Feb. 29, 2004
The Iowa football team will be benefiting from 20 brand-new Powerlift self-contained power areas in the Hayden Fry Football Complex. The custom-built areas were designed with Powerlift engineers in Jefferson, IA, and Hawkeye strength and conditioning coach Chris Doyle.
Doyle, who has trained more than 100 collegiate athletes into the professional ranks during his career, says that the areas will make the training program “more functional and more effective.”
“It starts at the top. Coach Ferentz has put an emphasis on strength and conditioning. With the support of Bob Bowlsby and our administration, we have been given outstanding resources in order to gain an edge on our competitors,” he said. “We are very fortunate. We continually evaluate and upgrade. It’s our objective to have the very best training atmosphere for the college football athlete.”
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“It starts at the top. Coach Ferentz has put an emphasis on strength and conditioning. With the support of Bob Bowlsby and our administration, we have been given outstanding resources in order to gain an edge on our competitors. We are very fortunate. We continually evaluate and upgrade. It’s our objective to have the very best training atmosphere for the college football athlete.”
Coach Chris Doyle
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The update to the current lifting areas is the first major improvement since Head Coach Kirk Ferentz came to Iowa almost six years ago and redesigned the facility. But according to Doyle, the new lifting racks, platforms and benches represent a continuation of advances made over the past few years for the student-athlete.
“The University of Iowa has taken many steps to improve the well-being of the student-athlete,” he said. “Over the past two years, the Gerdin Athletic Learning Facility opened, the Kenyon Practice Facility opened and we have also made fantastic improvements to our training table.”
Doyle added that as Iowa continues to successfully compete against other programs on the field, the competition naturally spills over to the strength and conditioning programs.
“The student athlete is the one who’s benefiting from (that competition),” he said. “The additional benefit, because of the great facilities that we have, is that we have a lot of our NFL guys training here at Iowa.”
Doyle said that many of Iowa’s alumni who currently play in the NFL return to Iowa City to use the training facilities in the off-season.
“They’ve gone out to the NFL and realized what a nice situation we have here,” he said. “They come back here and train in our facility because they enjoy coming into a situation they know is going to be first-class.”