John Thomas, the Penn State strength and conditioning coach, is seated at his desk in the Louis E. Lasch Football Building, where the team's expansive new weight room is located. Out in the room, several players go from machine to machine, as if they are being sent down an assembly line at a factory to be fashioned into football androids.

Thomas, or J.T. as everyone calls him, knows the nature of the questions because he's heard them before. He also knows that the perception about his program, an evolved version of the one Dan Riely originally implemented in the 1970's, is that it is out of date and does not adequately build players. As a result, Thomas intensely but patiently explains what Penn State players do, and maybe more importantly, don't do.

"Our goal is the same as Nebraska's (an Olympic-style program). . .we just take different roads to get there," Thomas said. "If you are looking at two exercises and you can get the same results either way, and one has a higher risk of injury, I'm always going to do the safer one."

The dangerous exercises he refers to are mainstream power lifting maneuvers such as squats, snatches, cleans and jerks which his players do not do. Instead, Penn State players train primarily with machines, which is one of the biggest complaints about the system. It also helps to perpetuate the misconception that HIT trainees do not use free weights at all. Indeed, the Nittany Lions have a rack of free weights running the length of the room and plenty of equipment geared toward free weight lifts.

The workouts, however, tend more to focus on machines because Thomas, among others, believes that Olympic-style lifts put excessive strain on the joints and back and are not best suited for football players since they are just that: football players and not competitive lifters.

"We have two goals for strength training," Thomas said. "One: Injury prevention. In my opinion, anyone that doesn't have injury prevention as number one is mistaken. Our second goal is improving performance."

Thomas makes the point that both of these goals are emphasized, which dispels the myth that HIT training does not hold increased strength as a goal simply because they do not throw around large dumbbells.

The biggest disparity between what goes on in a HIT program compared with an Olympic style program is the set and repetition numbers for each exercise.

HIT follows a philosophy known as overload progression, in which the lifter performs an exercise for ideally eight to 12 reps (although again, this is not a fixed number) or until "momentary muscular failure," using the heaviest weight possible.

For example, freshman offensive lineman Charles Rush hits the weight room around 9 a.m. on a Sunday morning. Thomas or one of his numerous assistants is ready for him with a chart showing all of Rush's information. After a short warm-up, Rush and a partner begin their actual lifts.

Consider the bench press. Whoever is leading Rush through his workout (there is never less than a 2-to-1 ratio between trainer and trainee) loads the bar for Rush based on what he did last time, a weight he can lift himself between eight and 12 times.

Rush then begins to lift, pushing the bar up and letting it back down over a four-count period. He does this on his own as long as he can. Then, when his muscles begin to fail, his trainer takes the bar and helps him finish off the set. If there comes a point where Rush cannot lift the bar at all, the trainer will help him lift it and tell Rush to let the bar drop as slowly as possible to his chest. This is called negative resistance.

"You've got to be able to dig down deep if you want to train with HIT," said former Penn State linebacker and current New York Giant Brandon Short, who still trains in a HIT style. "That has really helped me at this level, the mental toughness I learned at school."

Rush is still not done, however, as he must put the bar back and take the trainers hands, who presses down and offers more controlled resistance. Rush must keep his hands close together and prevent the trainer from pushing them down, a similar motion to the bench press.

Unlike in an Olympic lifting program, where strength is measured by the quantity a person can lift (his max), HIT proponents consider a player stronger when he can lift the bar one more time than he did last time. The weight on Rush's bench press will be increased when he is not experiencing muscular failure at his current weight.

This nullifies one of the biggest misconceptions about HIT, which is that players are merely doing many reps with low weights.

These personalized charts may mark drastically different weights but, in general, they deal with the same series of exercises, regardless of position.

Variations do exist, such as quarterbacks not bench pressing during the season or modified workouts for injured players, but for the most part all Nittany Lions suffer the same toils. Thomas feels that position specificity is overrated. In other words, he does not believe a lineman doing power cleans is making an identical motion to the action on a football field. A power clean won't help him explode off the line, practice will.

Thomas' beliefs are echoed by other coaches.

"If a power clean is supposed to improve coming off the ball, then coming off the ball should improve a power clean," said Ken Mannie, Michigan State strength and conditioning coach, which operates its own HIT program.

Thomas and his staff believe their mission is to make an athlete stronger in the gym and then let position coaches work on applying that strength to the player's on-field skills.

Perhaps what Thomas is most ardent about stressing is that what determines a player's success or failure in the weight room is not what exercises a strength coach prescribes but rather the players' level of dedication. This is especially true of a HIT workout, where players are asked to press beyond discomfort and give everything they have for the 45 minutes or hour they are working with Thomas.

"Everybody's got their own level of intensity," Thomas said. "Everybody's got their own pain threshold, we try to increase that."

Regardless of what Penn State's critics say, Thomas' colleagues support the validity of his program.

"Penn State is year-in and year-out one of the biggest, strongest, toughest teams we line up against. . .Any team I talk to, I don't care if it's HIT or a more traditional style, will agree," Mannie said.