Barbell Shrugged - Culture, Buy-in and Stronger Athletes with Jeremy Carlson, Doug Larson, Travis Mash & Dr. Mike Lane #840

Episode Date: March 18, 2026

In this episode of Barbell Shrugged, Doug Larson, Travis Mash, and Dr. Mike Lane sit down with Center College strength coach Jeremy Carlson to unpack how he built a high-functioning strength and conditioning culture at a small Division III school with limited staff, limited time, and one shared weight room. Jeremy explains how he went from being a former soccer player and CrossFit gym manager to launching Center's strength program at just 24 years old. What started as a scrappy operation with seven double-sided racks and hundreds of athletes eventually turned into one of the most organized and culture-driven systems in college strength and conditioning. The conversation centers on Jeremy's unconventional model: instead of training athletes only by team, Center athletes train in mixed-group sessions across the day, with different sports sharing the same space while following sport-specific programming. That system not only solved a logistics problem, it helped create a true department-wide culture. Jeremy breaks down his three-part mission: prepare athletes for sport, build character, and give them the tools to become lifelong fitness enthusiasts. He also explains why simple programming still works incredibly well for most college athletes, especially when they are still relatively novice in the weight room. Rather than chasing complexity, he focuses on getting athletes stronger with basic lifts, teaching movement well, and making conditioning and change-of-direction work more specific to the sport. The deeper takeaway from this episode is that great coaching is not just about sets and reps. Jeremy shares how consistency, standards, buy-in, and real human development matter more than flashy programming. He talks about teaching athletes to manage their own training, empowering upperclassmen to lead, and creating an environment where a golfer can confidently tell a lacrosse player to get off her assigned rack. The result is a system that develops stronger athletes, better habits, and more capable adults. If you care about coaching, leadership, culture building, or how to create excellence with constraints, this episode delivers a practical blueprint. Links: Doug Larson on InstagramCoach Travis Mash on Instagram

Shrug family, Doug Larson here. And this week on Barbell Strug, we're joined by Jeremy Carlson. He's the head strength and condition coach at Center College. He's built a very impressive performance system there, essentially from scratch. And in this episode, Jeremy breaks down how he trains more than 600 athletes across 24 varsity sports with minimal staff and a shared weight room. We talk a lot about the relationship side of coaching, how to build real buy-in from athletes, coaches, and administrators, as well as his focus on creating not just bigger, faster, and stronger athletes and competitors,

but also how to build high character, high integrity, human beings as well. So if you're a coach, athlete, or leader, and you want to create a culture of high character and high performance, this episode is for you. Enjoy the show. Welcome to Barbara Strug. I'm Doug Larsen here with coach Travis Match, Dr. Mike Lane, and as you put it a minute ago, a lowly strength coach, Jeremy Carlson,

Welcome to the show, my friend. Thank you. I appreciate you guys having me on. I've actually been a consumer of this show for years dating you back to my CrossFit day. So I'm excited to be able to be on here. Hell yeah, man, right on. I actually didn't know that until you just said that just now.

So good to have you. Very cool. Dr. Mike Lane, you and Jeremy know each other. You got a little bit of history there. What's the story? Yeah. So he and I worked together on the Kentucky State Board at the NSA. So we both worked for Dr. Adrian Mortara down at Briah College.

And that's how we kind of got to know each other. he hosted the conference over to his facilities before he upgraded. So I'm definitely not going to steal his thunder. So we can talk about all the things he's done is kind of literally doing the field of dreams, building it so they will come over there at center. And in all honesty, I'm a big fan of how he sets things up as far as organizing it for building the culture and, you know, making it in a way that you're getting all the athletes to come together, not the individual sports to only care about themselves.

But I'm not going to steal his thunder any further than that. Yeah, dude, very cool. Yeah, as Mike kind of briefly mentioned, you built a very cool program here at that center university or college. Center college. We'll dig into that here in a second. But what's your background? How did you get into strength and conditioning? And then how did you find yourself where you are today?

I hope I'm allowed to swear on this. I'm from Seattle, Washington. So I just use it as like adjectives and verbs. So probably an ask backwards way to be quite honest with you. I'm originally from Seattle. I came out to Center College, played on the Minnesota. soccer team from 2011 to 2015. At the time, strength and conditioning was quite literally in our department. The guys go downstairs and they bench and the girls go upstairs and I call it their

pretty girl walking. And that was about what strength and conditioning was. And I actually went home and was the manager of a CrossFit gym for a year. And did that, loved it. Just wasn't the right clientele for me. There were some other things that were going on business wise there that probably wasn't the best situation. And so I decided to come back. I was a volunteer soccer coach for a year at Center College. And in the process of trying to get my first assistant coaching job, I knew I was going to have to go back to school in some degree.

I just didn't know what I wanted to go back for yet. So I decided instead of just going to get some BS master's degree and communication, Sorry if anybody is a communication master's degree out there. But I just didn't want to go get a random one. I wanted something that if I'm going to spend money for it, I want to make sure that it's a worthwhile one. And so instead of doing that, I went and studied for my CSCS. I mean, just cold out of the book.

Like, there was nothing special to it. I just took notes forward, backwards and sideways, because I knew at some point if I was going to go on to be a soccer coach, I wanted to be involved in the weight room. And when you're at the collegiate level, you have to have a secondary certification. everybody goes and gets the USAW. USAW, the level one, it is what it is.

Anybody can go and get it. I'm not saying it's a complete money grab. I think there's some good that comes out of it. But the reality is, is that anybody can do it and it can be done. So I wanted to have something that was a little bit more, a little bit better of a sell when I put it on a resume. And so I started applying for jobs. And my athletic director looked at me and said,

what would you think about staying around for another year? And I was like, well, what are you thinking? And he was like, saw you study for the test? We've wanted to get this off the ground. We don't really know how to do it. Would you be interested in starting the strength and conditioning program here? And I was like, how much does it pay? And they're like, mighty $15,000.

