In the Franklin Community High School weight room, sounds of barbells being lifted and the grunts and chatter of about 80 students fill the air.
The students are in weights class, which focuses on speed, strength and mobility, and is the result of a two-year-old partnership between Franklin Schools and JoCo Fitness, a gym on the north side of the city. That partnership will continue for at least another three years, as the school and JoCo Fitness recently reached a contract extension agreement.
With that extra time, Franklin head strength and conditioning coach Mike Hart hopes to expand weights classes to the middle school, which currently has athletes participating in the after-school strength and conditioning program, he said.
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JoCo Fitness will be paid $150,000 over the course of those three years with money that would have gone towards nursing services at the district. Johnson Memorial Health has paid for those services since 2015.
Since January 2017, Franklin students, predominantly those on sports teams, have been training under a different regimen than in years past, when workouts were more centered on strength, wrestling coach Bob Hasseman said.
Franklin Superintendent David Clendening reached out to Hart, the co-owner of JoCo Fitness, to lead workouts at the high school with Hasseman and football coach Chris Coll.
Colby Welch, a junior on the football team, said the workouts add to his speed and endurance, not just his strength.
“It’s definitely helped me gain strength, there’s the speed aspect (and) I’ve gotten more athletic,” Welch said. “It gives you that mentality that you gotta go harder.
“When I was a freshman (before JoCo Fitness), it was a lot more powerlifting and getting stronger. This program helps me get faster and stronger.”
Under the program, workouts have gone from being focused just on strength to also being focused on speed and movement, Hasseman said.
“We’ve gone from a powerlifting program to an athletic-based lifting program,” Hasseman said. “We’re training kids to be better athletes, adding movement lifts along with power lifts. Mike (Hart) does a good job of incorporating single-joint exercises that are more athletic-based in my opinion, adding long jumps and box jumps (and) individual left and right movements.
“The bottom line is we want kids to get bigger, faster and stronger.”
Each week of weight class is divided to focus on different parts of the body. On Tuesdays, student do lower body workouts. Students might do a workout consisting of squats, hip movements, broad jumping and box jumping, for which students jump up onto a large cube and jump off. Wednesdays focus on the upper body, and students might be seen doing bench presses, rows and working with medicine balls, Coll said.
While most of the students in weight classes are athletes, senior Katie Wood said she was inspired to join not because of a team, but because of her brother.
“My older brother, who’s two years older than me, was in weights and said ‘it’s a lot more fun than the gym,’” Wood said. “It helped me in a lot of ways. I’ve seen a significant increase in my strength. It’s helped me with body awareness and to become more of an athlete.”
The high school has five weights classes totaling about 350 students, who can take them as electives. While the high school is the only school in the district with these classes, both high school and middle school students can partake in the after-school program, which is more focused on the needs of student-athletes in terms of the sport they compete in. Middle school workouts are less intensive than those for high school students, mostly focusing on weight room safety and how to increase range of motion before moving on to weights, Hart said.
“We’re not trying to make these kids super-athletes in six weeks,” Hart said. “From 7{sup}th{/sup} grade to senior year, it’s a (year-by-year) progression.”
