Below is a picture of us training at De Francos Gym with a host of professional sportsmen. We found this trip to be a real eye opener to how the top American players train compared to people this side of the world. Below are BIG STRONG FAST men!(including us!!!)
We have long been admirers of De Francos methods and when we finally got to his Gym we were in awe of the calibre of guys he has trained. The Gym is just as it looks on youtube – hardcore and full of strong guys. The walls are littered with Professionals Jerseys and motivational things like the record board. All the guys were very friendly and we were looking forward to the session ahead.
The first part of our session was our warm up which focused on many mobility exercises which really loosened us up. We did numerous med ball exercises and some jumps. We thought having played professional sport ourselves that our vertical jump scores would be good! We were poor in relation to what these guys could jump!
After completion of our warm up we moved on to our main session which was all geared towards strength work. Our trainer was an ex baseball player Mike Guandango. He emphasised before we started that it would be a mix of learning/training. First up was Bench Press with Bands which we loved, we lifted more than usual(maybe due to being surrounded by Pros with the music pumping). After 5 sets of this we next did Finger Pull Ups which were torture on the Forearms!! We felt good doing this as we could do similar to the Pros on this exercise! We next did some external rotation work with bands before Mike showed us some new drills on the ropes.
We finished with the prowler, we have one at our Gym but hadnt used it for a while so it was a shock to the system to sprint with it again!
Mike gave us some valuable tips on training athletes and told us to watch the rest of the guys train for as long as we wanted, an offer we took him up on and stayed there for a full three hours!!
We talked to Mike about a future visit and we will definatly be back some day!!
