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St Thomas Aquinas Strength & Condition - Motivating Your Team in the Off Season
- Item #
- WN-14011
- Format
- Buy Now Watch Now + instant streaming
About this video
The hardest part of an off-season strength and conditioning program is not writing it, it is keeping players willing to go past what they believed was physically and mentally possible. St. Thomas Aquinas High School in Fort Lauderdale, a seven-time state champion and a perennial national power, answered that question with organized team competition. Strength and conditioning coach Rob Biasotti and head coach Rocco Casullo lay out the principles, the workout stations and the unorthodox motivation that carries their athletes through the winter.
What you'll learn
- How team leaders buy into the Aquinas off-season program
- The scientific justification for running team competitions
- How the mental status of each athlete is affected by the way the program is organized
- The Pyramid of Success and what power, strength and stabilization mean within it
- Movements that ask players to be explosive for six seconds with 30 seconds of rest, repeated 60 times, to simulate actual game conditions
- Why the competitions are built for the team and not for the individual
- How the Aquinas competitions run: dodgeball, tug of war, "Buffalo Bill", jousting and rowing
- The specific workout stations: dumbbell split squats, box jumps, air squats or barbell squats, barbell straight Romanian deadlifts, single leg balance stations and hammer pulls
- How to convince players to accept six months of hard work so they are ready to dominate when the season arrives
Who it's for
High school strength and conditioning coaches, head coaches and any assistant running winter workouts, especially staffs with talent in the building but flat attendance and energy in the off-season.
About the coach
Rob Biasotti served as strength and conditioning coach at St. Thomas Aquinas High School in Fort Lauderdale, working alongside head coach Rocco Casullo at a program that has won seven state championships.
Frequently asked questions
Is this a workout plan or a motivation video?
Both. Biasotti and Casullo give the actual stations and movements, from split squats and box jumps to Romanian deadlifts and hammer pulls, but the heart of the session is the team competition structure that keeps players attacking them all winter.
What programs can copy it?
High school programs of any size. The competitions, dodgeball, tug of war, jousting and rowing among them, take no specialized equipment, and the station work can be scaled to whatever your weight room holds.
How do I watch it?
It streams the moment you buy. Pay $19.95 and the video sits in your AFM Videos account permanently, playable on any device with no view limit, or stream it through the 1-Year All Access membership at $99 for the whole AFM library.
What is the Pyramid of Success here?
It is the Aquinas framework of power, strength and stabilization, and Biasotti explains what each level means in practice, including the six-second explosive work with 30 seconds of rest that mirrors what a player faces on a game snap.