WVU's Muscle Man
July 21, 2003 09:00 AM | General
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Mike Barwis
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Throw a magazine on his desk and he’s liable to throw a fit. Everything right down to the Post It notes he places on top of his desk must be in order.
“I’m probably the most anal person around,” Barwis says with a raspy Philadelphia accent. “That magazine sitting on top of my desk was just driving me nuts.”
Barwis says he learned self discipline from his grandfather, having moved into his grandparent’s house in Northern Philadelphia with his parents when he was very young. Even today, Barwis has yet to meet a person who can measure up to his granddad.
“He’s the most disciplined person I’ve ever met in my life and I have more respect for him than any person I’ve ever met,” Barwis said.
Respect has always been important to Mike Barwis, especially now in his line of work as West Virginia University’s new head strength and conditioning coach.
Never the biggest kid on the block, Barwis nevertheless played all of the sports and became particularly interested in wrestling. As he grew older and his friends grew much bigger, Barwis began expanding into more unconventional sports like kick boxing, Tae Kwon Do and eventually, full-contact fighting.
Barwis joined a local gym to train for these demanding sports and he soon became interested in the science of physical fitness. By the time he was 17 he was exposed to many different advanced and unconventional training methods.
That ultimately led to an internship with Al Johnson’s strength and condition program at West Virginia in 1993. Four years later after a brief stint working with elite athletes back home in Philly, Johnson asked Barwis if he was willing to come back to WVU as a full-time member of the strength and conditioning staff.
He accepted.
“Al called me and asked me to come back here,” Barwis recalled. “I had worked with him and I felt a lot of loyalty to the University so I came back.”
Beginning in 1997, Barwis served as Johnson’s assistant, working with most of West Virginia’s other varsity sports until the athletic department decided to split the two jobs in 1999: Barwis then headed up the varsity sports conditioning program and Johnson handled football and men’s basketball.
This system remained in place after Johnson left to take over the strength and conditioning position at Ohio State and Doug Elias was hired to oversee West Virginia’s football strength program. After Elias was hired, Barwis was also given the added responsibility of men’s basketball.
West Virginia coach John Beilein loved what Barwis was doing for his basketball players. Every chance he got he raved about Mike Barwis. It was apparent to Beilein that the basketball team needed an advanced strength program and Barwis was the right guy to implement it.
Barwis was cruising along Interstate 68 about two hours away from Morgantown in his white Jeep Cherokee when his cell phone went off.
“Mike this is Coach.”
“Coach who?” Barwis wondered to himself.
“Mike this is Coach Rodriguez,” he tried again. “Do you have some time we can sit down and talk?”
“Sure Coach, but I’m on my way to New York City to speak at a conference and I won’t be back in town until Sunday. Can I come straight back and meet you at your office Sunday afternoon?” Barwis answered.
“Sure.”
Doug Elias had just resigned as football’s strength coach and Barwis thought he was meeting Rodriguez to recommend other strength coordinators he knew in the profession.
“We’ve talked from time to time and I’ve always enjoyed talking to Coach Rodriguez -- he’s a great guy,” said Barwis.
Barwis met with Rodriguez in his office and they began discussing the football strength position. The coach was asking him a lot of questions to the point that Barwis was beginning to suspect that this wasn’t a head hunting session.
It was an interview.
Finally, Rodriguez stood up and asked him if he was interested in the job.
“Sure,” said Barwis. “If you’ve got everything solidified with Coach Beilein, Ed Pastiong and the athletic staff then I’m ready to go.”
The next morning Barwis was sitting in Johnson’s old chair working out calculations, formulas and percentages for Monday’s afternoon workouts.
With the athletic department's blessing, he immediately elevated Autumn Speck to associate strength coach, added Mike Lias from Pace University as another strength associate, brought in Chris Allen as an assistant along with John McAllister, and kept Jim Nowell in his spot as director of skill development.
“Everyone was extremely supportive of my plan,” Barwis said. “They’ve made sure that the strength and conditioning program has developed here. They’ve invested a lot of money in our staff and they’ve invested a lot of money in our training equipment.”
It wasn’t too long before Barwis was going to be put to the test by the football team. As is the case with any new authority figure, the guys were going to see how far they could get with him.
Junior defensive tackle Ben Lynch saw his opportunity. While Barwis was spotting another player on the bench press, Lynch, who weighs 270 pounds, slipped up from behind Barwis and pinned both of his elbows behind his neck.
Lynch had heard stories about wrestlers trying to take down Barwis unsuccessfully and he wanted to see what he was made of. He was a wrestler once, too, and he knew some pretty good moves. Although it wasn’t going to escalate into anything serious, it had all of the makings of a challenge.
“Go ahead, try and trip me,” Barwis said.
Lynch stuck his foot out and slung Barwis around on his back, placing his big frame right on top of him. The rest of the team stopped what they were doing and began to watch.
As Lynch began to roll over and put him into a more secure hold, his elbow hit Barwis in the back of the head. The blow was just hard enough to set the lights off.
No sooner had Lynch put him down when Barwis got out of the hold, maneuvered completely around and was on top of Lynch, placing him in a pretty firm choke hold.
“Okay, okay,” laughed Lynch. “I’ve had enough.”
Barwis had earned instant respect from the football players watching.