I was like, anything better to do. So I was tasked with running the strength conditioning program at Center College. We have 650 student athletes across 24 varsity sports. When I started, we were probably closer to about 20 varsity sports and about 500 student athletes. Yeah, and so I started out at 24-year-old being a head strength coach, not knowing anything about what to do. I just knew that I love Center College and I love the weight room and we were going to

figure it out along the way. And that's pretty much what we've done. So, I mean, it's grown. I've gotten an assistant now who's actually running the session for me while I record this. You know, we're sitting in a, if anybody ever has an opportunity to come to center college, a really nice weight room for a division three school. That's the short and the skinny, I guess, if you want to call it. And then have any facilities for that?

Like they'd probably have like a general gym, but they'd have like a strength conditioning facility or programming. We had a weight room that we shared with in the beginning was students, faculty, staff, community members, and everybody in between. And we had to figure out how to program around all of that. It was, and we were fortunate. They replaced the weight room, our old weight room, my senior year. And we had seven double-sided.

rack. So for most folks, the Division III level, that's, I would say, on par or maybe a little bit ahead of where some other folks were in 2016, 17. But we quickly found out when we started organizing and it was not enough space. I mean, you know, now, and again, it's a little bit different, but now our track and field program is 120 people. How do you fit 120 people into a weight room? That's only seven double-sided racks. How do you fit a football team that's going to be 140-ish this coming fall into there. Like there were just logistical things that we were, we were trying to figure out along the way.

And we tried a lot of different models. And I'm sure at some point we'll probably get into that because that's something that, as Mike alluded to at the intro of this, we do a little bit differently than, than everybody else. So every team uses the one single weight room. And you have, what, five, you have 500 people spread across. You said 24 teams, all training, what, three to five days a week,

depending on the season and season, hour, season, et cetera. Yeah. Yeah, so the way that, so Center College is part of the Southern Athletic Association, and that consists of two schools from Texas, and then most are in the southeast region. So we've got us in Kentucky is the furthest north. We've got a couple in Tennessee, couple in Georgia. We've got one, I'm a blanking, we've got one in Mississippi. So we're primarily, you know, southeast, we're the furthest north.

All that to be said, and the reason I give the context for that is our teams travel and play on the weekends. If you look at some Division III institutions, they're a lot geographically closer. So like the NCAC, which is in kind of Indiana, Ohio, they're at most of a four-hour drive away from each other. So they'll play like a Wednesday, Saturday schedule. We play a Friday Sunday schedule, which means that training-wise in season, you're only going to get two days a week. You're going to get Tuesday and then you're going to get Thursday. There's other things that go into that. NCAA requires that you have one rest day throughout the week.

So if you're traveling Friday, Saturday, Sunday, where are you going to put your rest day? You're going to probably put it on Monday and then you practice Tuesday to Thursday before you travel again. So there's some logistical things that we had to figure out along the way. In seasons, we'll go two days a week. Out of season, we'll go three days a week. And then what we try to do between me and my assistant is one of those off

So a Tuesday or a Thursday, we'll try to get out to a team and do some type of speed and gillity and conditioning for them. So right now, during the spring semester, our women's soccer team and soon to be women's basketball team will be out of season. I'll take them. Women's basketball will be on Tuesday. Thursday will be women's soccer. And then he will take volleyball on Tuesday and field hockey on on Thursday. So we do the best with what to our kids. capable of. It's a little what would we like to be able to see them more. Yes, but the reality is that's that's probably what we have to do.

I mean, three days a week. I mean, you can get it done in three. You know, like it's like more is not always better. Especially with most student athletes in college, even at the division one level. They're so raw. It's like three days a week, you still see great improvements. Yeah. Mm-hmm. You know, building a program like that, I'd imagine there's different levels. levels of buy-in with the students, or the athletes, so to speak, the administration, the coaches, et cetera. Like, what was that like building a program and trying to get buy-in between all parties? I'm so glad I was not even young. That's probably the first part that I'll start with.

Yeah, you didn't know. I didn't know better. As a 33-year-old now, if I were to step back into 2017 and go, all right, here we go. I don't know if I'd have the time, energy, effort, all of those things. that that would have been there for it. I think I was just so naive to what it could be and I just like I love center so much. I was like we'll get this across the line. We'll do it and we'll figure it out.

So you know early on I'm and I've had the same administration all the way the same person as the head as our athletic director all the way through. So that's helped out tremendously and are we about got a lot of coaches that are 20 plus year servers here at this institution. So that is helped out. Now, there's pros and cons that come with both of those things, right? They become very stuck in their ways on certain regard, so you have to break through those levels. But once you gain their trust and they know that you're here for all the right reasons, they will inherently trust you.

So early on, I kind of go in system levels. It was, we haven't, again, other unique things about Center College and to get the joys of me going here and knowing it, I think it would have been really difficult if I didn't go here and I didn't have that alignment. But we have an academic day from eight to four. During that academic day, nothing athletically is allowed to take place. All of our classes are going to be during that period. If you talk to anybody else at a college or institution, they immediately go, fuck. How are we going to get practicing, right?

Like where is practice fitting in? And we'll go to Mike that's, you know, only 45 minutes away from me, not even that. You know, at EKU, they may have, they may have a coach that says, hey, we're going to practice at 10. We're going to, you know, lift at noon and you're going to have to figure out your classes around that. Now, the nice part about EKU is they're going to have classes until when's your latest class go off, Mike? Oh, that's cool. Yeah, so you're talking, class starts at 6 p.m. ends at 845 because I'm holding those. Yeah, right.

We don't have that. I like to say that we're kind of like a glorified high school a little bit, is that we have that kind of academic window and then our athletic window. With that all being said, early on when we were starting, we went six to eight in the morning. We then broke for class and people went to class. and then we would come back forward to eight-ish, nine-ish at night, and every day, Monday through Friday. And it was long and it was weird. And there were a lot of things during the day where there was some dead time. But I learned during that dead time, that was my opportunity to be able to go and create relationships with coaches.

