Hello friends, Happy holidays, and welcome to the Happy half Hour. We've got a few more weeks of the experimental edition of the Happy half Hour because we're in the midst of a transition up here in the digital team, as you're aware of. The football team might be as well. But I have good news to share right out of the top of the show.
How about this, d L.
We are going to have a new regular on the Happy half Hour beginning very soon.
Miss Cassidy Hill is.
Joining Panthers dot Com Digital to help us write. She will be getting here next week. Here's a sick joke for you that's coming down the stretch of a season. She is coming to us from the Green Bay Press Gazette in Green Bay, Wisconsin, where she covers the Green Bay Packers. Her first game as a member of the Panthers dot Com Digital staff, we'll be against the Green Bay Packers, so I feel pretty good about the know your foe that week.
She probably knows that foe pretty well.
So we are excited to get Cassidy in here, and you guys are gonna love her. She's got an enthusiasm about her. She is has been doing this job for a while she's covered the Jaguars, she's covered the Packers. I'll let her introduce herself when she gets here, probably on this podcast in a couple of weeks. We should probably break her in Christmas week, maybe something like that.
She can tell us about packing up in the middle of the season and how her new boss is real jerk by making her drive a U haul from Green Bay, Wisconsin to Charlotte in the middle of December to come start a new job. But we're excited to get her in here. She will become a regular on the Happy half Hour, and you know, there may be all kind of other changes to the Happy half Hour. You never know, we might get that long awaited delightful beverage sponsor.
You know, I think that would be perfect.
I've got our friends downstairs working on that seems natural to me if we're gonna call this thing the half Hour.
But what do I know? So here's what I know.
There are four weeks left in the regular season, beginning with this week's game against the Atlanta Falcons. It seems like forever ago when we last saw the Atlanta Falcons, and that's because it was It was a coach a go, It was a lot of expectations ago. It was about three months ago when this season opened up. Down in the I started to call it to Georgia Dome. Oh my god, how old am I? That Building's not even there anymore. Come on there and wake up.
Have some more coffee, another delightful beverage I could use right now.
So anyway, Yes, it's been a long time since we've seen the Atlanta Falcons coming down the stretch of the air. It's weird to say, the first place Atlanta Falcons, but that's just kind of the state of this division.
And you know, that made me think.
Earlier this week in the mail bag, I pointed out just how close this Panthers team is to, you know, potentially getting back in the mix for you know, first place in a bad division.
That kind of thing.
I've joked forever that the NFC South's kind of like a trailer park and somebody's got to be the president of the hoa And that's the way it is. This year. The Falcons are six and seven, not a great team by any stretch of the imagination, but they're you know, in first in this division. But the Carolina Panthers, to put them into context with what's going on around them. They are thirtieth in the NFL in scoring this year,
averaging about fifteen point two points per game. The NFL average is between twenty one and twenty two points a game.
I think the.
Chargers are sixteenth in the league and scoring. They're averaging twenty one point seven points per game per game. So, just for the sake of this exercise, let's round up. Let's say twenty two points a game. If your Carolina Panthers scored twenty two points and only twenty two points in every single game this season, not one point more, not one point less, they would be six and seven and tied with those Atlanta Falcons for first place in
this flying division. So it just shows you if the offensive fix comes in, if they can find a coach who's able to stabilize thing, you know, it doesn't have to be that far. I know there's a lot of doom and gloom out there, and I'm familiar with the internet too. I look around and everybody's like, Oh, this team's five years away from competing. I don't really think
it has to be that way. When you think about the opportunity to make some pretty significant changes this offseason in terms of the amount of money they've got to spend on free agency, they're going to be players, and I would imagine they're going to be players for some offensive targets. I would imagine there will probably be a player for maybe some line help fortify that guard position.
And it makes sense to me when you've run through as many guards as they have this year, it's natural to want to address that area, and I think that's a possibility. So when I we pulled together that number earlier this week, it just kind of just kind of blew my mind that that's how close this team actually is.
That if you can go from being down.
