For fans, most of what they see in a sport comes during the season – competition, individual honors and team championships.
But for athletes, just as much time and energy is put into the offseason.
Offseason workouts in two sports – football and women’s basketball – are in full swing at LSU.
Football workouts began June 9. Women’s basketball workouts started June 11. Men’s basketball begins lifting Monday.
Tommy Moffitt, director of Strength and Conditioning, is responsible for training and hiring strength and conditioning coaches for all sports at the University.
“Each semester we go through a week of in-service training where we talk about exercise technique … and the actual process of developing strength and power,” Moffitt said. “We discuss everything that I know regarding strength and conditioning.”
Moffitt said each sport uses an offseason program based on the demands of the sport.
“All of our sports use exercises that are similar,” Moffitt said. “But the workouts and the intensity of that effort is different.”
Moffitt trains all of the strength coaches, but the only program he works with directly is football.
One of Moffitt’s assistants, Melissa Moore, just finished her second year at LSU as a strength and conditioning coach.
She oversees women’s basketball and women’s tennis workouts and runs the North Stadium weight room in Tiger Stadium.
The women’s basketball offseason workouts have changed greatly under Moore, according to junior guard Allison Hightower.
Hightower compared workouts from her freshman year to football training.
“It wasn’t for us,” Hightower said. “When they brought [Coach Moore] in, she focused on what a basketball player needs and what a woman’s body needs.”
Moore said the old workouts weren’t as close to football as Hightower thinks.
“They were doing some great exercises before, but sometimes the athletes think that it looks like a football workout,” Moore said. “I just took a sport-specific approach.”
Moffitt’s summer football workouts take place five days a week, Monday through Friday. Each day has a specific purpose – endurance, power, speed or flexibility.
“We’re allotted eight hours [a week] by the NCAA and we try to use every second of that eight hours,” Moffitt said.
Football players condition all five days but only lift weights Monday, Wednesday and Friday and do an hour of flexibility work on Wednesday.
At least 30 minutes a day is set aside during football workouts for conditioning drills. Players run more or less during these sessions based on their physical condition.
The women’s basketball team, like football, works out Monday through Friday during the summer and lifts weights on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. But unlike football they only condition Tuesday and Thursday.
“We have conditioning either in the weight room, in the stadium or on the football field,” Hightower said.
Moffitt said football lifting sessions focus on “ground-base movements”- standing movements – and “compound, multi-joint movements.”
“All of our workouts are total-body in nature,” Moffitt said. “We’re really not ones to spend a great deal of time developing single muscle groups.”
Moore said the basketball players’ exercises are “explosive” and emphasize developing vertical leap.
“We do a lot of rigorous interval conditioning,” Moore said. “The type of conditioning that we’re doing, while it’s not as lengthy of an interval as soccer would use, it’s longer of an interval than football would use.”
Moffitt said the offseason workouts are similar to in-season workouts, but the in-season workouts occur less frequently.
“It would make no sense at all to stop that type of training in-season,” Moffitt said. “You would lose all of that [strength].”
Both coaches preach the importance of core strength – strength in the lower back and abdominals – in athletic performance.
“We do more core work daily than we do any other exercise,” Moffitt said of the football workouts. “All of your strength and power comes from your core.”
Moore’s core workouts rarely involve simple crunches – she always has the athletes using some sort of device to increase the exercise’s difficulty and work on the players’ balance.
Moore said she tells the women’s basketball players to eat a “well-rounded variety” of foods that are low in fats, moderate in protein and moderate to high in carbohydrates.
“We try and get them to eat a lot of fresh food,” Moore said. “Vegetables, fruit, lean meat and nothing fried.”
Moffitt said the football players should eat five to six small meals a day to boost their metabolism.
He also recommends they eat foods that are “nutrient-dense” and contain plenty of carbohydrates and protein.
“We try and steer them away from red meat,” Moffitt said.
The NCAA has regulations that control when athletes eat and how often they’re allowed to eat during the summer.
“Nutrition is the single most important thing in what [the staff does], but we have less control over that than anything,” Moffitt said. “It’s the most frustrating part of my job.”
Both coaches recommend their players to drink water and stay away from sports drinks because they contain refined sugar and caffeine.
“If they’re doing a really tough workout, a little bit of Powerade is good,” Moore said. “But we even water that down a bit to try and stay away from drinking anything that has sugar in it.”
Fans rarely see the work an athlete puts into offseason workouts – summer workouts start at 6 a.m., and football’s workouts are limited to players and coaches only.
But collegiate athletes rarely rest – the women’s basketball team started working out shortly after making its fifth straight Final Four.
“We really only took one week off after the Final Four this year,” Moore said. “We got right back to work for a straight month.”
—-Contact Robert Stewart at [email protected]