And I think that was, I didn't do it on purpose. There was no, like, rhyme or reason how I did it. I wish I could say there was a calculated way that I got it done. Again, I just like being around people. I love learning about people. I love asking them questions. and I just took the time to be able to invest in our program. So we did that.

I quickly found out, and you guys can start doing the math, right? 24 varsity sports. Yeah, I'm doing the math. It's exactly what I'm about to ask. You can go like, all right, if we start at six and we train to seven and then we go seven to eight, okay, that's great. That's two teams at best, right? Our swim and dive team is 85 people.

So you're splitting that in two. That's automatically going to take up two times slots. And then in the afternoon, if you went basically just on the hour, four to five, five to six to seven, seven, seven, eight. you got four more teams. It's like, how are you getting everybody in? And quite honestly, we weren't. We knew, I knew the, the teams that we needed to get to because just from a physical standpoint, they were going to take more of a toll throughout the year, right? Like, it's easy to understand that men's, I'm looking at men's across right now. That's why you reference him first.

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center because I was like I'm just not making a difference with these kids that I need to. We were getting down to at one point training the kids one day a week. And then it's like, okay, we're going to think of people for, right? I mean, that's what we're doing. Like, I'd love to say that we can do something with it, but we're lying to ourselves. I think you can realistically get something done two days a week, especially if you're playing games, three days a week if you're in the off season. But you start dropping below that. It's kind of like, what are you doing? So I left. I actually went Mercer County High School. And along that way, and the reason I give this long, drawn-out version is

along the way, I quickly found out what it was like to work at a high school level. At the high school level, they integrate you into PE classes and you don't get a choice about who's in your PE class. You're just getting, you know, a tennis, a football, and everybody's lining up and you're all not doing the same thing. I mean, I was smart enough to figure out how to be able to kind of delineate it a little bit. But I quickly learned that you create culture in a weight room much more than I ever thought that you could across an entire athletic department, not just one team. I knew that you created across one team, but how do you do it across the entire athletic department? And when my AD called me back and he was like, hey, you know, your assistant who took your job is

leaving, would you come back? I said, only if I get to implement a new system and serve everybody and be able to have better connections with our kids. And the system that we developed now actually got approval from our faculty to be able to train during the middle of the day. We now train from 7 o'clock in the morning until 4 o'clock at night. And then we train basically on the hour, right? Monday, Wednesday, Friday is on the hour plus 10 minutes. And then Tuesday, Thursday, classes are a little bit longer,

but more or less training throughout the day, but they're never in a team setting. So I'm looking at it right now. I've got men's lacrosse, women's golf. I think we just had a few tennis folks finish up, but then we're all training at the exact same time. Doing different programs, things that were specific to what they need at their time.

But we have intelligent kids. Once we teach them the system of what we're doing, not to say they can manage themselves. We still got to keep guardrails on, but they can do a lot of the things that we need them to be able to do. And we've seen a significant uptick and not just performance, but injury prevention and buy in to what we are trying to do as a department. Like there's a standard across our athletic department of we're physically cultured

and we are going to make this a part of our program. It's not just a one, you know, one team does it, but not everybody does it. And I think that's been a powerful message for all of our student athletes. How did you do that? How did you build, like, how did you build a culture, a true call? Everyone throws that word around. Like, it's such a buzzword. But some people actually know how to do it.

So like, how did you build a culture where everybody is into working out? Dumb and naive again is what I'm going to keep going back to. I just was dumb enough and naive enough to show up every day. I think I truly believe that the kids are going to buy into us, but long before they're ever going to buy into our program. So I needed to make sure that I hired on the right assistant that was going to be with me that was going to understand center to a really high degree. Now, I actually have one of Mike's former students with me beforehand when I came back.

And he did a great job. And he actually got ingrained into the center community. and figured out what it was all about. So that helped out with the transition. But I knew when I had the opportunity to be able to hire, I needed to find somebody that truly understood what center was at a deep level of like what the kids are going through on a day-to-day basis. Like when I speak to our kids,

I speak to them with the same language that they're used to hearing across campus. So there's nothing that's getting missed along the way. I communicate with our faculty on a daily basis. I communicate with our administration on a daily basis. So there aren't things that are missing in there. But the next step is it just takes time. And it's not perfect and it's going to be messed up. I mean, I had a conversation with three of our men's lacrosse players today

because they didn't do what was expected of them. And the biggest thing that I've learned as we've gotten this up and running is I'm there to make sure that every single day we protect what we have here. And they didn't live up to our standards and expectations. They didn't do the weight that was appropriate. They didn't communicate that they had. had an injury coming off of practice and they looked at one of the kids and said, oh, you don't need to go get your sheet.

It doesn't really matter that much. And I pulled them aside afterwards. I say, hey, look, you three are all upperclassmen. You guys can believe that in the back of your minds, but it doesn't come out in your words or your actions. That's not how this works here. You have to be better. And if it becomes a problem, a habitual problem, we're going to go have a further

conversation, not only with your coach, but it's also going to turn into you're probably going to be kicked out of the weight room. And part of the joys of creating the culture that I have is that I have coaches that fully support me. I have an administration that fully supports me. And I have autonomy to be able to build a standard that doesn't move depending on the team that's in here. I think we watch a lot of, and you could probably watch some coaches, like they get better as coaches because they're with a certain team and they get worse with coaches as a certain team. Our level of coaching stays the same. It doesn't matter.

