When Michigan football’s new staff got to Ann Arbor, the numbers in the strength room were not close to where they needed to be. Kyle Whittingham said the team’s overall strength was “shockingly low,” then pointed to a summer of work that ended with 97% of the roster posting new personal bests when testing resumed.
That matters now because the staff did not arrive with a rebuilding excuse. It arrived after winter testing by Doug Elisaia had already shown a baseline, and Whittingham said the program spent more than half a year trying to fix what he saw. In Chicago at Big Ten Media Days, he framed the offseason as a measurable reset, not a motivational speech.
Whittingham said he warned Elisaia before the results were even official. “Coach, you’re not going to like this,” he recalled being told before the early testing showed how far the group had to go. Whittingham said the staff then set out to correct the issue over the last seven months, and the latest round of testing after summer conditioning showed the work had taken hold.
Jordan Marshall described the shift from the players’ side. He said the previous approach was not about “lifting just to lift,” that the group almost never used the bench press, and that the point was to avoid shoulder injuries and build for the game itself. Marshall said he trained hamstrings essentially every day to avoid soft tissue injuries, and he added that the conditioning is now way ahead of where it was last season.
The jarring part is that the roster was not lacking talent. Whittingham said Michigan had more raw talent when the staff arrived than at any point in Utah, but the strength numbers still lagged badly. That made the fix less about recruiting stars and more about changing the way the roster worked, from the winter baseline to the summer finish.
Whittingham said the buy-in came once players saw the results. “As soon as the players realize you can help them be a better player, you’ll get buy in,” he said, adding that if they believe the approach works, they will follow it. He said the Michigan standard will always be competing for championships, because that is why a program like this exists.
Still, the staff is not pretending the work is done. Whittingham said the cupboard was far from bare, but the depth still needs to improve, and a successful campaign means having a chance to compete in later games. That is the real test now: whether the gains from the strength room hold once the season turns into the kind of grind that exposes every weak spot.
