RAISING THE BAR

Wipe your feet before you enter. This is hallowed ground, one of the fabled places in college football.

This is the Nebraska weight room, the machine that loads up the linemen and pumps out the All-Americans--while helping to lure the next generation of Cornhuskers.

“When you come on your recruiting trip, they make sure you get a good look at that weight room,” tailback Dahrran Diedrick says.

It’s a tourist attraction as well.

Busloads of schoolkids pass through the hall and peer at the athletes through the large windows, while being bombarded with promotional videos and music emanating from the flat-screen TVs on the wall.

This isn’t just any tour guide showing you around today. It’s Boyd Epley. He’s part historian, part mad-scientist taking you through his laboratory. He’s the man who revolutionized the weightlifting program at Nebraska and at many other major colleges some 33 years ago, and many of the machines here are his creations.

He takes you inside. To the right are the platforms for the hang clean exercise. Straight ahead are the squat machines, lined up back to back.

Epley takes particular pride in the giant machine to the left.

“This is our newest toy,” he says. “This is our Husker Power Transformer.”

This beast combines two of Epley’s preferred exercises at one station. In the squat, the athlete starts with the weight bar across his shoulders, bends his knees, then returns to the standing position. In the hang clean, the athlete lifts the bar from the top of the knees by shrugging the shoulders, drops below the bar by squatting, then stands up, keeping the bar just below the neck.

By stepping on a pedal, the lifter can raise or lower the platform to the appropriate level to begin the exercise. Or he can press another button to move the bar to the correct position for squats.

Even if you wanted to spend the $20,000 it takes to buy one of these machines, you couldn’t. Epley has an agreement with the manufacturer to build them exclusively for Nebraska.

There are other unique machines in the room, including a group that looks like red oil derricks swinging back and forth during a workout. “These are machines that work both sides of the body in a unique way,” Epley says. “It’s called reciprocal training.”

You push with one arm while pulling with the other, which forces the torso to stabilize the body and uses more muscles. He has two similar machines for the legs; one side works the hamstring while the other works the quadriceps.

One thing is conspicuously absent as your eyes scan the room: the good, old bench press.

“The upper body is very overrated,” Epley says. “Very much so.”

He concentrates more on the torso, and exercises that involve multiple joints in muscles, with routines that replicate moves made during competition.

Later, up in his office, Epley uses his laptop to make a PowerPoint demonstration of the workouts and their applications. It shows clips of players using the “jammer” machines, which have the players extend from their hands to their toes with their body at a 45-degree angle. Then it shows that same motion in action: an offensive lineman blasting an opponent five yards down the field, a baseball outfielder diving for a catch, a volleyball player spiking the ball.

“I feel more explosive,” Husker tight end Tracey Wistrom said. “I feel like I can control people a little bit better. Before, if a defensive end tried to toss me or something, sometimes they’d throw me around like a rag doll. And now I feel like I’m holding my own. They try to go for that toss, sometimes I’ll catch them off balance and be able to put them on their back. In the past, it was the other way around.”

In 1968, when Epley was a graduate student and former pole vaulter, the weight room was in a cramped area that now makes up the visitors’ locker room at Memorial Stadium. It consisted of a universal machine and a dumbbell rack.

Epley started working with some of the football players. Tom Osborne, an assistant coach under Bob Devaney at the time, noticed and asked Epley to submit a proposal for the equipment he could use. They proposed a new weight-training regimen to Devaney, who issued this condition to Epley: “We’re going to give this a try, but if anyone gets slower, you’re fired.”

The team needed something. It was coming off consecutive 6-4 seasons and had just lost to rival Oklahoma, 47-0. In the first year after Epley’s conditioning program, the team went 9-2. Two years later the Cornhuskers were undefeated and featured six All-Americans. Epley still wears that 1971 national championship ring.

He keeps the old equipment from those days too, encased in glass in the looby. There’s the original dumbbell rack and an old bench press, plus a photo of the room he took in 1967. Back then there were perhaps 400 pounds of weights available.

Now there are more than 30,000 pounds of weight in the lavish room of 16,600 square feet. The weight room has become as much a part of the team as the red “N” on the helmets.

“I think it’s a major in terms of us continuing to be successful,” Coach Frank Solich said. “Everybody gets athletes. The athletes that we get are into a conditioning and weight-training program that really benefits them. I think we’re able to maximize their potential.”

Senior offensive lineman Dave Volk weighed 270 pounds when he came to Nebraska. Now he checks in at 310.

“It’s not just mass you’re putting on, because there are different aspects that translate onto the football field,” Volk said. “Most prevalent is the explosiveness, which is what 75% of the weight room is geared toward. It brings out a lot of quickness and agility and explosiveness.”

Today’s college football player is big and strong and fast, which is where supplements come in. “You’ve got to be able to match up with them,” defensive tackle Jeremy Slechta said. “A lot of the guys have to take the supplements because they might be strong, they might be fast, but they might not be big. You’ve just got to kind of do that to keep up with everybody else.”

The school used to dispense supplements, but an NCAA rule that went into effect Aug. 1, 2000, put an end to that. Now players must buy them on their own. Linebacker Jamie Burrow said he spent about $300 a month on supplements in the off-season, when the players concentrate on bulking up.

“I need a little help from the parents [to buy them], but in order to play football at this level, you need to do a little more, and supplements provide that for you,” Burrow said.

The sale of ephedrine in over-the-counter products is illegal in Nebraska, but creatine (which is not banned by the NCAA) is popular with college athletes. Dr. Chuck Yaselis, professor of health and human development at Penn State and author of the book “Anabolic Steroids in Sport and Exercise,” expresses doubt that extreme weight gain at any school is possible without the use of steroids and/or human growth hormones.

“For four or five years, numerous athletes and athletic programs have used creatine and androstenedione as a smoke screen to cover gains made by anabolic steroids, human growth hormones and other drugs,” Yaselis said. “Drug testing, for the most part only catches stupid and careless people.

“When I see college players come into big programs that recruit top-notch kids, and then I see these 30-40 pound gains, I’m exceedingly skeptical as to what’s going on.”

At Nebraska, Epley said: “We have not had a steroid problem for so many years. Back in the early ‘80s, yes, there were steroids around. And Tom Osborne, I think, did a lot to do away with steroids. One time we had a conversation, I thought we had some players who were using steroids. We had some players who had some symptoms. He asked our medical staff to institute drug testing. And the next year the entire Big Eight Conference [now the Big 12] put in a drug test, also.”

Now Epley focuses on new types of machinery to create bigger, stronger, more powerful players. He has the blueprints on his desk for a redesign of the weight room. He just finished a round of fund-raising for more Husker Power Transformers. The program that modernized weight training has another revolution in store. He recalls his youthful days, when he was helping his father put roofs on homes in Arizona, to provide a metaphor.

“We used hammers,” he said. “Now they use air guns.

“We are the air gun. We’re about to experience that kind of change.”