And I'm not going to coach my women's golfer any different than I coach my men's lacrosse player. We might have a different relationship, but they're still going to get the same amount of attention, time, and care. And I think that's what it takes to build a culture that is sustaining across, again, 650 student athletes in 24 varsity sports. Now, how did you go for such like seven racks or whatever it was to like this million dollar place? Like, what happened there? Yeah, that, again, full transparency. I got a great administration. There was when, when my, when my AD came in, one of his big push is what being in Kentucky,

we're a little bit more fortunate that we've got, we're not landlocked, right? Like it's a little bit easier to purchase some land than it would be if we were in, you know, New York City or or if we were in, you know, Atlanta or different things like that. There was clearly room for us to be able to grow. And we, my athletic director was very smart in leveraging athletics as an office. opportunity to be able to continue to keep our admissions numbers where they were. So when he sat down and he started to plan this out when I was actually still a student athlete, he had a clear vision of there were there were really through, I'm going to go like

two or three big areas that we were missing. The first one was we didn't have anything related to strength conditioning, but our pool was more or less condemned. And we didn't have an indoor track and being the first. further northern team in our conference, our track athletes weren't able to train for, I mean, really right now, Mike and I are probably looking at it at the same weather is it's finally starting to break. But Kentucky weather, we could be in shit here in like three hours. So we needed those, those opportunities. And we have a great alumni support base. So we were able to fully

donor funded, fund a $70 million project that included, a new outdoor track, new football field, weight room, new pool, new indoor track, move the baseball, move the baseball facility, and redo the softball outfit. I think that got everything. And I couldn't do what I do without my administration. And I know that. And I think they would reciprocate that, right? Like, they can't do what I can do.

And I can't do what they can do. So we have worked hand in hand. And I heard somebody say this a long time ago, I won't take credit for it. it, you can't outreach our leaders. At the end of the day, the administration has a goal of trying to be the best in Division 3, and that's what we strive for every single day. So without them, I'll still be in the seven double-sided racks in Buck, you know, lifting with community members and faculty and staff if it wasn't for my administration. So that's trying to go bigger. I mean, do they have aspirations of Division 2? Because like, you know, that's a pretty big buy right there. Yeah, no. As long as our athletic director is here, I would say unequivocally no. It's all the division. I had a, I had a, it was when I played soccer here, one of my teammates, he's now the head coach at Evansville. And he came back. He hadn't been back in a while. And he looked at me and said, Jeremy, I don't think you realize how nice it is here.

I was like, oh, no, I truly know how nice it is here. He's like, we don't even have this at a division one setting. And he's like, I'm fighting tooth and nail just to get some gym time to be able to figure these things out. He's like, what you're what everything is functioning at a high level here. So I part of the credit for building culture and building a weight room and doing all those things. Yeah, sure. I've shown the significance of like how it helps our teams. But I can't reach my leader.

If my leader doesn't want to to get there, then that I'm not going to get there. Yeah, no doubt. Like, yeah, if they don't back you, then your hands are tight. Yeah. 100%. So yeah, no, been very, very fortunate in those regards. Yes. Do the members of the administration, do they train those like the president of the school train, etc? Or do you train them?

Nothing against our new. I love our new one as well. Our old one did. Our old one was a, he actually started in higher education as a assistant football coach at Ohio University. And then just kind of figured out that getting into the administrative part, and not even just in athletics, but across the straight into the academic world as well, was more what his fit was.

And he ended up bouncing around a few different places before he came to center. But yeah, very pro athletics. Our new, I say new, but he's been here almost five years now. So I guess it's not really new anymore. But our new president is very pro athletics and understands the importance of how we fit into the ecosystem. and how we are just as big a part. Because at Center, and I probably should have mentioned this from the beginning, we are half the student body population.

So, I mean, if we're looking at 1,200 to, you know, good years, we're 1,400, kids, 600 of them are going to be student athletes. So we are a large majority, a very large minority of what the experience is at Center College. I think all that context makes sense because, you know, Center is a, it's a good school. And I'm not trying to denigrate other D3s in the state of Kentucky or otherwise, but economics is obviously part of the mission. And that's why we can get into the philosophical differences of the different levels of the D1, D2, D3 structure where these are students that also happen to be athletes, not athletes.

I mouth the word, but I think we know D1 athletes with NIL now. essentially professionals, with your steps and more to your comment earlier, like I have gotten emails from, we will simply say, academic advisors for athletics, saying these are the times that these athletes can take classes because of the practice schedule. And in the words of Marilyn Manson,

I was not born with enough middle fingers. Yeah. Because, you know, we just don't have that many sections in certain programs. And I, you know, act as an academic and I like the fact that you're making athletics part of the experience and being appropriately pragmatic with giving them the times to go in there.

And so I know we're going to probably get there, but I really like the model of you have where they can come in. They're still getting the coaching, but you have athletes that are now having social interactions with athletes of other teams when before it's like they all go in their bubbles. You know, the football team trains of the football team, the baseball team trains of the baseball team. And then, you know, the different gendered sports

never even get to be around each other outside of like watching them from the stands. which is different than, you know, you see him like, oh, man, X extremes gets after in the squad rack, like, and you naturally organically create those relationships, which is how do you roll with that culture? I'm so curious, so you know, so you got like some football players and got some, you know, tennis players, how does that work? And like, so everybody's got their own program. Yep.

And so, and what are you, you just well aware of what everyone's got going on and like you just kind of walk around and coach them? Yep. How does it work? Yeah. So, so let me, and I'm going to answer kind of like two questions. in this as well, because I'm going to circle back, Coach MASH, to your question about culture. I think part of culture, too, is having a very clear mission statement.

And I'm going to build off what Mike said there. So we are, I take my vision statement exactly from what our athletic director wants, right? It is to be the preeminent leader of Division III, strength, conditioning that we can be. Now, there's always going to become limitations with that. But we are, we are pushing in that direction every single day. But our mission statement, I think, is more important. And it's three prongs. So number one is I need to prepare them for their athletic endeavors.

And that's what we're going to dive into here in a second. Number two is I need to be a catalyst for character development. I need to make sure that they're better young men and women because they've come through this program. And then number three is I need to give them the tools necessary to be able to be lifelong fitness enthusiast, right? We all sitting here probably played sports at some point. And it all ended.

It ended for me at 22. And I still pick up a barbell every single day or every other day because I want to still be competitive in something. I still want to make sure that I'm still getting after it. I think part of that and the thing that we found out along the way was that this model fits that much better because we have young women that will come in here and look at a man and will say get the fuck off my rack. That's my rack. It's been assigned to me. Get the hell out. Right. And that's that's one of my proudest moments when I got to see I got to see a golfer do it to a lacrosse player. And that would not, in most weight rooms, that would not be something that people would be like,

yeah, that's happening. But I need those young folks feel comfortable being able to do that because I need them to go into a weight room one day and feel confident that they know how to use a squat rack and how to use a barbell and how to do those things. Rewon the clock to the start of this. I said that we didn't have a strength coach and we went downstairs and we benched press and the girls went upstairs. I need them to be better than that.