Near the bottom of the rankings offensively to just the middle of the pack with what's on hand on defense, this thing could turn around pretty quickly. I truly believe that, because no matter what happens, and you know, a lot of things can change based on the preferences of the new coach who comes in here, whoever that happens to be, And we're a couple of weeks away from even thinking about what that coaching serch is gonna look like. But depending on what the next coach wants, there's a pretty
good base of talent. I mean, you begin with Derek Brown, who's playing like an absolute beast right now.
He is.
Somebody made the point to me that Cortes Kennedy was once named an NFL Defensive Player of the Year on a two and fourteen Seahawks team. I don't know that Derek's gonna win Defensive Player of the Year, but Derek's been one of the most impressive defensive players in the NFL this season, and to be able to make the kind of impact he's made on a defense where not much is going right around him on the other side of the ball has been impressive. But Derek Brown's gonna
be back next year. Shaq Thompson's gonna be back next year. The secondary is turnkey, you know, Dante, JC Vaughn, Xavier. Those guys are all under contracting back. Brian Burns is gonna be franchise tagged. I'm certain, I'm almost certain of it if they don't get a deal done prior to
free agencies. So I think you're looking at the beginnings of what could be a pretty good defense, no matter who the coach is, and then if you can make those additions on offense, you never know things could turn around, but that's to be determined at a date in the future. For right now, we're gonna continue. I've kind of gotten
into this project a little bit. We started this as a little bit of a lark of Darren trying to fill a little time in this happy half hour by letting you listen to someone other than Darren Yell at the Cloud. And I've been going to around the building talking to the support staff folks who keep up football team moving. We started with Kate Callaway, director of Performance Nutrition.
We've gone through the training room. We talked to assistant Special Teams coach Devin Fitzimmons, even though I used his government name there. Fitz told us some great Chris Tabers stories the other week, and this week I wanted to kind of get into another area that I don't think a lot of people have a clear picture of what actually happens in. I had the opportunity to sit down
and visit with Jeremy Scott. Jeremy is the head strength and conditioning coach who oversees the entire weight room operation down there for the football team, and Jeremy was good enough to share some time with me and kind of explain how they go about keeping guys ready and keeping guys strong for what is really a grind of an
NFL season, And it's pretty enlightening. I think, you know, a lot of people have this perception that NFL weight rooms just a bunch of racks of bench presses and squat racks that you know, guys are in there grinding out heavy weight and banging around, and you know, it's kind of a lab down there.
But let's let Jeremy explain this.
He's the scientist. He knows how this stuff works. So here's our conversation with Jeremy Scott. All Right, as promised head strength and conditioning coach, Jeremy Scott joins us here on the Happy half Hour. Jeremy, appreciate you taking a couple of minutes. No, it's a busy time of year.
It is a busy time of year. But I'm happy to be here and you know, get some information out to the fans and give them a little insight on what we do here and the wait when during the.
Season, Right, that's one of the first things I wanted to ask you. I mean, it's we're going into the last month of the season. People talk about the fourth quarter. How is strength training and what you do with guys here in the weight room different in December than it is in November or October, September, or even March.
So March and the off season we obviously allowed to train them a lot more, a lot more volume, a lot more days. We'll run a four day split routine with those guys during the off season. Right now, our main concern is recovery, and they're so at this point in the year, their bodies are fatigued and beat up, but we still need to lift and move and keep ranges of motion active and allow them to recover from the game. So that's probably the biggest part of what
we're trying to do right now. And if anything, we cut back a little bit of volume on the guys
that are playing a lot of reps. We get a rep count every Monday morning and who had the most reps, and we'll go down through that list and we'll kind of go over their lifting plan and talk about where we might want to cut some things out of here and wait room to kind of make up for all the action day and on Sunday, because Sundays are so violent and the contact is so crazy and the outputs are so high in terms of their running and their efforts that the biggest thing we want to do on
Mondays is kind of get them back to zero from the negative that they gave kind of put on their body,
and that's our main focus on Mondays. And then they'll lift again one other time during the week, and I'd let them choose whether that's a Wednesday or a Thursday, and that'll kind of be like on the meat and potatoes lift of the week, where we're gonna come in and you know, have an Olympic variation whatever they're comfortable doing, their main squad movement's main bench movements, shin up those types of things and beyond that second day of the week.