“He’s kind of a freak and everyone was trying to figure out what they could do to him,” said senior fullback Moe Fofana. “He lets you feel good for one second and then he flips it all around and it’s like, ‘hey I’m the boss and you’ve got to look up to me now.”
Barwis downplayed it saying, “It was a test but it was just playful in nature.”
Now that Barwis had their trust it was time to start killing them.
“At the end of last summer we ran Law School Hill seven times – that’s all we could do,” said senior defensive back Brian King. “The first time we did it we ran it seven times. The last time we ran it 10 times. I don’t even want to know how many times we’re going to run it next time.”
Barwis’ rule is simple: you’ve got two minutes and thirty seconds to get up and back down the hill. “I’d prefer they come down running but if they have to run on their face ... anyway to get down the hill in time,” he said.
“If there is one thing I know about West Virginia it’s that Law School Hill,” said sophomore Pac-Man Jones.
“It’s a whole different world and we’ve accepted the challenge,” added junior offensive guard Jeff Berk.
Some players have even turned Law School Hill into their own personal version of the X Games. Redshirt freshman Pat Liebig flies down so fast that the team often has to form a wall to keep him from running right through the medical school parking lot into the hospital.
“Just as long as they get a hold of him,” Barwis laughed.
Players are now convinced that Liebig and freshman Marc Magro are related to Barwis. “They call them genetic freaks,” said the coach. “They all think I’m this mystical freak that can heal overnight. Some of them are calling me ‘X-Man’ or ‘Wolverine.’ It’s crazy.”
Liebig went from being 241 pounds last year to his current weight of 265.
“In 10 weeks that’s pretty good considering last year he was 241 the whole year and never gained a pound,” said Barwis.
Mike has more testimonials. He can rip off player’s bench presses and forty times just as quickly as a young kid reciting Major League batting averages. Right now his mind turns toward his basketball players, though.
“D’or Fischer came in the other day at 245.4 pounds,” Barwis said proudly. “That was one of my goals when he came here weighing just 212. Tyrone Sally … I wanted him at 200 and he weighed in at 204. I wanted Patrick Beilein at 205 and he weighed in at 208. My boys have reached their goals!”
Football’s Pac-Man gave his own testimonial: “I came here running a 4.41 and now I’m down to a 4.31. I came here bench pressing 225 two or three times and now I’m bench pressing 225 nine or 10 times. We never did squats in the city and the first time I ever did a squat I could only do 225. Last week I did 420,” he said.
Brian King is much more succinct.
“I don’t even want to see some of these guys in a few years,” he admitted.
“Coach Barwis has come in and put in a new attitude as far as it’s not just going to be lifting weights and then running afterward,” said senior Quincy Wilson.
Much like Rodriguez, who coincidentally is also a fitness freak, Barwis decided to turn his workouts into a competitive situation. His stop watch has become the game clock. If the players are upset and tired or jump over the line before the whistle blows, the entire team is running again – not just the offending player.
“He says if one guy jumps offsides the whole team moves back five yards,” said Fofana. “It’s tough to argue with that.”
No Moe, you can’t argue with that.
Barwis also reasons that he won’t put his players through a workout he can’t do himself.
“The first workout I put them through was the most hellacious thing they’ve ever been through in their lives and that’s just a normal workout for me,” said Barwis. “It’s hard to look at out-of-shape conditioning coaches and do what they tell you to do.”
Yet even though the team has already become much stronger, weight lifting in Barwis’ equation comes out to about “20 percent of what we do.”
There is core and balance training for player’s abdominal muscles, there is functional training, explosive training, speed training, impact training, plyometrics, Olympic style lifts, conventional lifts, injury prevention lifts, agility work and conditioning combinations. Also, each and every player’s diet is closely monitored.
“There are so many pieces to the puzzle of being a great football player,” said Barwis. “It’s not about being a great weightlifter.”
Perhaps the biggest benefit from Barwis’ high-impact training is that the players are too tired to do anything else once they’re finished with their workouts. Part of the genius in his approach is that now most of them are in bed by 8 o’clock because they’re not sure what he has in store for them the next day.
“Their training has to transcend their lifestyle,” he says. “Even though we have it mapped out for them down to the second, they will never be told ahead of time what they’re going to do.
“We don’t know when the game ends,” he added. “We’re trying to get to a national title. We’ve started eight weeks ago and we’re trying to finish at the national title. That’s our objective. If you lull for one second that workout turns into hell. If you lull for one second on the field, that may cost us the game. If you practice like a sissy you’re going to play like a sissy.”
No sooner had Barwis taken over the West Virginia job when his old buddy from back home in Philly, Mike Daugherty, got on the telephone and rang him up.
Daugherty also got into the strength and conditioning business and is currently training athletes at Northern Iowa.
“Hey Dragon (Barwis’ childhood nickname), have the people at West Virginia gotten used to the genetic freak yet?”
“Not yet, but they’re coming around,” Barwis laughed. “They’re coming around.”
“I think Mike Barwis is an amazing guy and he’s a blessing to our program,” said Pac-Man Jones.
“Just watch us run around on the field this fall,” said senior linebacker Grant Wiley. “We’re a completely different football team in the short time Mike Barwis has been here.”
“When we get out onto the field people are going to see a little more pep in our step and a little bit of a swagger,” said junior safety Jahmile Addae. “I know that is because of what we’re doing in the weight room right now. How can you not feel confident?”
Yes Mike, maybe some of them are starting to come around.
