Three Home Workout Lessons From Notre Dame Strength Coach Loren Landow

Per the New York Times, a 48-year-old reporter walked into Notre Dame's Guglielmino Athletics Complex expecting a profile piece and walked out with a workout from Loren Landow — the program's director of football performance, who joined in 2024 after six years as head strength coach for the Denver Broncos. Landow has also trained five-time Olympic gold medalist Missy Franklin, UFC fighters, and NFL, MLB and NHL players. The reporter left with soreness and three hard lessons. Here's what you can steal for your living room.

The towel drill is not a joke

Landow pulled out a hand towel mid-session. Not for sweat. For control. Palms up, pull the towel taut until there's zero slack. Then sequence four moves back to back, no rest:

• Bicep curl. Squeeze the towel hard, curl to the shoulders.
• Overhead press. Press straight up, lock the elbows, don't flare the ribs.
• Lat pulldown. Pull the towel apart as you drive the elbows down to your waist.
• Tricep finish. Bring the towel to your waist and flex hard.

Ten reps. One minute rest. Repeat. The reporter's upper back felt like it was trying to leave his shirt by rep six. Missy Franklin ran three sets of fifty on this exact drill. If an Olympic swimmer is grinding it, you're not special.

Tension turns a towel into a cable machine. If your grip gives out, your entire posterior chain collapses. Brace the core, retract the scapula, keep the towel loaded — or the drill falls apart. That tension is the point.

The warmup is the program

Before every Notre Dame practice, players line up by position in a grid spanning the full width of the field and about forty yards deep. They run one hundred movements in ten minutes, ordered mobility, stability, activation. Freshmen learn the sequence before their first fall camp. Landow walks between them with an assistant logging who can stretch and who can't hold a single-leg position.

The reporter passed the bodyweight squats and inchworms. Anything one-legged — wobble city. Landow called it out on the spot: "Your hamstrings are limited. Your stability is the problem." That's the entire point. The warmup exposes leaks, and leaks are what get fixed first. A routine that looks like filler is actually a diagnostic.

Run it at home

No field required. Build your own ten-minute sequence — mobility, stability, activation — in that order, before any session. Flag one weakness. Spend two extra minutes on it. If you can't hold a single-leg stand without shaking, that's your starting line, not your finish line.

Three sets of ten on the towel drill. If your grip blows up by set two, regress to a slower tempo without the towel, same setup, same cues. No skipping. No negotiating. The soreness is the receipt.