasted energy, and you know you want to. Technique is paramount, paramount, paramount, paramount.

Well, for the coaches that are listening, talk about which I was really wanting to hear from you is you got a thing out now? It's called the Moffitt method, and why would a coach want to bring this to their school?

Yeah, so I appreciate that. So, yes, so after, after I got let go at LSU, you know, and so it was quickly evident that I was addicted to coaching and the weight run. I missed the loud music, I missed the banging of the weights. But then I was 59 years old. I knew that the likelihood of me getting another SEC head coaching job was probably pretty slim. So I thought, you know what, now is just as good a time as anything to take a vacation, and I think I'll do a podcast. So we started with a podcast and then, the more that we looked at it and the more I was not in the weight room, I thought let's develop a remote coaching tool where we can continue to coach and help people. So I put together a group of men that are very experienced in strength and conditioning and they also know that all the electronics behind it, you know all the technology. But they're all nationally certified strength and conditioning coaches. And the first thing that we did, we teamed up with a company called Team Builder. Team Builder is just like Huddle. You know, coaches are real familiar with Hull that delivers their. You know all it does. It's a third party app or software that delivers game film. Well, team Builder is the same thing, but it delivers training to different people in all walks of life. They have over 150,000 clients today. So I took the 30 some odd years of training that I had done in all different sports and we put that into the app. So we have templates. So first thing that we do we have when someone contacts us via the website or through social media ever how we do it we sit down and have a personal conversation. We talk about what they think you know, because somebody wouldn't call us unless they needed help. And so we talk about the issues, what their goals are, to talk about how much time they have, how often they want to train, how much equipment they have, what type of equipment they have, and then who's going to run the program at the school, who the point person is. So then we take all that information and then we sit down as a team and we choose based on the sport, because every program that we have is customized for the individual school or individual, because we do individual training too. So we sit down and we look at that onboarding sheet, we call it, and we pick a training template that most closely resembles that school or that sport organization or that individuals, goals and needs and facilities. And then we tweak that and this is about a two or three day process. We tweak it and we, you know, and our program is 52 weeks in length. If you need it, I mean, we go, we have six week programs, we have 12 week programs, 16 week programs or 52 week programs, but we tweak it, get it looking right and then we present it to our client. After that presentation, you know we're taking notes throughout the whole thing because we deliver it through an app and so they can sit there along with us and own a product similar to what we're using today and we can look at it and talk about it among their staff or the parents, whoever the client may be. And then we go back to the drawing board and tweak it again to ensure that that young man, that young lady or that school or sport team is getting exactly what they need. And then we assign a remote coach to that school that is responsible for the day-to-day operations with the team. And we're hands-on. You know it's now. We have some training templates where we offer unlimited support for the first week and then the next five weeks you're on your own, but with the Moffitt Method, with our gold package, we're there every day to lead you through it. Our. So I'll start from here. So we start with weekly updates. So every Sunday we update the program. So, whether we're delivering it to a cell phone, a tablet, a laptop, a computer, we update it every Sunday. And then we offer five AM daily email reminders so no one forgets, do you know, and we're all the same. You know, we pick up the phone. First thing that we do is check our text messages and then you check your email and every morning at five AM, if you have any training that's going to take place that day, you're going to get that five AM email reminder. And if it's a team setting, it goes to every coach, every athlete, the equipment managers, the sports medicine department and then any administrators who the coach deems necessary. You know, if you have somebody that organizes the practice fields or organizes the indoor practice field or whatever, everybody gets it OK. And then our remote coach is available from five AM in the morning until 7 PM at night to make adjustments For weather or if there was a scheduling mishap and you can't get in the weight room like you thought you were going to. You know, you just call that coach. There's also printable versions. You can do it. You know you can print it out like you used to. There is a tool on it where you can broadcast it to the TVs in the weight room. If you have tablets and these have gotten very popular now if you have tablets on your Polarax you know your squat racks and stuff you can pull up our profiles. You can have up to four athletes on a tablet at a time throughout the weight room. What else, oh? So here's the neat thing about the app. The app, it's almost, it's a lot like Twitter or Instagram, because there's live feeds. So if you're in the weight room using it live, or if the players, as