New Miami Hurricanes baseball weight room has equipment you've never heard of, with Frankenhypers and velocity based devices
For a decent chunk of the fall, the Miami Hurricanes baseball team’s workout center was more than a football field’s walk from the diamond. With the baseball weight room under construction, the team took to the Hecht Athletic Center for its workouts.
That changed about a month ago.
That’s when the revamped state-of-the-art weight room opened. It features 2,800 square feet of space, up from 900 square feet (and ironically located almost directly across from the famous and very fattening milkshake stand), 30 yards of turf, 5 custom Sorinex power racks, 5 Gymaware velocity based training devices, 3 Proteus motion units, 3 custom Sorinex Frankenhypers, 3 custom Keiser functional trainers, 2 sets of Hawkin Dynamics force plates and over 10,000 pounds of custom Sorinex dumbbells and bumper plates.
If some of that sounds like a foreign language to you, well you’re not alone.
“There’s a lot of new technology in there, stuff I’ve never heard of,” OF/DH Ian Farrow says.
The guy who has heard of the stuff? That’s Miami strength coach H.R. Powell. Talking with him, well, you can sense his excitement.
He says what used to take all day to get the entire team through its workout paces can now take as little as two hours since there’s more room for players.
“We really kind of upped the technology in this place to a whole new level,” Powell said. “Maybe the most technologically advanced weight room in the country for baseball.”
Powell says the “most talked about” new items is the aforementioned Proteus.
“That is a piece of equipment that essentially can train any movement you can imagine with resistance, and constant resistance at that,” Powell said. “For rotational athletes, that’s been something that’s been really difficult to do. This machine has mastered the ability to take that training to the next level.”
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As for those “Frankenhypers” in the Miami weight room?
“That’s a glute/ham training device that strengthens the posterior train of the athletes,” Powell says.
If that’s TMI, well, too bad.
“I don’t know where they got that name from,” Powell said. “It’s because it does so many things, has taken so many pieces of equipment and turned it into one (ala a Frankenstein).”
Want to know about the Gymaware velocity based training devices?
Ah, Powell is glad you asked.
“The velocity based training allows us to program training loads more smartly, in real time,” Powell said. “What is 70 percent for an individual athlete last week vs. this week, it may change based off how they recover. Sometimes those numbers will be higher, lower. What it looks at is how fast you move the bar an determines what the 70 percent would be for that day working out. It’s really good for recovery and keeping our athletes healthy and ultimately getting rid of that one rep max old school way of programming loads for each training session.”
Yes, the workouts are tailored to the individual based on position and body type.
“We call it rehab, strength and conditioning (in the facility),” Powell said.
Powell says the feedback so far from Miami players is that “they all absolutely love it.”
“When they walked in, the look on their faces – it’s been a gamechanger for us,” Powell said. “That’s for sure.”