SOUTH CAROLINA GAMECOCKS FOOTBALL

When Will Muschamp was in the market for a new strength and conditioning coach, he made a few calls about the leading candidate Paul Jackson.

In conversations with a few of his former employers and co-workers, there was one common theme, a cornerstone of Jackson’s program, and it ultimately helped Jackson land the job at South Carolina and that was his background in sprinting.

“It jumped out in the interview process, and that's something that several people that I talked with, before I even visited with Paul, or even called Paul, that that was one of the first things they said, was his sprint background was very impressive,” Muschamp said.

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Jackson played football at Montclair State but has a background in track and field and understands the benefit of a high-intensity sprint workout.

Sprinting, to him, is defined as a player giving 90 percent or more effort over the course of a workout.

Doing more sprint work will do the obvious and help players get faster, but Jackson said sprinting puts more tension on muscle, which helps them get stronger for the season.

“That's not going to be sprinting, you're not going to be able to get faster, running at those sub-max velocities, and you're also not stressing the tissues the same way you will when you do run above those velocities, so you have to recognize that, first,” he said.

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Jackson’s conditioning program starts Monday after the team arrives back on campus to start the spring semester.

It’ll be a four-week program designed to get guys better conditioned and faster both in top-end speed and in change of direction.

The team will workout four days a week with two being sprint specific and the other two being more slower, longer runs.

Through all of it, Jackson emphasizes competition to try and make sure players are hitting that 90 percent or better mark throughout the entirety of the workout. He said he’ll incorporate some racing and other things to get guys’ competitive juices flowing in the offseason.

“A sprint workout, it’s got to be a quality-based type of workout. So it's not going to be guys throwing up, in that particular session. We'll have other sessions where we're dropping guys, but that is not what those are for,” he said. “So, as they start to understand and value the quality of movement you can get on a sprint session, it gives you some freedom to do those things. Maybe you allow longer rest periods, you make it competitive in nature, you let guys line up and race, and you do things like that to get true, close to their peak velocities achieved, more often.”

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He learned a lot about this approach interning at the Parisi Speed School in New Jersey. There and the main goal is speed and agility training, and Jackson was tasked to help elite athletes get faster and quicker, something he hopes to do at South Carolina.

The things he learned there he brought to stops at LSU, Southern Miss and Ole Miss before arriving in Columbia, and he’s ready to implement some of those practices in the coming weeks.

“That was a blessing; it's a lucky opportunity that I got to work there, where we got to focus on that,” Jackson said. “A lot of strength coaches, we come up in the weight room, we come up playing football, and you just know that. You don't really get the exposure, unless you add a track background. So I was able to get that, and learn how to program, learn the importance of it.”