I need them to be better than me. So I think we're starting to achieve that at a really high level. In terms of programming, I'm not going to, I said this before we started with everybody, is I'm not going to sit here and tell you that I'm the best exes and nose coach. And that's primarily why we're spending so much time on culture development, character development, systems, different things like that. That's where I'm aggressively average at. But the programming perspective, I truly believe that most of our athletes that we get,

you can maybe exclude some baseball players, some men's lacrosse players, and some football players. Most of the athletes that I'm getting are very, very novice at what they're doing. So from a programming perspective, we use a modified tier system. Be honest, I've run Joe Ken's tier system 15 million ways. I've got like three copies sitting up here where all my books are. I highlighted it. It was one of my first books I ever read. I thought the idea was brilliant.

I disagreed with some of the things they did. because I just thought critically about it. And I was like, I don't really like bench pressing before I go to do some type of clean. I just don't like it. Just personal preference. I watched enough athletes do it, didn't like it. So we ended up changing it. So from simplistic sake, we're just talking out of season three days a week.

They will go total lower upper. They'll go total lower upper and then they'll go total upper lower. And from a very, again, thousand foot overview, it changes. It's going to mold itself a little bit. But the primary exercises that we're going to be focused on, improving to show growth in our program that we're making them stronger is going to be a clean, a squat, and a bench. I keep it overly simple because I think most of our athletes need that.

That being said, I just make day one, our total body exercise is going to be the clean. It's going to be the thing that we're going to try to improve on that day. On day two, we're going to look at our lower body exercise. That's going to be our squat. And then on day three, it's going to be our bench rest, right? Like so from a logistics standpoint, I know that those are going to probably be in there. There are a few teams that I don't do that with. But by and large, me and my assistant have sat down and gone, this works fairly well.

But what starts to change is all of the other kind of lowers and uppers, but also some of the, what I call smaller rock. So the fillers or the assistant exercises that go in there. So we'll have a total body movement. When they come to their lower body movement, they will, we will primarily pick something that is rehab related. So with some of my track and field folks where they change surfaces a lot from going inside to outside, outside to inside. We just deal with shin splint. So I try to take care of some of that and give them, you know, things that are there.

Whereas my soccer players deal with knee things. So I'm going to take care of bandit KEs and different things like that in that lower body. We also may, depending upon the time of the year and what we're trying to work on, we may put something that's a little bit, you know, contrast training, you know, combine up some exercises that are going to be, that are going to be similar with doing a squat into a jump. You know, something along those lines. And then when they get it down into their third tier, they're going to primarily do some type of posterior chain.

Me and my assistant have just watched enough of our athletes now, especially on the lower body with pulled hamstrings, you know, just things there that they're going to hit some type of glute ham raise, reverse hyper, hyper, pendulum hyper, something along those lines, some type of core, and then they're out. And I know that probably people are sitting there going, man, that's freaking simple. I don't I I I beautiful and Mike and I just this the last time he and I talked about this

system is I don't know if there's anything that is specific to the weight room like we're trying to give them better motors right we're trying to install better motors so that they can go and express that on the field where we really start getting specific and I'll put it in quotation marks to say specific we get specific with conditioning like we get specific with their change of direction when we go out there on the field with them we get specific with those things because I think those things are actually what's going to move the needle for from the perspective of, again, my sister and I just had this conversation. He's going out to do volleyball today. And he was like, you know, I was thinking about having him backpedal.

And we discussed it. And then we watched actually some volleyball games from this past year. And we're like, at what point does a volleyball player ever backpedal? They drop step. They're going to drop in turn. But they're going to try to primarily keep themselves as square to the net as possible. So I don't know if they're ever going to really drop five steps backwards like a DB would. and then flip their hips and turn.

Okay, so that's where we get specific. I don't think the weight room itself is overly specific in a lot of ways. Now, some coach is going to get on here after this podcast gets released and go, well, you're wrong. And I'm like, yeah, that's great, but you're not training 650 student athletes and you're not doing it across all of these time periods. Like, it's what we can get done realistically with the time constraints that we have, with the constraints of the school that we're at.

And this has worked the best so far. I'm sure it'll change and it will update. as we go along, but that's what that's helped us move the needle. Does that answer the question? I think that was going to get there. I would totally agree too that. I mean, the latest study with soccer players that came out and like, what moved the needle the most was just basic strength training.

You know, they had a group that did strength training, a group that did like plymetrics, a group that did functional training or some little crap. Anyway, so like, but the people who did just basic strength training, it got faster, jump tired. It was more applicable than the other stuff. Yeah, man. Like, especially those, you know, like you're getting those raw athletes probably never worked out or never worked out properly at least. Yeah. You just get them stronger. And I should say, too, at the start of all of our sessions, too, if they are, okay, I, I group my athletes a little bit when we start talking about the warm up section of this. If they are a country club sport, so golf,

Oh, tennis. Or track and field. So sports that don't run as much or hardly at all versus a sport that's running all the time. They start in here in our weight room while the everybody else in primarily field athletes start out in our indoor track, which is about 30 yards kind of back that direction. And we work on basic mechanics of running and we work on an acceleration pattern and we work on max velocity running and we time them and we do what, I'm going to put it in quotes. Everybody says feed the cats. I think it's just general training for being an athlete, right? Like, I don't know an athlete that's not going to need some form of acceleration with what they are doing or some form of max velocity.

Like, I think those are, again, when I go back to my three pronged approach, my hope is that some of these athletes are going to take what they do and they apply it to their kids one day. Like, I need to give them the tools necessary to be able to do that. Do we need to spend all that time doing it? I think it helps. I think it moves the needle. But I think it even feeds that last part of that mission statement, which is we're trying to make them better people for lifelong fitness. And those are important facts that we need to make sure that we are continuing to hammer home with these folks.

