The Gridiron Warrior Podcast – “Load Management, Practice Design, and Keeping Your Team Healthy” with Coach Joel Reinhardt

In this episode, I sit down with Coach Joel Reinhardt, Director of Football Performance at Lafayette College, to break down one of the most misunderstood parts of coaching: load management and practice design.

We talk about how to balance reps without losing detail, how to keep athletes healthy through the entire season, how to structure weekly practice flow, and why monotony is the real silent killer in football. If you coach a team at any level, this conversation will sharpen how you build your week.

👇 Timestamps

00:00 – Welcome to the Gridiron Warrior Podcast

00:29 – Why TrainHeroic is the platform I use for programming

01:12 – The 90-day free trial + two 12-week programs offer

01:56 – Why the Plyomat is a game-changer for jump testing

03:02 – Introducing Coach Joel Reinhardt

03:30 – Joel’s background: Springfield → Nicholls → UMass → Stanford → San Jose → Lafayette

04:34 – Coaching as a lifestyle and why Joel loves the yearly rhythm

05:42 – Why neither of us could survive a normal 9-to-5

06:44 – The balance of family, hours, and college football life

08:00 – Having kids, dogs, and real life inside the weight room

09:18 – Being fired, bouncing back, and coaching resilience

10:11 – Load management: what it actually means

11:13 – Joel’s guiding question for weekly load

12:00 – The goal: maximize game-intensity reps without losing freshness

13:07 – The “game load” model: 2.75–3.25 units per week

14:11 – Using practice time as the simplest GPS metric

15:25 – What happens when teams hit 3.5+ game loads

16:07 – FBS cautionary tale: high loads and injury explosions

16:50 – How simple scheduling adjustments keep athletes healthy

17:34 – The real purpose of high-low practice concepts

18:39 – Big field vs small field days

19:47 – Manipulating speed, space, and contact

20:34 – Why Wednesday can’t look like Tuesday

21:30 – What “high” actually means in football

22:12 – Why a true low day in football is almost impossible

23:00 – How your practice script drives athlete recovery

24:00 – Why every day feels the same for players (and why that’s a problem)

24:59 – Using barrels, tempo, and formation checks to manage load

25:47 – Monotony: the most overlooked performance killer

26:50 – Simple fix: change practice feel, not just duration

27:23 – Using GPS to reveal invisible workload mistakes

28:03 – Fast Friday vs regular Friday: which model makes sense?

29:20 – How Joel runs Thursday speed checks

30:51 – Why players AND coaches misjudge speed

32:07 – Underestimating your slow days vs overestimating your fast ones

33:06 – Fixing pre-practice “walkthroughs” that aren’t walkthroughs

34:21 – The warmup trap: burning a quarter of a game before kickoff

35:15 – How we corrected game-day warmup overload

36:40 – Fall camp: the real place where teams lose the season

37:32 – Why Joel avoids more than 3 practices in a row

38:20 – The “big rocks” that matter more than GPS fine-tuning

39:50 – Preparing players for the heavy weeks before they happen

40:56 – Using planning to eliminate panic

41:39 – Why coaches feel like they “didn’t do enough”

42:23 – The emotional burden of under-preparing vs over-preparing

43:07 – Decision-making: what’s the cost of one extra period?

44:20 – Every choice has a trade-off — and coaches must admit that

45:17 – Trusting your coaching instead of adding more volume

46:15 – Using film, meetings, and detail instead of just more reps

47:05 – Where to find Joel (SprintJumpThrow.com + Instagram)

48:36 – Closing out

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