Review - Gridiron Strongman by Elliott Hulse

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The best strength & conditioning coach I ever had... The truth is that I didn’t like this guy, but he helped me to get super fast & massive in only a few short months. In college, I lifted like a maniac and destroyed all of the schools strength records. At 230 pounds I ran the fastest 40 on the football team - 4.34 (the coaches made me run it 4 times to make sure that is wasn't a mistake!) This was my freshman year and the strength coach at the time was an ex-power lifter. He designed programs the same way that my uncle did. Heavy squats, dead lifts, bench press and cleans. He knew more about speed development than my uncle, so we did a lot of jumping, bounding and sprinting up staircases, but as far as sprint training went… that was it. I was the strongest and fastest I had ever been. The worst strength coach I ever had... The following year, our university hired a new strength and conditioning coach. This guy was about 150 pounds 'soaking wet' and had a doctorate in exercise physiology. The first thing that our new "strength" coach did was to add an arsenal of fancy new exercises with yoga balls, rubber bands and wobble boards. We trained a ton of ‘speed technique with cones and ladders’. The biggest change he had made to our program was that he reduced the amount of weight that we were lifting… for safety reasons. Interestingly – this was the very first season that I had ever gotten injured. Not only that… I had gotten slower and weaker despite all of the new so-called advances.

Elliott will be the first to tell you, the techniques he uses in this manual are NOT revolutionary or shiny and brand new...this is about BASIC training and getting massively strong lifting big heavy things.

My kind of philosophy!

And couple that with his section on attitude (LOVE the story about how he, at 175 lbs in high school knocked the stuffing out of a 300 lb lineman to make sure the coaches took notice of him), you've got a powerful package that can really set you apart on the field.

Onto the training....

This is the "meat" of the book. Elliott has trained with and learned from some of the best in the strength and power game...Dave Tate, Louie Simmons, Joe DeFranco, Mike Boyle, Dan John...

He's taken these "best of the best" ideas and crafted his own football program based on them.

He combines powerlifting, strongman, bodybuilding, and speed techniques to maximize the overall impact of the program. This information is targeted for mass, power, strength and speed. What you WON'T find is a recommendation to do any aerobic work at all (which I totally agree with).

Football is not about running a mile - most plays are over in 4 to 8 seconds. You need explosiveness more than you need to be able to jog a mile.

Elliott has a unique take on Olympic lifting in relation to football training...

"I do believe that including power cleans and other Olympic lifts into a Strength and Conditioning Program for football players is beneficial. But, I also believe that the less an athlete has to 'think' about a movement, the more ATTITUDE he can bring to its accomplishment."

In this respect, Elliott leans far more towards Strongman-style training than the more technical Olympic-lifting style of training and his programs reflect it.

When you're coaching kids who are trying to learn a hundred plays while doing 2-a-day sessions trying to make the team, I can understand his point that trying to coach a technical lift like the Clean & Jerk properly is not the ideal approach.

Giving these athletes exercises that they can "attack" without having to worry about perfect technique can really pay off in strength development. I like his logic on this approach.

Elliott's approach is very similar to what we use at Staley Training in terms of targeting the approach to the goal. Olympic lifting has it's place but it's a tool in the toolbox.

The program is laid out very well in terms of when each type of training is performed. Elliott uses what is called Conjugate Periodization - basically, instead of training just one aspect at a time (like just training high reps, then just low reps, then just speed), you'll be targeted several goals at the same time to keep up your overall strength and power.

When you just focus on one thing at a time, you get very good at just one thing at a time. To be a complete athlete, though, you need to develop MULTIPLE aspects of fitness.

Elliott's done a nice job of providing workout schedules that you can print out from the PDF file of the book and use to chart your training sessions and even your nutrition.

He's included a TON of sample exercises (with links to videos of the exercises being performed) as well as training programs and even a book on how to build your own inexpensive home-gym setup using stuff you can get at Home Depot (VERY useful section, btw).

The nutritional approach...

This is another excellent section of the book. Not only are you going to get a great rundown of what you need to eat to build strength, Elliott dismantles some big-time misconceptions about HOW you should eat. I really like how he's explored how a number of "uncivilized" societies eat - they have none of the diseases we associate with a Western-style diet yet they eat plenty of meat, butter, etc.

He's also included a number of meal plans in the book that you can follow to the letter or use to craft your own approach.

For supplements, he sticks with the basics, which is to say you won't be taking any supplements with ingredients you can't pronounce the names of.

Drawbacks of this book...

The information in the book is excellent...very useful stuff, links to videos so you can see how every exercise is performed, meal plans, training programs, etc. Great explanations of his rationale on how to put everything together as well as how and why everything works to make you stronger.

We may differ on some of the specifics in the approaches (not greatly, mind you, but we do have some differences of opinion on things), but overall, I can definitely tell you this stuff WILL get you bigger, stronger and faster.

The main hitch I can see is that the formatting of the book is not always easy to find your way around. This is a pretty small thing in an otherwise excellent manual.

I'd like to see the training programs and meal plans separated out in different files so that they're easier to get at and print out.

Overall, these are small things...don't let them stop you from grabbing this book if you're a football player or are a strength coach for football players.

CONCLUSION:

Bottom line, Elliott knows what he's doing when it comes to training for football. He's built his career around improving the performance of players at every level from high school to college to the NFL. The results he's achieved with his clients speak for themselves.

The book is an entertaining read - Elliott isn't afraid to speak his mind - gotta respect that! The information is effective and will definitely get the job done.

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