soon as, because it's customized for each player also, so each player has all of his sets, reps, volumes and intensities. If you're a percentage based program, all of that stuff is available to them. And then so if I'm supposed to bench 225 for five and I do 225 for three, then my max goes down. If I'm supposed to bench 225 for five and I do it for seven, then my max goes up. And when my max goes up, if I enter my sets and reps like I'm supposed to. If I follow along in the app, like I'm supposed to, then it updates it immediately and then it goes to the live feed. So everyone in the team, every coach, every athletic trainer, everyone sees that Tommy Moffat just hit a PR and bench press. Then there's also leaderboards so the coaches or and the players can create leaderboards all the time. So I can take my best bench squat and power clean and my vertical jump and I can see where I rank among my team members in all those different areas. And I can go on and on and on. We have 358 instructional videos. So if I'm in the middle, or let's say, here's what we recommend the coaches to do, and this is the sequence that we go through. First of all, you do a team warm up, whether it's in the indoor or in the weight room, wherever, or outside, on the football field or baseball field, and then you come into the weight room and if you have it pulled up on the television if you have a TV on the wall or on a cart you pull it up and then you can go through each exercise and show a short video of our athletes and our coaches performing. That and our core exercises, the big exercises has a coach talking you through the bullet points of that particular exercise squats, bench power, cleans, all that type of stuff. And then so you introduce the workout, you show videos. If it's a new video let's say we're introducing a new video for the day then the coach can say hey, today we're going to do back foot elevated split squats, here's a demo of it. And then the coach can play our instructional video over a couple of times and then answer any questions that the players or the athletes might have. And so there's just so much. The depth of this app is so immense. There's pre-designed testing protocols, you name it, it's available. So what we have found is that the people who use the app because not everybody uses the app, a lot of people take our program and they just write the workout on a white marker board and that's perfectly fine. But we have found, through the analytics that are built into the app, that the schools and our clients and the sport organizations who actually utilize the app on their phone have much more success Like we see greater improvements in all the lifts and all the sprints than the schools that do not use the app. And so we have a team. So, for instance, one of my team members his name is Matt Bruce. He's actually the head strength coach at Catholic High School here in Baton Rouge, where all of my boys went to school. He was a seven time world weightlifting team member, so he lifted. He was 86 kilos, so he lifted somewhere in the 190 pound weight class, could almost clean almost 400 pounds, snatched over 300 pounds. He was a two time Olympic team member and now he's a high school strength coach. So just an incredible team member. And so there's just so many advantages to do this over not having a strength coach. And here's what we tell everyone Our goal isn't to replace anyone in your organization. That's not what we're here for. We are here to assist the coaches and offer a progressive, long term program where you see consistent results from year after year after year. And one of the examples, let's say well, this happens. So one of our clients is LSU Eunice. They're a perennial powerhouse and junior college baseball. So Coach Willis called me this February. It was like the first week in February he called me. He says, coach, I'm losing my strength coach and we're about to start in the season, so I don't want to go through the process of hiring someone else. Can y'all help us? I said absolutely, coach. So I sat there and I talked to him. We talked about what their goals were, what he thought the team needed. Then I called up Alan Orgain who wrote the program for the pitchers, talked to Coach Orgain and then it took us about three or four days. We presented the program, made a few changes and they stuck with us. And because he knows that, no matter who he hires as a position coach, he can go out and get the best position coach he needs and doesn't have to worry about hiring somebody with weight room experience and so yeah, and so if I'm a football coach and my offensive line coach, if I'm the head football coach and my offensive line coach is my strength coach and he leaves, then I've got a higher guy that can teach science or math or social studies, that can coach the old line and know something about the weight room. But with the Moffitt method it doesn't matter. You can go out and find the best offensive line coach that you can that has the math certification, and then all he's got to do is be the point man, because we do all the dirty work, and I was a high school coach, I was the offensive line coach, the head wrestling coach, the sister track coach, and I had seven class periods a day. I know the demands and sometimes either one thing was something was gonna suffer. It was either gonna be the weight room wrestling practice or one of those lesson plans that I had to write. But again, with us you don't have to worry about that. We do all of that work and then we present it to you, you present it to the team and they roll. Sorry about that long. I could talk about it all day. I get a little fired up when I start talking about it.