So right now, it's like I said, it's it's more about movement ranges of motion, keeping them active, keeping them from getting stiff, stretching them, mobility, all those types of things is our main concern.
Is it fair to say that you mentioned in March, Is it fair to say that you build strength through the off season and then it's maintenance throughout the course.
Of a four month regular season.
I never, I never looked at it. I don't like that word maintained. I don't want guys coming in here with the frame of mind that we're just kind of coming in to go through the motions and maintain strength. Every time they come in here, I want them to push themselves and you know, give effort and kind of try to you know, get stronger. You know, worst case scenario, they keep the strength at the rat So what we like to do is we run three week blocks during
the season. In those three weeks, you'll have like a moderate week of volume, a low week of volume, and a higher week of volume, and that's how we wave it throughout the whole year. So on the high volume weeks, the weight, the intensity or the weight on the bar isn't as much as it would be like in a
low volume week. And those lovel volume weeks, we tried to reach eighty percent intensity on the squad bench like those main movements, and we feel like doing that every three weeks where they touch eighty plus percent keeps them strong throughout the year. And we just did that last week and you know, everybody did pretty well with it. And we also tracked the velocity based training will track the bar speed as well. You see, are they still moving the same weight as fast as they did in September,
you know, in terms of meters per second. So we keep track of all those things.
Yeah, it's it's way deeper than number of pounds on the bar, a number of rips each guy's doing. You you had talked me through some of this with Austin Corbett's recovery from the ACL when he was in here, really in that active phase for him.
Getting back in here.
Talk about that velocity component and how big a deal that is. I mean, you guys track every number that these guys do, but I mean that that's one that I don't think a lot of people are aware of that.
You would track or keep up with.
So we utilize the gym aware technology and that's basically a TENDO unit, and there's a bunch of different ones out there, but we feel this one that we attached to the iPad gives us the best information that we
can have and it just measures the bar speed. So if a guy's moving let's say four hundred and five pounds on the squad at point eight meters per second in September, and you know, if we put that on the bar now and it's point five, then we see how the fatigue is set in and his ability to produce force has been affected by the game and the
accumulation of everything that goes on during the season. But it allows us to kind of self regulate where we have the certain rep schemes, the certain weights that we want them to use, but we also have the speeds that coordinate with those weights, and if they can't hit those speeds, we will lighten the weights up to make
sure that they hit those speeds. So it's kind of like a self autoregulatory process with the central nervous system that if we have a certain weight on the bar and the guy played a lot and is just shot, then this speed will tell us that he's shot, and we'll adjust the weights from there to get them up
to the speeds that we want them at. So let's say, like I said, at four h five is move and slow, then we'll drop the weight to try to get them up to the same point eight for you know, just as the number thrown out there, and we'll adjust the weights they get them back up to that speed. Because the speed of the movements really what we're focused on right now.
And you know how the movement pattern looks you know, this is how's the squad look, you know, because a lot of guys, you know, if if they're not looking good on the warm upsets, you're not gonna look good on them. We're starting to add the weight, so we
always keep that in mind as well. So and we also have a lot of modifications so we'll make with the guys during the year, you know, to your point with you know, a guy that maybe started off to your squatting and now does a belt squad because say it's taking an alignment for example, because his low back is so shot and the knees are sore and those
types of things. So, you know, mister and missus Stepper have given us the opportunity, you know, with Fit and Down to get all this equipment that we need to kind of train around all these injuries that we see during the year.
And that's one of the things that is kind of amazing.
I think people have this perception in their mind of what a weight room looks like, but this looks like a computer lab attached to a weight rec I mean, everything in here is is regulated, calculated, documented. I mean that's the data component of this. To me, seems like the thing that nobody realized what's going on. This is not a guy walking around the gym carrying his clipboard with him writing down.
Number our rips.
This is this is science.
