Matt Gildersleeve had been a collegiate head strength and conditioning coach for half a dozen years before he got the chance to design a weight room from scratch. It came during his two years at the University of Buffalo, and he was ready. A career spent keeping tabs on technologies and trends had, at the very least, prepared him to live up to his personal goal if given such an opportunity: “Don’t fall on your face.”
“We designed it top to bottom,” says Gildersleeve, who arrived at Buffalo after seven years at Akron, where he earned a master’s degree in sports science and coaching principles before ascending to head strength and conditioning coach for the Zips. “I mean, the water fountains, the electrical outlets, the equipment itself, the layout.”
And then, before he or anyone else had even turned the lights on, he left.
That’s because an even bigger opportunity beckoned at the University of Kansas, where a brand-new weight room — influenced from day one by Gildersleeve’s newly minted design experience — debuted in August. Suddenly unfettered by the sort of budget limitations encountered by Mid-American Conference athletic departments, Gildersleeve recalls that first meeting with an architect assigned to KU’s so-called Gateway Project, of which the weight room would be an integral part. “He said, ‘If this weight room was a car, what car would you want it to be?’ And we said a blacked-out Ford F-150. It looks nice, but at the end of the day, it’s a work truck, and it’s here to get things done. That was kind of the mindset we had as we approached it.”
Here’s a look inside the new KU facility, which Gildersleeve says, at a relatively modest 15,000 square feet, is “absolutely in the conversation” of top weight rooms in the country.
Efficiency and effectiveness
For Gildersleeve, the Jayhawk football program’s director of sports performance since 2021, when he followed Buffalo head football coach Lance Leipold to Lawrence, it all starts with the two “E’s.”
“Anything that we’re going to train our athletes with, is it effective? Yes or no? Is it efficient? Yes or no? It’s got to meet both those marks,” he says, adding that even the most effective piece of equipment makes little sense if there aren’t enough units to efficiently serve a roster of 100 football players. “The biggest difference in this weight room is we have so much of everything. How we program and how we train the guys is totally different now. Now we’re at the point where we have the things that are more effective, and we have enough of them to where it’s also more efficient than what we were doing before.”
Gildersleeve, a tight end for Mount Union’s 2008 Division III national champions, cites as one example the reverse hyper machine, a specialty piece of equipment that facilitates lower-back traction exercises for posterior chain development. “It’s something I’ve always believed in,” he says. “It’s just that at Buffalo, we had two. When I was at Akron, we had two. When I got here, we had one. We have eight of them now. We did them this morning as a team. The whole group rolled through reverse hypers, and we did them in a matter of a five-minute block — whereas before, that’s literally impossible. You just can’t program with it.”
At Akron, Gildersleeve had four Tendo Units, devices that measure the speed of barbell movement. “I would literally be sprinting around the weight room, setting them up on one rack, and then I wanted to get to the velocity of another one, so I’d sprint down the weight room and set it up on another,” he says. “Well, now we have 24.”
For more universal weight room must-haves — racks — the disparities are equally obvious.
“There’s high-low cable pulleys at every single rack,” Gildersleeve says. “Before, once again, at Akron, I think we had four when I was there. At Buffalo, we had two. We have 16 now.”
The resulting time savings can’t be over-emphasized, according to Gildersleeve. “In season, especially, football and film and those kinds of things are going to take up most of the time the NCAA allows us to have,” he says. “In the weight room, we don’t get much time. We had a 45-minute block to train the team this morning, and what we can get done now in that 45-minute block… Every single rack has a dumbbell set at it. Every rack has five different pole variations at it. Every single rack has what’s called EliteForm, which is a sport science piece of tracking equipment, at it. Like I said, every rack has a high-low pulley system at it. So, the guys don’t need to move. They can just get everything they need to get done right there, and just cutting down on that transition time saves us 10s of minutes every single session. That part’s been tremendous.”
In addition to those 16 racks, Gildersleeve specified eight additional full (front and back) “mega” racks for specialized training use. “We have special accessories on those for positional-specific training,” he says. “You’ll see a different kind of pullup attachment — it’s a handle attachment that rotates, so guys who have shoulder problems, who maybe can’t do regular chin-ups, can do them there. It’s got these things called jammer arms, so a lot of quarterbacks, a lot of O-line, D-line guys who have a lot of striking in their position can do variation training. We designed 16 of them to be the main 16, and those are going to be the ones we use every time we train. The back eight are always going to be set up for specialty things.”
He adds that sessions feature a maximum of three athletes on a rack, with no more than 30 players per lift group. The workflow is further facilitated by another rack customization that equipment supplier Rogers Athletic had never installed before. Instead of the typical one foot of space allotted for spotters behind the bench and barbell, Gildersleeve asked Rogers to provide double the room. “We expanded that out to two feet, so by having 330-pound guys squeeze in and squeeze out in even quicker transitions we increased the speed of our workouts.”
