When high school football programs talk about their 1,000lb club, it usually involves three lifts: Bench Press, Back Squat and Dead Lift. WA Football does things slightly different to take advantage of a key lift that is frankly missing from many high school player’s repertoire: the Hang Clean.
With no disrespect to the Dead Lift, but as it relates to achieving 1,000lbs of cumulative max totals across three lifts, it’s significantly easier to make 1K of total cumulative max lift weight when it’s quite achievable to dead lift over 400lbs. Not so when you substitute Hang Clean with Dead lift though.
The Hang Clean is the quintessential football lift. When you take a static bar in both hands while standing and explode upward to take that weight and bring it to your chest, you are replicating in the weight room what a lineman does on every snap of the ball. Explosiveness, speed and control are all a part of the lift as well as on the field.
When do you ever see a football player lift a dead weight on the field? Perhaps after the play is over and you help a teammate up, but that’s it. We’ll take fewer guys achieving this crazy high school lift goal over a list of big guys who can lift up a bar of plates any day.
The WARRIOR 1,000 pound club:
Derek Johanik (2019)
Andrew LaPlant (2020)
Jared Samuelson (2020)
Josh Friedland (2020)
Peter Johanik (2022)