Bryan Harsin outlines what Auburn's summer workouts will look like

Bryan Harsin had a frustrating first season as the head coach of the Auburn Tigers, and those frustrations carried over into the offseason. After much speculation about his future at Auburn, the Tigers ultimately retained him after a long and public process. Now, as Auburn heads into the summer months ahead of fall camp, Harsin has a clear plan in place.

The summer will be continuing the progress from the spring for Auburn, and Harsin wants to use that progress as a building blocks while building towards bigger goals in the coming months.

“It’s a continuation of what we did in the spring,” Harsin said on McElroy and Cubelic in the Morning. “So taking the max’s that they had in the spring and then using those percentages and hitting that all the way through June and July. Hitting those numbers and the foundation. But it’s a progression, too. I think one thing when we got here was really about conditioning. It was about getting ourselves in shape and body fat and doing all that. I think our guys are in a better position that way.

“The summer is about speed and agility and some of our movement. The strength coaches do a great job at just looking at what our team does well and what we have to work on. You don’t lose the strength aspect of things, you have to have that.”

Harsin emphasizing nutrition for Auburn over the summer

In addition to schematic improvements on the field, Harsin is also looking for significant progress nutritionally from Auburn this summer. He wants to see the Tigers improve their diets, eat better, and overall become healthier. He believes that is an underrated key to having success in college football, and he is making sure that is being focused on in the summer.

“One area that I think our players have done a much better job of and they’re taking more serious and will continue to keep evolving is the nutrition piece,” said Harsin. “It’s so huge, you can’t outwork a bad diet. You can go out there and do whatever you want, but if you’re eating like crap it’s not going to help you. So we’re doing a good job of just trying to get everyone more aware and trying to fuel these guys the proper way. When we do that, body fat drops, muscle goes up, they’re faster, they’re thinking better, they’re just more twitchy.

“It’s one of the things I think when you watch really good teams, and people talk about that, just a really twitchy player. It’s mentally, it’s physically, it’s all of those things to be able to move like you want to. So we’re trying to just build that as we get into August and we’ll hit the field, get these guys right schematically. We’ll make sure all the details, communication is where it needs to be, and then we’ve got to go play. And we want to play like we train. Want to play fast, want to play strong, want to be well conditioned and more twitchy going into the season.”