In the spring of his freshman year he weighed 229 pounds, had a 31 inch vertical leap and ran a 4.1 pro-agility. The S&C coach left and the soccer coaches took over much of the training. They were concerned that Bryan was overweight and they started him on a program that included a lot of distance running and no lifting. This past spring he weighed 210 pounds and had a 26 inch vertical leap, they didn’t do a pro-agility but it would have been slower as indicated by his decreased vertical leap.

What they succeeded in doing was taking 19 pounds of muscle off of him while decreasing his athleticism. Secondly, I try to find as many scientific articles as possible about strength and conditioning for athletes and what I have found is that the techniques employed by Xplosive Edge (weight lifting and high intensity running drills) have been shown to produce the greatest increases in explosiveness and endurance. Lower intensity training (distance running) actually decreases explosiveness because it causes increased growth of slow twitch muscle fibers. Some of the articles have gone so far as to say low-intensity training should be eliminated from a power athletes training. Soccer, like most of the sports our kids play, are power sports. Think back to State Cup 2007. The 3-0 game against CSA was one of the most dominant performances I have ever seen. I think over the last couple of years our girls have lost some of the physicality they used to have since they stopped doing Xedge.

Concerned Parent,
Eric