It is science, and you can ignore it. And you know, shoot, when I started, I was back at Pennstane in ninety six, that we don't have any of this right right, but the ability to track guys, to see the speeds that they're moving at things, they get them on the force plates during the week. We have them to do nord board, which is any centric hamstring monitor, so we can see you know, any fatigue and the hamstrings fatigue and their jumps, their ability to jump, their ability to absorb force as
that kind of goes down during the year. It just allows us. It's another tool that allow us to make the adjustments we need to kind of, you know, get them back. I always use the word move the needle in the right direction, you know what I mean. And that's our main focus right now. So like the other modalities that we have, you know that we're seeing right
now is a lot of party. Like again, I always go back through the line because they're in a battle every play, so sometimes their first lift of the week or training session, will do it in the pool, you know, unload the joints, get them in there. There's a compression with being in the water to kind of help flush out all the you know, the byproducts are playing in the game. So we'll utilize the pool a lot during this year as well.
Yeah, is there a misconception that you think people have about what happens in that weight room in there that doesn't match up the reality of what you guys do today today.
I think everybody just thinks it's always like heavy squats and heavy bench and it's not. You know, you can't come in here and just can continually beat down, you know, their muscle scalable system in here with everything else they're having to deal with. It's not just games, you know, and either's practice. There's player loads that are in practice, and you know, it's not it's not like they don't do anything during the week. So there's that accumulation going
way back to it. You can even go back to oks if you want, but especially during August, there's a lot of accumulation on their bodies right now. So what we're doing here again is that the main thing is movement. Want them to move well, so again with all the modifications that we have the ability to make in here, I think that's you know, the misconception that it's kind of like the grassroots train training. Well, we have to utilize a lot of other things because a lot of
guys don't have the ability to squad anymore. They struggle with some of the Olympic variations that we do, so we have things for them for that, like med ball work and those types of things. We have a furnomax. So everything we try to do right now is train them hard, train smart, but everything is trying to be joint friendly at this point in time because we still feel like their ability to come in here, you know, and move the weights we want to move is important.
Even with three weeks left, it's still important. So it's not like we get to the point where we stop training. And I think the other thing that we get that I didn't mention before with the gymalware technology is creates intent and it creates competitiveness where guys might be working out on the same rack and you might see someone move a weight at a certain speed, Well, the next guy's going to try to move that way to certain speed.
So it kind of keeps it interesting with the guys, and it kind of helps us with the culture and the environment that we want here. Were guys are pushing each other and competing, so that never changes, you know, that's always the same guys. You can kind of get on them another, and that's what we want.
Yeah, it's an environment in here. It absolutely is.
I mean, and you see when guys are in here, especially during the off season, if guys recovering from an injury or something, that pushing each other is a pretty important component of what you do here.
Yeah, it is. And I always looked at this place as like their refuge because you know, there's there's no cameras in here. It's just them being themselves and being around their teammates and pushing themselves to get better. And I always thought, you know, you know, champions and championships are one when no one's watching, and that's basically what the weight room is. You know, there's just them and us and their coaches and they're solving here together kind
of pushing one another. So I think I love the atmosphere these guys come in with. You know what, you know, we're talking about misconceptions. You know, there might be that misconception out there that you know, when you make a team the NFL, then they don't train as hard. You know. I've heard that when I was in college, and that's I couldn't be further from the truth, especially here. You know, these guys come in they're no business like, take care
of their stuff. They understand the importance of it, and well, you know, they're making their living with their bodies, so they understand the importance of everything that we do. And I'm really happy with the mindset they always come in here with, you know, especially you know we're having a rough year, but they're still coming in here and pushing one another and continually trying to get better. And I think that's what pays off it, you know, at the end of the.
Day, no doubt, no doubt. Now tell me how long you've been with the Carolina Panthers.
This is my fourth season. Previously it's twenty four years. At the college level, so I started at Penn State. Then my first head strength job was at Temple University, and then I was at Baylor University and now here.
So what's the biggest difference in dealing with an eighteen year old college body and a twenty five to thirty year old NFL body.
