Stories trickle back from the Midwest. Tales of quarterbacks that clean 300 pounds. Tales of offensive linemen that can bench press 500 pounds without breaking a sweat. Stories that tell of a better way.

For the most part, these stories have their genesis at Lincoln, Neb., a city whose population swells to become the largest in the state when the Cornhuskers play football on Saturdays. It is where the first college football weight room was installed in 1967, where the original dumbbells now sit behind velvet ropes. Inside the West Stadium Strength Complex strength and conditioning coach Boyd Eply runs a thriving Olympic-style training program that has produced some of the largest physical specimens to strap on pads.

"We're going to take an athlete, and we're going to make him bigger, faster and stronger and by doing so, improve his performance," says Eply, the Nebraska strength coach. "Power is the component we're after. We want guys with natural explosiveness, and then we make them stronger."

Power, when most strength coaches use the word, refers to the ability not only to lift heavy objects (strength) but to do it at high velocity (explosiveness).

Which is why schools such as Nebraska train its players using Olympic-style methods. Clearly, football is a game of explosiveness. The very nature of the contest characterizes it that way: game play is based on short spurts of activity, during which a player is exerting all the force he can. Then he gets a 30-second break before he does it again, or he goes to the sideline for a few minutes rest.

"You've got to take into account what a sport is comprised of," says Derek Shore, a strength trainer in the Philadelphia Phillies system, who works in Canada during the off-season. "Football is a power-based sport. It requires acceleration and strength. You've got to gear up to be explosive for short spurts."

Force equals acceleration times mass. This concept is central to why Olympic-style trainers employ the methods they do. They want players to be explosive in the weight room so that it carries over onto the field.

Sport specificity is a relatively new, but simple, concept that has taken over the strength-training community. Bluntly stated, mainstream trainers believe a workout regiment should mimic the action on the field. Accordingly, a baseball player would not include bench press in his routine, since he rarely, if ever, makes that motion on the baseball field. Instead, he would concentrate on core movements in his hips, the muscles he uses to turn quickly on a pitch.

That is not to say that an action in the weight room can somehow replace practice or duplicate a skill.

"You must take into account what you are training for," says University of Pittsburgh strength coach Buddy Morris. "It's scientifically proven that if you train slow, you'll be slow."

Morris is referring to the HIT practice of restraining from explosive free-weight movements in favor of controlled motions based on constant resistance.

A very generalized Olympic-style program consists of four days a week, cycling through a period of concentration on strength and a concentration on speed. Eply explained that his program trains slow (with high weights and low reps) and explosively (less weight with more bar speed) for two days each.

Morris said the Panthers train dynamically, emphasizing strength speed on Monday and Tuesday, and speed strength on Thursday and Friday.

Monday, a Pittsburgh player will do limited sets of bench press with weight close to his one rep max. Tuesday, he will do the same with squat. Morris refers to these as max effort days. Other exercises are filled in to work the rest of the body.

Thursday, the player will reduce his bench press significantly (by as much as 50 percent) and work more on bar speed and moving the weight at higher velocity for more sets. The same happens the next day with squat.

Simply stated, the program operates on a cycle between intensity (heavy weights) and volume (amount of sets and reps).

Both Nebraska and Pittsburgh rely on cycles throughout their training. It not only varies throughout the week, but it is periodized so that an athlete performs a different regimen every two to three weeks.

"The body adapts to any stimulation after a while," said Morris. "So you've got to change the stimulation after a while."

Olympic style programs rely primarily on free weights as opposed to the machines used in HIT. The main argument for this is that free weights force a lifter to support the whole weight using various smaller, stabilizing muscles in his body.

"When you work out on a machine, you're operating in just one plane," said Morris. "But you play in multiple planes. Machines do part of the work for you."

Eply stated it a different way.

"If you take a kid and put him on a machine, you're taking him out of his playing element," he said. "If he's sitting down, he's in the wrong situation."

HIT advocates machine use because they allow the lifter to perform more controlled motions, reducing tension on tendons and joints.

This is one source of criticism about mainstream programs, with detractors saying it is unsafe and puts undue pressure on the player's joints and back from the jerking motions required to perform the lifts. This is further emphasized by the fact that power-lifting exercises often rely on momentum, which is a necessary result of the highly explosive manner in which the moves are done.

However, coaches such as Morris and Jeff Madden, the strength and conditioning coach at Texas, which has its own Olympic-style program that incorporates elements of HIT in the off-season, believe that the risks of explosive movements can be minimized.

"We do fundamental lifting, we do momentum drills, we think we do injury prevention also," Madden said.

He employs a staff of 10 assistants, and believes that they can properly supervise Texas players to make sure the athletes follow proper technique.

"Ever time you step on the field there's a chance you're going to get hurt. You're pushing the body. It's the nature of the beast," Morris said. "To say that power-lifting is going to cause injury, that's just bullshit. Pardon my language. If it's done right, it's perfectly safe. And our guys never attempt a heavy lifts unless one of us is watching."

But like HIT advocates, Eply, Morris and Madden know that the program can only go so far.

"No matter what, your kids have got to have high energy and work ethic," Eply said. "The best way to get results is for your players to go all out no matter what system they're using."