View Video- Building True Team Unity: The Hillbilly Workout

Welcome coaches to Episode #5, last week we discussed how suffering together as a team can build True Team Unity. Hard punishing workouts that as an individual you probably would not do but put in a team setting you will step up and do them because your teammates are doing them with you. Again, these brutal team workouts that I am talking about are in the off season. I did not want my team to be a team for four months. I wanted them to be a team for 12 months.

There are many different types of suffering workouts you can do in the off season to build true team unity. I discussed the Bike Race last week as one such workout. A good friend of mine and a former college coach, Scott Hinkel, designed a 45-minute workout called the Rock Course. He would have his team come over to his house and do this work out. They would run with rocks, carry rocks, load rocks in a wheelbarrow, and move rocks that were physically exhausting on your body and mind.

Again, these crushing workouts with your team really builds true team unity. I am trying to give you coaches ideas for crushing workouts in the offseason that sets the standard of intensity for the upcoming season. When your team suffers with punishing workouts for 8 months in the offseason, the punishing workouts you do in season becomes normal for them. We have talked about the bike races in the spring and fall as a killer team suffering workout. I would like to share another crushing workout that built true team unity as well. We would do this work out every Thursday afternoon in the summer for 3 months. We called it the “Hillbilly Workout”. This psycho workout would take between 45 minutes to an hour to finish.

We would meet at my office at 3:30 on Thursdays after my wrestling camp ended. We would load up a few suburban as well as trucks and drive to Greg Stephen’s house. He had 2 boys that won state wrestling titles for me. He would have the whole course laid out for us. It consisted of 10 outside stations as well as 10 inside stations. These 20 psychotics stations crushed you.

You would start the first station and get lung burn and it would stay with you all the way through station 20. Station 1 consisted of a half mile run carrying 2, 5-pound bricks in your hands. Then going straight to shoving a 200-pound sled, 100 yards, then to flipping tractor tires where you would jump in them and over them. Next came sledgehammering as well as climbing ropes. Jumps, lunges, and burpees came next. All these killer stations and more led up to station number 20. Station #1 -#19 were brutal but added together could not match Station #20. Everyone dreaded and hated station #20.

Station #20 was called “Jacobs Ladder”. It sounds lovely, like it comes from the Bible, but after doing it you know it comes from Hades himself. Jacobs Ladder is a machine that will break you mentally and physically, and it can do it in 2 minutes or less. It is a machine that is titled at a 40-degree angle where ladder rungs revolve around a circle. It is a treadmill climber where you climb the revolving ladder rungs with hands and feet. Each wooden rung is 1 foot apart and the faster you climb with your hands and feet, the faster the ladder rungs move. When you get the technique down you can run in like a bear crawl fashion. To finish the “Hillbilly Workout” you would have to climb 300 feet on “Jacobs Ladder”. There was not one time in six years we did not have multiple wrestlers through up after doing this machine.

There would be dads, coaches and teammates screaming at you to push as hard as you could to get to 300 feet as fast a humanly possible. A good time for 300 feet 2 minutes and 15 seconds. My personal best was 2 minute and 7 seconds. I would have 6-7 wrestlers break the 2-minute mark. I think Bo’s record was 1 minute 55 seconds, Micky’s best was 1 minutes and 53 seconds, and Rocky’s was 1 minute and 57 seconds.

The best I have ever seen on Jacobs Ladder was named Eli Stickley. He passed away 2 years ago in a tragic car accident. I did not think it was possible to break 1 minute and 45 seconds, especially after doing the other 19 station. Eli, with a crowd of about 15 coaches, parents, and teammates did 1 minute and 43 seconds. What shocked us all was when Eli was at 1 minute and 30 seconds, he went into oxygen depletion. Oxygen depletion is when you cannot get enough oxygen to your muscles to make them work right. Eli turned white and his hands started to curl up. As soon as he hit 300 feet he fell of the machine. He almost passed out while he was gasping for air. It was crazy how hard my guys would push themselves for the team.

After the workout we would load the suburban’s back up and would pull through the local drive thru and I would buy 25-30 Gatorades for every wrestler that did the “Hillbilly Workout”.  All my wrestlers would look forward to the Gatorade because they knew that the Hillbilly was done.

Suffering workouts like the Hillbilly are great for building true team unity. Coaches, I hope you enjoyed this episode and I also hope I have given you some ideas on workouts that will build true team unity.  

Stay safe, keep training hard and remember… Noah Didn’t Wait for His Ship to Come In…He Built One