Well, I mean that you know the thing I'm thinking about. Just hearing you, I was a PE teacher. That is something that PE teachers across the country could use when they're putting in their weight training programs for students that wanna sign up for their weight and strength training programs Exactly and so well.

so here's what happened. So we had a baseball organization that contacted us. They had they have 320 baseball players, they have 24 teams, eight to 14. And they wanted to start some strength and conditioning. But they didn't wanna start with barbells. So we developed a year's worth of training that starts with just body weight exercises and it's progressive. Everything that we do there's an end in sight. Okay, where we take everyone from the boat, you know we're not gonna throw all these Olympic weightlifting exercises in on somebody that's never touched a barbell. So we start with body weight exercises first, and then it progresses to body weight exercises and dumbbells, and then it progresses to body weight exercises with dumbbells and kettlebells and then we start introducing some plyometrics and then we start introducing some med ball throws and then we start introducing speed improvement drills. And we developed a program it's a year long program where those young men and now young women and anybody else in our program you can start and train for an entire year, three days a week and never do the same workout twice. And that's yeah, and that's how every program is. It's progressive in nature. So you know, because here's what happens and I have fallen victim to this too. You just keep doing the same thing over and over and over and over. We had a junior no, not a junior college. We had a division three basketball team and it was actually funny. The coach heard about us. He called, he was the head coach and strength coach and it was in New York, so I can't even think of the name of the school now. But he said, coach, we, I'm the strength coach, I'm the head basketball coach, I'm the athletic director and we lift weights every day and it's five sets of 10 every day and we do the same thing every day. And can you help us? I said absolutely we can help you, and so that's an extreme example of it. But sometimes as coaches, we just, you know, it's easier to go back and do what you did last year or what you did last month, but that's not progressive. At the Moffitt Method, our goal is to climb that mountain, okay, and develop you patiently over a long period of time. And I tell everyone, if you lift weights and most people, come January one, everybody's gonna, you know, set that new year's resolution and they're gonna start working out and they're gonna go in there and they're gonna do too much, and some of those new year's resolutions last three days, some last three weeks, some last three months. That's not our goal. Our goal is that it lasts a minimum of three years and so that you know you take a young man or a young lady and after three, you know you'll see a little bit of results after three months. But when you go three years of lifting and sprinting and jumping and throwing medicine balls, you start to see a type of development that when you roll your team out on the field or the pitch or the court, the opposing coaching staff and players look at them and they go oh my gosh, where did they get those kids? And that's my goal. You know now, my kids, my kids were big man. All three of them were big and when they were little, you know, and it was jokingly, but people would always say to my oldest son said son, what do you drive? A Camaro, you know. This is like when you was 12, like what'd you drive the game today? A Camaro, you know. And but he just got good genetics. But that's the type of response that we want the opposing teams to have for teams that, you know, use our Moffat method and we're serious about it. You know, and that's been you know, and the app is what drives it all, because you know how young kids are attached to these cell phones and when they can start, and so it's. Here's another thing about it too, and I've had coaches tell me that players would if, if you的人, if, if I weren't took out there. If it's a setting where there's seven class or six classes or block schedule, four classes, that kids will check their phones between classes to see what's going on in the wait room, because they can get a hold of that live feed and then at night they'll go home after testing and they don't even have to wait for the coach to compile all the data, to post all the stuff, because if you use the app, it's right there on the app and you can rank your players, one through a hundred, in power, clean squat, bench, vertical jump, broad jump, 10 yard splits, 20, 40 yard splits, 100 yards, you can do it all. Med ball, throws for distance, you name it. And smart watches. So any smart watch that you have or any smart technology that you have, you can also connect to the app as well. So I mean, it's just unlimited, it's unlimited.

