Part I: S&C Head Coach Tim Caron & Staff look to assist Army to next level

Often overlooked by the majority of fans is how significant a team’s Speed, Strength & Conditioning program is to the overall success and in some cases, the failure of the on field performance.

When it comes to the Army Black Knights, leading the charge Tim Caron, who is heading into his 3rd off-season as the Army Football Program’s Head Football Strength & Conditioning Coach.

Prior to making his way to West Point, Caron spent 2007-2010 at Georgia Tech (Assistant Strength and Conditioning Coach) and then moved over to USC where he was with the Trojans’ program from 2010-2014 as Associate Strength and Conditioning Coach.

GoBlackKnights.com had the opportunity to have a detailed Q&A with Caron, who is clearly very excited about the progress that he and his staff are seeing from the of players currently on the roster.

“I say this ... I feel really good when we leave a training session and that we worked as absolutely hard as we could possibly could and our guys really really took advantage of what we have and what we can do and how we are doing it,” shared Caron. “I think it’s evident by the weights that we are lifting and we’re putting them online and showing the world that we have some really strong talented guys here.”

Let’s indulge further into our conversation with the Black Knights’ Head Football Strength & Conditioning Coach, as we kick-off Part I of two part Q&A.

GBK: How much has changed since your arrival 3 years ago as Army Black Knights’ strength coach?

Caron: Yeah, a lot. Obviously the roster is so different and now we’ve gotten a much better feel for working at the academy. But, from another stand point is the guys have been with us for 2 & 3 years and going into their 3rd off-season with us and now going into their 2nd off-season.

We are really trying to push the limits in what we can possibly do in a college setting. And the level of programing that we are doing now has far surpassed anything that I’ve ever done at other places and I think it’s just a matter of the evolution of where we’re trying to go. I can’t wait to see how it manifest on the field.

GBK: How much of what you and head coach Jeff Monken are targeting relative to progress has evolved? For example, do you have the same strength goals now compared to when you first came on board three years ago?

Caron: I would say no. I mean obviously Coach Monken has a vision and our job down here is to facilitate that vision with the physical perimeters we think we help us go really go out there and do those big goals that we have.

The guys that we have on the team now are so different than the guys that we had on the team that first year. The program and the things that we are doing now ... if we tried to do that with our first year here, we would have had a plethora of injuries and guys breaking down. These guys are really strong, they really work hard, they are tough and I’m not saying that the other guys weren’t. But, it’s just the progression and how things have unfolded over a couple of years.

It’s the same vision. You know, like get bigger, get stronger, get faster, be tougher, be in great physical condition, be very fundamentally sound, be on the band and move. The way we do it and how we’re doing it .... now our guys and I’ll say Aaron Kemper, who’s a very strong guy and he was a very strong guy before I got here. For him, I can look at it from the stand point ‘how can I get this guy stronger and faster’. So, we have to keep pushing the limits to brink of what we are doing and try and get a little bit more. You know, do uncommon things to get uncommon results.

We put very very complex high level programming for guys like Aaron Kemper, Andrew King and Colby Enegren and some of our more gifted athletes. We got to at that level and have a chance to get those guys faster and stronger. I just don’t want to waste their time. I don’t want to go into their last year and say ‘you are good already and let’s just manage this’. I rather push the envelope and get these guys as developed as we possibly can, and get them prepared as much as I can and when they go out there and play that this will be the best season that they every have.

GBK: What type of S&C schedule are you on right now with the team?

Caron: So we have three different programs going right now and we break them up. We’ve go a Development Group - Bravo, which will be all of our first year guys. So, all of our Plebes going into their yearling year. Then we have our Development Group - Alpha, which is all of our Yearlings and a couple of our Cows that are progressed past the Bravo program, but for some reason haven’t gone through an entire year of an Alpha program. So, if you are a Cow and something might have happen last year ... you might have missed some training time or you might have been away for a semester, we put you in the Alpha program. The last level is what we call our Elite Group, which is where we are going for broke. This is the highest amount of high intensity training that we have ever done in a college program ... at least that I have done..

We are really pushing the limits in what a human body can handle and so far, so good. This is the first year that we have unveil it and like I was talking about before, guys like Aaron Kemper ... I want to make sure that he has his best year this year and we are pulling out all the stops to get the most advance level program.

But in terms of how it’s structured through the week. So, we will go four days and we will split it up into ... we primarily focus on the speed aspect and we break up our week based off of that. We really strongly believe in our nervous system being a really sensitive entity. You have to be able to maximize it when you can and you need to be able to recover it when you are not doing it. So, with us we try to get as much rest in a week in between our speed training sessions as we can without sacrificing the quality of the week. So, what we typically do is try to go Monday and Thursday that we train speed and our Tuesday and Friday we try to allow for a training session that is not going to beat our nervous system down. And to tie into that, we actually tie our speed training with our lower body training. We really strongly believe that a lower body is extremely nervous system intensive and when you really really want to get down to it and you want to get the most recovery and you did a lower body exercise everyday, or olympic lifts ... that would tend to break you down. But tend to do very well when we load it up on one day with a minimum of 48-hours of recovery.

For the first time, we are now doing two-a-days. We will go in the morning ... a 45-minute speed session in the morning. So, we will get up bright and early and we will get those guys doing all their speed work and all of their plyometrics. Then we will come back in the afternoon, about 10-12 hours later and then we will hit our lower body training. And we are getting much higher quality from our lower body training in that regard.

GBK: So, the bottom-line there is a ratio of lower body to upper body stuff you want your players doing?

Caron: Yes. We are trying to get as much emphasis ... I mean at the end of the day, your motor is in your lower body and the more powerful you are in your lower body the better you will be. So, we want to make sure that we structure the week to really really maximize that fact.

Stay tuned for Part II of our Q&A with Army Head Football Strength & Conditioning Coach, Tim Caron.

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