Strength Staff Crafting Individualized Workouts for Homebound Players

It’s not easy to maintain one’s fitness routine these days, and no one is more acutely aware of the difficulties than James Franklin. Hunkered down with his wife and daughters in the family’s condo, the Penn State football coach recently got into a fight with another resident over a set of weights.

Franklin and his wife had been trying to use the development’s communal fitness room but didn’t want to violate any social distancing guidelines and thus were reluctant to use it when other people were in there. That turned out to be a problem, because one resident was spending hours at a time in the room. At one point, while the room was unoccupied, Franklin grabbed the 25-pound weights and took them back to his unit. A testy exchange ensued.

“He left a nasty note in there. He said, ‘Whoever stole the 25-pound weights, could you bring them back?’ ” Franklin explained. “So then I wrote him a little note saying, ‘Could you stop dominating the weight room for three hours a day?’

“It’s been different for all of us, there’s no doubt about it.”

It has indeed. And rude condo dwellers aren’t Franklin’s only fitness-related concern. The larger problem is that he and his staff have also had to figure out a way of maintaining the strength and fitness of their players, as they too have been holed up at home due to the COVID-19 outbreak. Some of those players have weight benches or treadmills at home, some don’t. Some have safe outdoor spaces nearby, some don’t. The coaches have had to devise individualized solutions for players, always bearing in mind what sort of equipment they have access to.

“Our strength staff reached out to every single one of our players to find out what do they have,” Franklin said. “It’s not like we can send a workout out to the whole team. It was based on individuals. They may have a kettlebell or something like that in their house. [We ask] what they have and then try to build the workout around that for them. Some guys live in an area where they have the ability to get out and run on a field or do something like that. I think we have to be careful how much they’re leaving the house, but we’ve tried to look at all those things.”

Franklin said players have been improvising, using body weight to provide resistance or doing what he called “backpack workouts.” The latter involves “taking a duffel bag or a backpack and loading that up with sand or rocks and being able to do basically a body-weight workout with whatever that bag is able to hold. If they have the ability to do that, then we can adjust the workout for that as well. It’s challenging, but it’s based on what they have at home and what position they play.”

With most players back home for now and organized team activities shut down, those sorts of individual workouts have had to suffice. It might seem like an advantage that quarterback Sean Clifford shares a roof with a Division I-caliber wide receiver, younger brother Liam Clifford, a member of Penn State’s Class of 2021. But Franklin said he’s been urging all of his players to stay indoors as much as possible.

“Quarterbacks and receivers throwing the ball, things like that, I don’t really see where that fits with where we are as a program and as a country with the virus right now,” he said. “I think that needs to take a backseat for the time being. Obviously, some people have more space in their home or their basement or their backyard and can still do some things. I saw some of our offensive linemen working on pass sets in their front lawn, things like that. So there’s some of that.”

Franklin said that he and his staff have been starting to think about how much time they would need to get players prepared if the season were to start on schedule in early September. No one at any level of football has been through an off-season like this, so there’s no template to follow. The staff has been looking at different scenarios, with player safety being the top priority.

“We had already worked on about six different models – if we were able to get back in a month, if we were able to get back in six weeks, in two months, whatever the time period was, and we started breaking it out,” Franklin said. “What’s it going to look like from a football perspective? I talked to the staff about it. We usually get vacation time in the summer. I told the staff: I’ve had a conversation with my wife, you’ll probably need to have conversations with your wives and start to prepare your families. There’s a chance we won’t get any vacation time this summer because everything is just going to get bumped back. There are a lot of things to work through, and I wish I had a specific answer, but we’re literally just starting to dig deep on that one.”

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