Well, if a player is using the Moffitt method and my son's training as a strength coach now he's training high school-age kids and he's seen a lot of young athletes with injuries because, in his opinion, they're lacking the flexibility and they're not getting the proper rest. Talk about how important flexibility and rest is for a young athlete.

Great question, great question. And first of all, in our minds we look at flexibility two different ways. You have static flexibility, and that's where you're sitting on the floor stretching your hamstrings, laying on your side to stretch your quads, bending over and touching your toes, and then there's dynamic mobility, and that is something that we take very seriously, not only in our warm-up but in our workout and our sprint-based programs. We do a lot of mobility work and it's different every day. So, again, when you're programming and you have all this other work that you have to do, sometimes you end up doing the same warm-up every day. So, no matter what, if you're lifting or running, the warm-up changes every day and there is a mobility section in every workout and where we're going to work you from the ground, from the tip of your toes all the way up. So there are aspects of that dynamic mobility, first of all in the warm-up and then in the actual lifting. We do a lot of exercises. And so here's where, when I look at strength-based and I don't want to say high school, because I see a lot of them in college too For upper body strength, you only do bench press. For lower body strength, all they do is squats and they do some deadlifts and maybe some power cleans and that's it. But the way we select our exercises they're in a progressive manner also, and the exercise programs change just about every week and we do a lot of unilateral exercises or single leg exercises and the progression has about seven different exercises in it. So, and that's just for the single leg movement. So we start with just a regular split squat where I have one foot in front of the other and then we move the weight around also. So we'll do them on our back for a little while, we'll do them in a front squat rack for a little while. We'll hold dumbbells and then we'll hold the weights overhead. So we'll hold kettlebells or just a weight plate. Depends on, you know, depends on what sport it is and all. And we start with a split squat in place and you just squat up and down. We'll do that for three or four weeks and then we're going to put plates under the front foot and we do front foot elevated split squat for generally three or four weeks and then we raise the back leg up, we put the front foot down, raise the back leg up and do rear foot elevated split squats and then we'll throw in some Cossack squats, where it's a lateral squat, and then we'll do that for three or four weeks and then we'll change the stimulus up. We'll do it with weights on the back, weights on the front, weights overhead, weights at the side, and then we'll do a back lunge in place. So now I'm holding the weight on my back, on my chest, overhead or at my side, and we step back and lunge, and then we go to step ups on a box and same thing, hold the weight here back overhead, and then we'll do walking lunges. Same thing all the way out here there overhead. So we're always switching up that stimulus. If we're doing deadlifts, we'll do trap bar deadlifts, we'll do sumo deadlifts, we'll do conventional grip deadlifts, we'll do clean pulls. Because there's this thing and it's what leads to micro trauma, which also leads to injuries, its repetitive motion syndrome. And if you keep doing the same thing over and over again, you're not stimulating the body or the central nervous system and the torso like you should. And you know because what you end up doing. You end up doing everything in the saginal plane and working on the mirror muscles. You know the muscles that you, the coach, the parents and everybody can see in the mirror. But for you know, for total development, you got to work on the mirror, the muscles that you can't see in the mirror. You got to work on your hamstrings, your calves, your glutes, your low back, your mid back, your upper back, and then also in Tom House, who was a, you know, great, a great mind, great pitching coach, a great strength coach, and you know he's trained everybody, from Tom Brady to the quarterback. That what was the guy's name was quarterback for the Saints. I can't even think of his name either. Yeah, drew Brees, he's trained everyone. Tom House is, you know, is one of the goats in our business. He talks about disassociation and opposite and equal. So you know, if I'm a right handed pitcher, I'm going to do all this arm care on my right side, but then you build up a muscular imbalance. So Tom House would always talk about opposite and equal. So you got to work the offhand side just as hard as you work that. But then you also have to work on disassociation between my right arm and my left arm. If I'm pitching, you know my arms are doing totally different things. So you have to work on that disassociation with your upper and lower body limbs, but also your torso, and this is something that people take for granted. And there is torso mobility in every one of our warm ups where my lower body will be stationary and I'm turning my upper body. And then there are times when my upper body is stationary and I'm using my lower body lying on the floor or, you know, whatever we do, all types of stuff for the disassociation of the upper torso and the lower torso, and that's especially important in sports like baseball. Because you got to swing the bat, my lower body is somewhat stationary. My upper body, you know, is rotating through pitching, and here's why it's important. If I'm a shortstop and I'm running up to make a play, I field the ground ball. If I'm a righty, then I'm going to have to turn and throw it, so all of my momentum is going forward, and then I've got to turn my upper body while my legs are still moving forward and throw across my body. Same thing if I'm a lefty. I'm gloving it on this side and I got to make a throw to third base. I got to throw across my body for pitchers and butt situations for catchers, you know there's so much, and that's why torso mobility, especially for quarterbacks. You know, and here this is interesting and I get to say I'm getting fired up again. So when you know, when I first started coaching, like the high school team that I coached at, we ran split back there. You know somebody, we won a game one time and somebody asked our head coach, jt Curtis, said coach, did you ever think about throwing the ball in the game? He said, yeah, I thought about it for a minute and then I forgot about it. You know, to now you know the game has evolved to where, you know, quarterbacks are thrown the ball 40 times a game and so what I started seeing as a strength coach, I started seeing guys that started having low back issues. Quarterbacks, peyton, all right. So this is an interesting thing because your head kind of acts like a, like a gyroscope, you know, for quarterbacks and people that throw, and Peyton's neck used to always get real tight after long practices and games. He ended up having neck issues, you know, and probably one of the mitigating factors in his retirement, other than getting sacked as many times as he did. But we started seeing quarterbacks that started having low back issues. As the number of throws went up. They started having low back problems because of the violent rotation of throwing deep balls all the time. So, yeah, you get me fired up when we start talking about flexibility. There is so much flexibility and range of motion and mobility that goes into training any athlete, no matter what they are.

