Fitness plan helps Knights get an edge
The UCF football team’s weight room may not have the amenities of a five-star hotel on TripAdvisor, but that hasn’t stopped it from becoming a popular destination during the summer.
All college football teams hit the weights during the summer, but the Knights’ commitment to extensive lifestyle changes that go beyond regular lifting drills is paying big dividends.
“I see bigger, faster, stronger guys,” second-year UCF coach Scott Frost said following the team’s first preseason practice. “It’s a great start and we have to build on it.”
While Frost and his players credit strength and conditioning coach Zach Duval for transforming the roster, Duval disagrees.
“All the credit goes to those guys. I mean, the guys’ work ethic is second to none. One of the best work ethics I've seen,” Duval said of the Knights. “A lot of that comes from the position coaches ... [who said,] ‘Hey, this is important.’ ”
After a winless season in 2015, players were open to quickly adopting Duval’s allinclusive wellness plans that called for monitoring their sleep cycles, regulating their diets and adjusting their weight training.
The Knights got immediate results, but there was much room to improve with a long-term investment in the program.
Duval said he and his staff had to make adjustments from Year 1 to Year 2, with a lot of players dealing with body fat issues as well as deficiencies in strength and power.
“Year 1 was really good. We didn't have to pull any teeth,” he said. “But Year 2, it just flipped over. So these guys are not only here on time busting their butts for two hours. They come back and they get more.”
While there is an optional time for lifting weights in evening, the whole team has made it a habit of showing up.
“That just tells you their commitment levels, their buy in to Scott's vision, which is in turn our vision,” he said.
And the payoff has been noticeable.
Running back Jawon Hamilton, who gained 20 pounds during the offseason and wide receiver Dredrick Snelson (19 pounds) were among those who made the biggest transformations.
Tight end Jordan Akins wanted to bulk up in an effort to improve his blocking. Thanks to a nutrition plan and hitting the weight room, he went from 243 pounds to 260.
“Last year, he was coming off of an injury,” Duval said of Akins. “So we didn't really have a lot of time to develop him. So looking at last year, reflecting back on kind of who he was, how he moved, what his composition looked like compared to this year, that's not the same guy.”
The science of strength and conditioning at the college football level has changed dramatically in the more than two decades since Duval first entered the field at the University of Nebraska.
“If a guy's not getting enough sleep, if their hydration level is not where it needs to be, if their stress levels are too high, that's my job to kind of back off a little bit, work on the recovery side and insert a different workout for them because they may or may not be ready for what I have planned,” he said.
“Now we actually have the technology to verify, ‘Is that correct? Or are they not recovered enough?’ ... We can really focus in and pinpoint it because there are some differences. So we're measuring sleep. We're measuring heart rate variability. We're measuring heart rate. We're measuring their nutrition, their hydration levels. their mental capacity and their central nervous system.
“Without the technology, it's a best guess. I've been doing it for a long time, but I don't enjoy guessing. I want to know.”