Muscle Men
June 12, 2007 11:01 AM | General
June 12, 2007
MORGANTOWN, W.Va. – Having used the weight room to his advantage as a player when weight training wasn’t popular in the 1970s, Bob Huggins knows the value of good, hard work. Huggins believes the benefits are multifaceted.
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| Guard Alex Ruoff performs a lift during a strength and conditioning session last summer.
All-Pro Photography/Dale Sparks photo |
“I think it helps you win over the long run,” Huggins told Metro News’ Tony Caridi recently. “If you look at scores over a long period of time we don’t get beat very badly. We’re virtually in every game because we’re so physically and mentally tough.”
Since taking over the West Virginia program three months ago, strength and conditioning has been Huggins’ crusade after he witnessed his team’s lack of girth in the handful of individual workouts he was able to run.
“To be brutally honest we’re so weak now that we can make dramatic gains,” Huggins said. “You’re going to pretty much max out at some time but we’re so far from even thinking about maxing out.”
Huggins uses his former Cincinnati players as an example.
“To bring an Eric Hicks in who benched 240 pounds when he walked into the door … we have one guy who benches more than that and nobody else even close,” Huggins said. “From Eric going from 240 pounds to 430 pounds on the bench, for example, that’s a dramatic gain but that’s in four years.”
If the players work hard this summer, Huggins believes they will make phenomenal progress by the time fall practice begins in October.
“We’ve got some fast-twitched guys and fast-twitched guys are going get stronger faster than slow-twitched guys are,” he said.
“I will be very shocked and very disappointed if maybe all but of one of our guys before it’s all over don’t test out at more than 250 pounds on the bench and over 500-550 on the leg squat,” Huggins said. “If they really work at it then they’re going to make those kinds of gains.”
Huggins was well known for developing physically imposing players at Cincinnati that had NBA-ready bodies.
“Most of the kids I have recruited who walk in say will you help me be the best that I can be? Well, for me to help them they’ve got to be strong,” Huggins said. “For a long time around the NBA the buzzword was ‘you’ve got to have Cincinnati bodies’ and that was because our guys were physically ready to go into the NBA and play. They didn’t have to bring them in and put them with a trainer and do things to get them physically ready to play.”
Huggins cautions that weight training has a way of weeding out the weak of heart.
“We talk about great gains in the strength department well you don’t do that without some pain. There is some pain involved in that which develops a toughness which I think is just as important as having the physical strength,” he said. “I think that bodes well at the end of games. If we have the mental capacity to push through that it gives us a better chance.”
According to Huggins, two things any team can control during games are its ability to defend and rebound. Both simply require effort.
“Shooting comes and goes and even great shooters have bad days. We should never have a bad day defensively because that’s so much of an effort-related thing,” Huggins said. “There’s technique involved but once you teach the technique it becomes an effort-related thing. Rebounding is without question an effort-related thing. It is two constants we can do night-in and night-out.
“Hopefully we can make a lot of shots but the days that we don’t make a lot of shots we’ve got to find a way to stay in games and be able to find a way to win,” Huggins said.
At one time the Big East was considered the nation’s most physical basketball conference. Huggins isn’t certain that’s the case today.
“I think the Big East at one time was very physical. I’m not so sure it’s as physical as it once was and I think that’s something that we can do,” Huggins said. “We can get in and kind of re-route some people and take them out of what they want to do.”
What the Big East is now, Huggins believes, is an eclectic mixture of styles.
“You go to Syracuse and you’re going to see 2-3 zone. You go to some other places and people are going to try and dig up in you. You go play Villanova and you’re going to see multiple defenses,” Huggins said. “To me it’s the reason why the Big East has been so successful in the NCAA tournament because the more you see of different kind of defenses and different kind of offenses you’re able to adjust.
“The NCAA tournament is about Thursday-Saturday or Friday-Sunday. You’ve got one day to prepare,” he said. “You can go back and say they’re going to play like Villanova then all of the sudden it clicks and they understand now what they have to do to attack that. They’re going to play 2-3 zone like Syracuse did. OK, here are the gaps and this is how we have to attack it and this is what we have to do. They understand that better and they visualize it better.”
