Cincinnati Bearcat Olympics: Tug of War INTENSITY

What do you get when you put a shopping cart on sled rails, a 100 LB bag of sand, a 100 yard field on a summer morning and Calvin Johnson?

100% bad-ass-ness

To set the stage, when we ran 110’s in the off season, skill players would get 14 seconds, medium skill 16, line 18.

For anybody that’s ever tried this drill, it’s one of the hardest things you’ll ever do. You have to keep the rails of the “sled” on the ground by pushing straight ahead, not up or down or you lose speed. The sled had a 100 LB bag of sand in it.

This is sometimes one element of our summer competition, other times just a conditioning/mental toughness drill.

Before before his junior year, Calvin Johnson showed up with the rest of us, went through our 2 hours of conditioning (bag drills, pro agility etc) and then promptly jumped into the first group of cart pushers while the rest of us sucked eggs trying to catch our breath so we could turn in our best time.

The man pushed the cart 100 yards in 15 seconds. I don’t know of another human on the planet that could match that effort if they practiced just that drill for a year straight.

our competitions were always filmed for the preseason highlight tapes