Now for context you were at Tennessee when Peyton Manning was at Tennessee, correct?

Yes, that's right. So I coached high school football and strength and conditioning and wrestling, and all that at a school in New Orleans called John Curtis Christian School. The head coach, jt Curtis, you know his family owns the school. He's won now he's won like 620 something football games. I think he's the first or second winning this coach in all the football. All time he's won 27, I think 27 state championships in football. The schools won over 70 state championships in all sports. They're probably a double A size school but they compete in 4A because it's just a little small Christian school. So I started there and then I went to the University of Tennessee and coached for Phillip Fullmer during the Peyton Manning years and I left there and went to the University of Miami and coached for Butch Davis and we all know the success that they had at the University of Miami. And then Coach Saban hired me here from the University of Miami, my wife. So I met my wife in New Orleans. So the entire time we were in Tennessee I loved it, that's where I was from, but she wanted to go back to New Orleans. And then when we got to Miami, you know, we both got homesick. You know, because in Miami neither one of us could get home without driving 12 miles and you had to go north, you know you can't go east. You can go west to Naples, but that's about it. And you can go south to Key West, but there's only way out of Miami's north. And so we came here to Baton Rouge and you know it was a blessing, because her family's, you know, just 45 minutes down the road and you know I've been here now almost 30 years in the south, you know.

Special thanks to Tommy Moffitt for joining the Athlete One podcast. If you're looking to take your game to the next level like Joe Burrell, peyton Manning, jamar Chase, obj, just to name a few of the players that Coach Moffitt has worked with check out the Moffitt methodfit. It's a remote strength and conditioning service for teams and individuals. As always, thanks for joining the Athlete One podcast. I'm your host, ken Carpenter. Thanks for listening. Take care.