Well, the eighteen year olds can recover really quick, you know what I mean. You could basically beat them down wherever you want, they're going to recover. So that's probably the biggest difference, quite honestly. But as the you know, the guys get older, and obviously the biggest difference is we're dealing with mature professional guys that I again understand the importance of making their living with their bodies. So
they're going to do all the things. They're going to get the soft tissue work, they're going to get the massages, they're gonna use a lot of the modalities that we have here like the red light therapy and the dry floating and those types of things, you know, to take care of themselves. So that's probably the biggest difference quite honestly.
Yeah, how old would a football player need to be to benefit from getting in a weight room. I mean, I'm sure that's a big topic with you players and stuff like that. How young can you be and still get the benefit of strength training.
Well, I think you could. You could start fairly early. And again it's all about movement. You're not going to you know, put a thousand pounds on a new year old's back or anything like that. But like, you know, basic movement patterns or basic movement patterns. So like my son is thirteen, you know, and I already have him doing a lot of things, you know. But again, it's just about the movement. It's not about the weight. So I wouldn't be afraid to train kids as long as
you know you're being smart with what they're doing. You know, they're they're pretty you know, at that age, they can move pretty well. You know, they haven't had the rigors of anything else on their body, so their ranges of motion are pretty crazy. But I think it could benefit everybody, you know, as long as you're smart how you're going about it.
Yeah, And that's the key of what's going on in here. I think of anything I've learned and being around this staff and the people trying to keep all these people together, it's.
The being smart about it.
I mean, everything down here is very intentional, it's very measured, it's very calculated. It's a big job keeping a football team strong and ready for a seventeen game season.
You guys have done a good job with it.
I appreciate that. And I think the biggest thing is the communication with the players. You know, they have ownership over what they do too, so we'll always have the conversations with them. If they don't feel like doing that this week for whatever reason, hey let's do this instead.
So it's not like they're ever getting out of anything, but we will make adjustments where they're going to train the same way, but maybe use something different, you know, And for sake of argument, if a guy's shoulders are beat up, will put them on a chest press machine instead of making them do dumbelt and a barbell bench.
So little things like that. I think that helps guys understand that we're here to take care of them and we'll work with them, and they'll work with us and try to get the best results as we can, you know, during the course of the year.
Yeah, very good, Jeremy. I appreciate you taking a few minutes. No, it's a busy day down here.
I appreciate you coming in, man, keep.
Bounding there we go all right.
I don't know about you, but I'm ready to go lift heavy things, maybe flip a car over, something like that. Every time I come out of Jeremy's office or walk past the weight room.
I feel like Hans and Franz, I want to pomp you up.
There's your dated pop culture reference from Darren this week. That's about what DL's over here behind the board right now. That's probably what a thirty year old pop culture reference Kevin Nelan, Dana Carvey, Saturday Night Live.
Hans and Franz, what are going to pomp you up?
So anyway, that's what you people came here for, dated pop culture references.
Those are my specialty.
Fortunately, Jeremy Scott's specialty is something far more important to a football operation, so we appreciate him taking a few minutes to visit with us. We will continue this exercise
at points in the future. I will figure out who I'm gonna talk to at some point in the next week before we have a chance to visit again, and very soon when we visited again, as I mentioned in the top of the podcast, we will be joined by my new BFF, Cassidy Hill, who is en route from the frozen tundra to the unfrozen tundra off Bank of America Stadium. And oh, by the way, it's still Bank
of America Stadium. That's this week's big news. Or our friends at Bank of America had decided to continue their relationship with this organization. So that's great because it means I don't have to learn another new thing, and as we all know, when Darren has to learn new things, things get messed up. So anyway, we appreciate you guys visiting with us, We appreciate Jeremy Scott sharing a little bit of his time, and we will see you next week or a Christmas week edition. Maybe would that be
a Christmas week edition. It's leading into a Christmas Eve game, so we'll call it the Christmas Eve edition of the Happy Half Hour. I don't know, you never know. We may have eggnog. We'll see, but we'll see you next week. Thanks for joining us.