Yeah, Matt, I think that really helps building the culture. Like you can clearly see that you care about them as people and their long term, their life, not just winning the next game. You care about them and you care about their kids that they don't even have yet. That's part of the reason they have buying like they do, I'd imagine. Yeah, absolutely. I wish more coaches thought about that too. Thought about like, you know, if we make the experience awful, there's a big chance

they'll never go to another weight room ever again, you know. But if we make it fun and we can teach them like, hey, man, teach them to fall in love with the weight room. Well, now that we know what we know, we know that it's going to help with cognitive, you know, their mental health, you know, their overall well-being. like we've helped them become a better human and live longer. Like it's way more than just making great athletes. Because like you're at the D3 level.

Like, you know, odds of them ever, you know, going to pro anything is not very much. Who cares? But the odds of them going on to be a human is 100%. So like if we can help them be healthy, my gosh, why wish more people would consider that? Well, I think that's even the more powerful thing about the way we do our system, not to keep like going back to that every single time. But it, we're, okay, we're, we are all grownups at this point. And we all have to figure out how to get our lifts in throughout the day.

Yeah, you're right, coach. The lane, we're, we're bordering on grownups. How about that? At least we are adult humans. We've had enough age on this earth. Anyway, um, at some point, we have to figure out how to get our work in throughout the day and our, our work out taking care of ourselves. I'm sure you all woke up today and you went, all right, what time can I get that in around

my kids schedule around my work schedule. I'm going to record a podcast. Like I got like three, four, five, six different things that are going on, but I know I need to get my workout in. Our kids are learning that life lesson here, right? They're going, okay, they do it at the beginning of the semester. We program it into their day. So it doesn't really change, you know, day to day week to week.

But I even thought it when I woke up, I was like, all right. So I've got this, this and this. I've got an admin meeting. I got a coach four. I got a coach four of these sessions. I've got a podcast. What am I going to get my work at him? My inlaws are coming down.

I got it in right before this. And I have the ability to be able to do it. It's a good life skill that we're teaching them because they're going to have to deal with that one day. And we're just starting that process early for them. Are you guys like, so they come in and they start working out or is it like one of the whole thing, they're on a whistle or whatever? Like, how does it work? So, yeah.

So again, two different starting points. But we start depending on when the class schedule starts. So if we go one before the class schedule. so just in case somebody's got like an awful like they've got two labs on one day and they only got like 30 minutes to eat. We have one that starts at seven. But basically on Monday, Wednesday, Friday, we go 7, 8, 9, 10, 10, 10, 20, 11, 30, 12, 40, 152, and then 3 o'clock. On Tuesday, Thursday, we go 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 30, 12, 40, 220. On those times, we will start on the dot.

And I tell my kids this all the time. We start at 7 o'clock in zero seconds. We don't start at 7 o'clock and oh, I'm rolling in at 30 seconds. We start on the clock because I need to teach them again, a life skill that when we say that we're going to be somewhere, we're going to be somewhere. So we take attendance.

It's our number one KPI. I'm looking at it in front of me here. We're sitting at 94% of attendance across all 650 student athletes. And I count their ass in the seat, like they're here or they're not here. that even if they're sick if that it's an absence and i don't i don't mix it you're either here you're not because i can't make a difference if you're not here but we will start in here and we will do a general prep warm up that basically just goes through like yeah some bandwork for the shoulders we do some hip work we do some just just very general basic let's get our body moving out there we

actually have a hurdle series that we go through um as we get kind of ramped up into that but they We will start that. At the in here, it takes seven minutes and 15 seconds to get through. At that point, they break. And we basically say, go ahead and you start with your program. We're going to walk around to each group. We're going to talk to you about what you have for the day. What are your sets, your reps or percentages are for it. Do we have any questions? No, we're good. Go. We'll move on to the next group. At that point, it usually takes us from the 715 mark. We're probably done talking to kids around the 12 minute mark. And at that point, A lot of it is managing and correcting and making sure that we're doing things the right way. Yeah. And we've got, again, when they're out there doing their acceleration max velocity, they will start coming back in this way. And my assistant usually is picking them up as they come in. Hey, here's the things that you've got.

What questions do you have? And then I will be the last one that comes back in with that group. And we usually spend workouts usually last. We're about 20, 25 minutes out. there about 30, 35 minutes in here. If they're just in here, it's about 30, 35 minutes, maybe a little longer. I like that much, but I think that a lot of coaches just manage time more than they coach, you know, like, if you're just blowing a whistle, blowing a whistle, go, you're not really, you're doing a good job managing time, but you're not really coaching

anybody anything. And so then you're looking at the movement, it's horrible, you know, like, now I'd rather like, say, you know, like let them do their thing, let me coach them on their movements and like move well versus like making sure they're on the oh whistle do something you know you're giving them to the development as an adult so like yeah i mean here's the rails you're going to work with them but you're not you know full blown they're stuck on a rail and i think the other thing worth coming back to as anyone that's been a strength conditioning coach it's a freaking profession that they like to brag about how much they hate their family you know they'll be there at the gym at five in the morning and they don't live until eight o'clock at night and the cats in the

cradle and the silver spoon. So, you know, the way you've got it set. Yeah, you got it. You start at seven, but shoot, you know, when your kids are in school, you know, dad can be home X amount of days of the week and picking them up, you know, from the school and doing stuff with them at night. Like, it's got to be just so much more sustainable for you and the other coaches of work with you. Yeah, 100%. And Levi was a great, great example of that. I mean, he lived in the old system and he did, he did all that. And he was actually still commuting in from Richmond. So he was living. living in Richmond, he would come in, he would get here about 530, right?

Because anybody's going to be prepared. They're going to get here early. So you get here by 530, which means you're leaving Richmond at probably 430, 445, somewhere in there to get over here. He would coach, and then he would just sit around for most of the day. And it's not a bad thing, but like there just wasn't a lot to do during the middle of the day. Yeah, you get your workout in and it's like, okay, well, that killed an hour, hour and a half. It's like, what do I do next with another six before I get to the four o'clock time. So he'd get to the four o'clock time slot.