Some options on the F-150
Gildersleeve takes the F-150 metaphor seriously, right down to the specification of gray on a 30-by-15-yard swath of synthetic turf that leads to a 20-yard sprint incline. (He also employs a 1080 Sprint, which measures such things as an athlete’s acceleration, top velocity and differences in force applied by either leg when sprinting.)
But he also understands the importance of weight room aesthetics, and his new truck does feature some of those bells and whistles, too.
“We weren’t going to get all caught up in the glitz and glam stuff, and I get that that’s important. We had one goal with the aesthetics of this room. We wanted to create an environment where we make it easier for guys to make good decisions, and we make it very uncomfortable for them to make poor decisions.”
The walls feature what Gildersleeve calls the program’s cultural blueprint, inspirational messaging of core values specific to University of Kansas football. “The things on our walls are extremely intentional,” he says. “It’s definitions. It’s quotes, but it’s not just random ‘iron sharpens iron.’ You hear our head football coach address our football team, you’re probably going to hear him say about six of the seven things in this weight room on a daily basis.”
The Jayhawks logo, sometimes referred to as War Hawk, appears in weight room flooring, and on dumbbells and bumper plates. “We have a giant War Hawk head that lights up and can strobe or can go blue or red. So, there are some impressive things in here from an architectural standpoint,” says Gildersleeve, who hasn’t even fully test-driven the room’s LED capabilities. “If we want to do a St. Patty’s Day lift, we can literally turn this whole room green. We can make the War Hawk head green, we can make the pillars green, we can make the lights glowing out of the ceiling green. There’s so much variation of what you can do, which is very cool. But, for us, things that we focus more on, those things on the walls, when I think of aesthetics, my brain goes there first.”
Circling back to those initial face-to-face encounters with architects, Gildersleeve recalls another question. “There’s a handful of us in this meeting, but they say, ‘Coach, what do you need in this weight room?’ And I’m like, ‘Guys, I was a head strength coach in the MAC for seven years before we got here. This is my 10th year as a head strength coach, and being in the MAC, we learned to get a lot of good results out of very minimal resources, so we don’t need a lot. Now, what do we want? What would we like? Those are two totally different equations.’
“And the best part about this is we got everything we wanted, which is tremendous, because the best part is coming up in this industry the way that we did — and I say we, I mean I played D-III football, Coach Leipold played D-III, coached D-III football, a lot of guys on our staff started that way, too — is you learn to be able to do a lot with a little. And, so, it’s up to us. When you have the opportunity to do a lot with a lot, the sky’s the limit. I feel like we really reached that with this room in all facets.”
Want Versus Need
When Matt Gildersleeve didn’t have force plates at his disposal before his arrival at the University of Kansas in 2021, he devised ways to mimic the technology.
The coach explains, “A guy would do a pause squat, and he’d have a med ball in his hand. He’d pause at the bottom for three seconds, so the tendon was totally out of the movement. He’d throw the ball up in the air as high as he could. As soon as the ball left his hands, I had a stopwatch going, and I would time it until it hit the ground. And then I’d have him do it fast — down fast, up fast. Then I’d have him drop off a box and do it. And I would take those numbers, and I’d create a ratio. If they had a certain ratio, and it told me, ‘Hey, this guy’s got really good twitch, but he needs more strength,’ then I’d train him that way. And vice versa. ‘Hey, this guy’s got really good strength, but he doesn’t have much twitch,’ then he would go into this other bucket. Even though we didn’t have a force plate, in my mind, I wanted to create a program that got us as close to that kind of training environment as humanly possible.”
That’s not to say that eight force plates, each of which analyzes 77 variables in athlete performance, don’t make his job at Kansas easier. “It’s night and day,” he says.
At the same time, Gildersleeve fights the idea that training technology could make him or anyone in his profession soft.
“In my estimation, if you need those things to train athletes and make them better, you’re not a very good strength coach,” he says. “Now, is having those things beneficial? One thousand percent. Will it help us move the needle of this program forward? Absolutely, unequivocally yes. But to sit there and go, ‘You need those things to be successful,’ I mean, shoot. Especially in our culture and the way we talk about things, give us a barbell, a set of bumpers and some dumbbells, we’ll get bigger, faster and stronger. We’re going to find a way to make it happen. Even though we have all these things now, we’re not going to lose that gritty mindset, that edge, and sit there and think that we need a frickin’ castle to get things done.
“But I will say this, it is sure nice to have these things. We’re in uncharted territory. Things we’ve never been able to do before, we’re now able to do, and that will make a huge difference in the development of our athletes and our program.”
