Bridging the atlantic
Discovering the development gap
I grew up playing in Europe, for a Swedish team called Arlanda Jets. I made the choice to go over to the U.S. to play college football for the University of North Dakota.
I arrived as a walk-on and after 2 years I earned a 75% scholarship at the FCS level.
In U.S. colleges the facilities are miles ahead of what we have in Europe. There’s indoor facilities, gyms connected to tracks, turf fields and more. Just check out what my old school just built out at the FCS level.
Mind you, this is is also attached directly to the indoor turf besides the turf they already have inside.
Any way, by 2018 after I’d played for three years with the Dresden Monarchs it was clear to me that the athletes lacked proper off-season strength & conditioning. Most athletes in Europe stop training when their season ends.
You see it in basketball too, players have great skill but they lack the physical dominance that U.S. athletes have.
Physical gap, not skill.
AJ and I discovered that to challenge the teams that had better funds to sign players we needed to develop the local guys during the off-season.
Forward us now to 2023 and we finally kick-start the Euro Athletes Academy project. This would be the training program that bridged the gap of physical, technical and tactical development that the U.S. has and bring it to Europe.
The limits in Europe
As we know now, Europe does not have the same access to facilities for the common athlete as they have in the U.S.
We decided that our philosophy for the training of our athletes needed to be rooted in a more realistic scenario.
Our athletes would be working full time or studying
They would only be training in commercial gyms such as fitness first etc
They would be limited time (60-90 minutes)
They would NOT be able to train on a field and a gym in the same day outside of weekends.
So we needed to create something that was simple, do-able and especially it needed to be do-able during the busy hours of a commercial gym.
Our training philosophy
So we create EAA PRO a subscription style program, with no commitments. Jump on and off at any time.
The program was built around realistic expectations of time management and used simplicity rather than gimmicks.
Myself and AJ both come from exercise science and kinesiology backgrounds. The training that you do in the weight room does NOT need to be complex. That does not mean it’s not hard, it just means that we want simple and effective exercises that transfer to field.
For strength we use the big lifts, back squat, bench press, overhead press, pull ups, chin ups, RDLs etc. We just change the method for those movements in terms of tempo and loading (how heavy).
Olympic lifts
We are huge proponents of olympic lifting. If your gym does not allow for olympic lifts we give alternative exercises that can be done.
However, there are few things that are as athletic and powerful as mastering the olympic lifts.
Our philosophy summed up
Long story short, what we built was something that is simple when you look at it. But hard to execute. One of my favorite coaches Jörg Möckel who I worked with in 2023 and is an olympic sprint coach for the likes of Rebekka Haase has a saying “Simple, but not easy.”
As always, if you’d like to give this program a try, go ahead and sign up here.