He would coach until eight and then he would go home. Well, by the time he got home at 9 o'clock, it was time to go to bed and then turn around and come back the next morning. He looked at me at one point. He was like, this system is so much better for just general well-being of a strength coach. And again, I don't disagree with you. I think there's a lot of times we like to beat our chest that we're the hardest workers in the room. I think we like to confuse motion with progress a lot of the times.

And I'm here to find solutions to and systematic solutions are going to last. beyond me. Like, I don't know how long I'm going to be doing this. I love what I do. But this system that we've got in place, we're ingraining it so deeply that we're going to be, I think at this point, every person that's in our system has not experienced it a different way. So our kids don't know any different. This is, it is an expectation. When you come to center and it's great because recruits come in in the middle of the day, right? And they see all these teams working out together. And the parents look at them and they're like, oh, this is great. They're working out. They're doing these things. But the kids see and they go, oh, this is what I'm

getting a part of, right? Like, and if I don't want this, and I tell recruits this all the time, if you don't want this portion of it and you want to be with your team, you probably need to look at a different school because we're not going to be that group for you. We're going to be an entire athletic department. We're not going to be isolated to just one group. I like that, man. I think, I think that I judge as far as like strength conditioning coaches by movement, you know, obviously and by like results, you know, are they getting people better? And I swear I see better coaching a division three level sometimes and a lot of times then i see division one for example let me give let me clarify like mark watts is probably the best i've ever seen in my life and he was at

dennison universities where i met him he invited me up to do a talk and that guy is a straight gangster when it comes to being in like movement was nice like you know the he was getting those d3 athletes like man they were they were jacked and like fast and like they were they were seeing results. So when you want, if you think I'm judging you because you're organized, I could give a shit less. It's like, I'm looking at how your athletes move and are they getting better? You know, like, and if you're just like, you know, oh, well, you know, we're a division one. We don't have to get them better. But then what's the point of your job then, man? Like, then you need to be fired because there's no point in you. You're a babysitter. Well, I guess the, the, the, what I will add to that is

my job is not dependent upon wins and losses. My job is not dependent upon either if my, I want them to succeed. I hope that that comes clear in this, in this podcast. I want them to succeed. But my job's not dependent upon if they succeed or not, right? My, if, if, we'll use UK because they're up the street as well for me.

If their strength coach does not show improvement with their kids and their group does not do well during the year. most likely the person that's going to get fired first is going to be the strength coach. Like I realize that those pressures are at a different level. I don't disagree with you. I think movement patterns are incredibly important. I get so frustrated when I watch on social media. So we went, oh, I got a PR on a squat and they did a quarter squat.

Drives me at the fucking wall drives my assistant coach even further up the wall. Uh, there's one leg of squats. They're ramming their knee into the four. Yeah. Yeah. Like those things, they, they, they frustrate the hell out of me. But I, again, I also. So I don't have that pressure that if, you know, whatever team that we have underperforms for the year that my job's sitting on the line, like there's a given to take and there's, there's some joy in knowing that because I know I get to coach them how they need to be coached.

I think too often we get, we've got folks that get into this profession and they get caught in the rat race. If they don't perform, my job's sitting on the line. And that's, I would never elect to be in that position. I think there's a lot of things that are great about the Division I level or the Division 2 level and all those things. I want to develop people. I want to make sure that what we're doing here is developing them for their next steps. Development, character, post-graduation is a hell of a lot more important to me than the four years while they're here. I want them to make it to make sense.

But I want to make sure that when they come back into this weight room, we got a little one running around. I have seniors from last year that graduated that came back. And they're like, oh, my gosh, he's walking. Like, that's awesome. And, you know, I think those things are so much more important from the human side than anything else. I totally agree. And so did Mark Watts. Not to mention, I mean, don't get me wrong.

Those guys still got better. Oh, yeah. Way better. And like, I mean, so, but it's good to see that there's strength coaches out there that care about the whole person. Yeah. I will say this division one is. getting tougher to do that since you get like a whole new like you get 100 people on a football team and then they're gone the next the next yeah i don't envy any of those folks that i wouldn't do them for

doing it i know that they're getting a payday from it that's great just i that that's not that's not where i want to live that's not what i want to be what i want to develop so i know not about myself no i'm like i'm really curious like what's a point of you can get paying a smith coach at that level because there's no way anybody gets better anymore. You know, like, it's almost palliative care. You're just effectively making sure that they don't get hurt. Yeah. You know, I guess.

We're trying to minimize it. Yeah. Given, you have minimal staff and a lot of kids, are you handy with recruiting the seniors to help the freshmen and the team captains to help with, like, kind of organizing the training sessions and do some of the movement queuing and all that? like get some volunteers under under your belt a hundred percent now that again this is where it always is going to make it difficult to make center college the best strength conditioning department in

the country we are a liberal arts education through and through we do not have exercise science at this school i was a history major there was no exercise science background here there's no kinesiology there's no nothing we are we are we are preparing the future doctors lawyers of kentucky in america That is what we are known for, which is great. We have a lot of intelligent kids. I sometimes think that we have intelligent kids that are really book smart and not very common sense smart at times. I make fun of them for that.

Good example, just to illustrate the point. We typically have somewhere in the range of 30 to 40 kids in each session. This week, because track and field and cross-country stuff, just got done with indoor, the coaches are giving them a week off. That group in the morning at 7 a.m. typically takes up like eight racks in here. The other folks that are in here, men's across, women's across, they're kind of like jammed on a few racks.

They still stayed on their same racks, even though the cross-country team wasn't in here. They could have easily spread out, but they're just, they're just so like laser-focused and so book smart. Sometimes they lose some of the common sense. So anyway, I, yeah, I absolutely have to recruit the kids. And the kids that have been through long enough, we actually, I'm looking at two women's basketball players here. I'm going to go on paternity leave here in a couple of weeks.

I looked at both of them and I said, typically I do speed and agility for you. You all are going to run the speed and agility. You've gone through this now for three years with me. You're going to go on to your fourth year. You're going to make sure that it is run because our coaches can't be there. Like we do this because our coaches can't be there because of the division three model. So they are coming in so that they can talk about speed and agility

what it needs to look like for the next three to four weeks while I'm out. that again, teaching and developing life skills is important. I had a cross-country kid that was coaching another sport about how to do a clean. Like, when do you ever think about a cross-country kid teaching another sport about how to do a clean? It was happening two weeks ago. It's we have to be able to do that. And again, I think it shows that we're actually teaching them. We're not just blowing a whistle and making sure that they get the work done.

they're actually having to learn along the way. And yeah, our freshmen, like we do an orientation period and we kind of, we get them up and running. But we have kids that are at such varying different levels. We've got to have the folks in our building, our student athletes, to be able to help out with that. Yeah, dude, that's fantastic. Those kids are lucky to have you.

Appreciate it. Come on the show. Where can people find more? They want to learn from you on social media, websites, et cetera. Where can people find you? Yeah. My personal one on Instagram and social. media is just Jeremy C. Carlson, no spaces, no capitals. That's on Instagram. Yeah, and I guess

X is now what it's called. We also have a Instagram for our Strengthening Edition Department. We don't really do a great job on either. I don't do a great job on either one of those really doing and promoting much. I guess if I'm allowed, I make a shameless plug. Is that all right? Yeah. Okay. We've got a Strength and Conditioning Clinic. I don't know if this podcast will be out in time. Maybe it will, maybe it won't. But we've got a Strength and Conditioning Clinic that happens every year of the third week of April. So this year it's going to be April 18th. We have got, we always bring five speakers in. In previous years, we've had Mark Hoover, we've had quite a few different folks, Ethan Reeves, just good quality strength coaches that come in. It's completely free. When I started

as a Strength and Conditioning Coach in 2017, I had $0 in my budget to be able to go do professional development. Mondo put on a clinic at the University of Cincinnati that was free. It was the only one I was able to attend at that clinic. I got to meet Joe Ken. It was great just to be able to sit down with somebody that's been through it and be able to talk to them. It was my first introduction into it. I said when I came back that I was going to start one and make sure that every year it was free. So we use our, we use sponsors to be able to help make that happen. You can find the sign-up link is just a Google Doc on our social media page. I would love to be able to get people to come to it.

I think it's a great event. Mike's been to, Mike, you were at the first one. Is that right? I've been to two of them, but yeah. So, yeah, so we've got the third one coming up. Each year has been great. This year, we've got Mike Snyder coming in from Louisville, Kentucky. He's at Trinity High School, who's won a bazillion state championships.

We have got Cody Hughes coming in. He was at Madison Academy. He's now at Farm and Forged in Tennessee. We have got Logan Neff coming in from Cincinnati. He's at Indian Hill. Why am I blanking on my... Oh, we've got Nate Harvey from Elite FTS coming in. We've got that's kind of our strength conditioning lineup.

And then we've got one other person that was in the military. He's coming in to talk about character and leadership development. So that's our, our lineup of five. That's going to be my shameless plug if I'm, if I'm a lot of it is. Yeah.

Is a acquaintance of mine. So we've been on each other's podcast. Awesome. He's a good deal. Yeah. It's great. It's honestly, it's an opportunity to give back as Mike can probably attest to

living in the state of Kentucky. It's really hard to find strength conditioning clinics. They're just not as prevalent as if you're in a bigger city. So we are. I'm trying to kind of fill that void along with Mike, with what he's doing at the NSA. So I, anybody that wants to come, would love to have them. If you will, if you will email me, I will sure try to get it out to you. If you, if you'll email me that, Mike has everything.

I will definitely get it sent it out for you. Yeah, that would be great. Yeah, any way that we can promote it on social media or do any of those things. That's, that is our primary, uh, stream of how we get people. Yeah. All we ask is for 50%. of how much of nothing because they don't charge. 50% nothing.

Still nothing. Okay, cool, cool. Gary the zero, do all that good work. Yeah. And one more time for clarity. That's for current and or aspiring strength. Current and or aspiring strength coaches. Or this is for athletes or all the above.

Who is this for? Yeah. Primarily strength coaches, people that are aspiring to get into it. But I mean, we've even had some of our students come that have had zero interest in strength condition. They're just like, it's happening on this weekend. I'm going to come and do it. And so it's primarily for strength coaches and people that want to get into the field and people that, I mean, I've had football coaches come to it that also run the weight room in, you know, in their high school at the state of Kentucky.

Like it's just, it's a good learning, it's networking event and opportunity. And I try to really make sure, because I still remember going to my first clinic or my first NSA event in Charlotte in like 2018 or something like that. It was the national one. I remember being scared, shitless. And I really try to knock that out from the beginning that, like, if this is your first time, we're going to make sure that we introduce ourselves to you, and we're going to make sure that this is a family event. And then very fortunate that every year we continue to have people come back.

So anybody that wants to get into it, love to have them. I just taught last weekend in Texas, and it was free. Like, same thing. It was a performance course put it on in Dallas. And, like, yeah, it was great. There was hundreds of high school football coaches, you know, Smith coach is there. It was crazy. It was a lot of fun talking

with those dudes. All right. Very cool. Coach Travis Mash. Mashlead.com. And so anyone who falls sore next, I'm doing the whole spring cleaning again. So that's coming up in April. Yeah. Very cool. Dr. Mike Lane. Yeah, Mike Lane, PhD on Instagram. Feel free to

follow and say hello. Beautiful. And I'm Doug Larson, Douglas E. Larson. On Instagram, we are Barbell Strug. Barbell underscore shrug. If you want to work with Travis MASH, Dr. Mike Lane, Dr. Andy Gap, and the whole team at Rapid Health Optimization. You can go to Artea Lab.com, A-R-E-T-E-L-A-B.com. Friends, we'll see you guys next week.