Inside the numbers: Florida Gators making huge strides in the weight room

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — A self-described redneck meathead, Tyler Miles is living the dream. The view from his office is of weight ranks and Florida Gators‘ branded bumper plates inside the brand-new weight room. It’s a nice view for a kid from Kansas who grew up throwing hay bails and working for his family’s construction company — Miles Excvating Inc. — in Basehor, Kansas.

While Miles may be humble when describing himself, he graduated with a degree in construction management, which is essentially a math class shy of getting a civil engineering degree. He works in numbers and data and has brought that approach to Gainesville.

Gone are the days when the team walked into a weight room just to throw around the heaviest weight possible. There is a cause and a reason for everything Miles has the Gators do in the weight room. All of the lifting is based of off national percentages. Miles uses tried and true standards like Louie Simmon’s rep range ratio and the INOL calculator to work around one rep max percentages. But there’s also running. Using Catapult, a GPS tracking device every player wears during workouts and practice, Miles gets real-time data on what every player is doing during a workout and can make adjustments between reps.

“The fact of the matter is a lot of times back in the day people would just guess at running, right? How much should we run? There’s also a one-rep max for football with running. In the winter you’re training for spring ball. In the summer you’re training for camp and season. Because of GPS data we now know, hey, how many accelerations, decelerations, tempo yards, and high-speed yards is a lineman going to get or a DB? We have the information,” Miles said in an exclusive interview with Gators Online.

“You have to go through and learn how to clean the data. We’ve dialed into it and it can take months and months of time to really do it right but we’ve done that now. We have one rep max for our running, too. The game of football has changed completely. There should no longer be any guesswork on what you need to do as in meeting these metrics and building guys up to it just like you would in the weight room.”

The players have responded. Partly because MIles was already well-liked before he was promoted and partly because the results they’ve seen in such a short time speak for themselves. Guys are faster, leaner, and stronger. The work might be hard but the results are there.

“I love Coach Miles,” Florida linebacker Shemar James said during spring camp. “He came in with a different mindset. It was unacceptable, what we had last year. We just came in ready to work. We have days where we’re kind of like, ‘Oof, glad that’s over.’ That’s going to help us go from the weight room to the field.”

Florida Gators standing out in the weight room

The Gators hired Jake Sankal as their director of football nutrition and assistant strength & conditioning coach. He works hand-in-hand and just a few doors down from Miles in the Florida weight room. UF is one of the only schools in the country that has their nutritionist also on staff with the strength and conditioning program. Sankal previously worked for the Washington Commanders in the same capacity, where they were the only team to have such a role.

Sankal has implemented accountability with the players. They have their hydration levels checked before every run, lift, or practice. They weigh in on an InBody scan, which breaks down a person’s weight to how much of that is bone, fat, and lean muscle, every Friday. You can’t cheat a weekly weigh in and every athlete on the football team has an individualized plan and weekly goals they need to meet.

While the Gators use an InBody scan every Friday to track player’s weight and body composition, they use a more in depth scan, the Dexa Body scan several times throughout the year to get a more detailed look at the progress players are making. These scans and numbers reflect just a period of roughly 90 days when the team was scanned in January and then scanned again in April.

Team Totals

Position	Weight (lbs)	Body Fat %	Lean Muscle (lbs)	Fat Mass (lbs)
Defense	– 10.3	– 60.5 % (each position group % loss added together)	+ 174	– 184.8
Offense	– 69.6	– 100.3 % (each position group % loss added together)	+ 213.8	– 289.1
Specialists	+ 27	– 9.3 %	+ 47.8	– 20.8
Team Totals	– 53 lbs	– 170.2% (each position group % loss added together)	+ 436.1 lbs	– 494.8 lbs

OL Damieon George

Date	Total Mass (lbs)	Body Fat Percentage	Lean Muscle (lbs)	Fat Mass (lbs)
January scan	351.4	38.3 %	216.7 pounds	134.7 pounds
April scan	349.9	33.5 %	232.7 pounds	117.2 pounds
Difference	– 1.5 lbs	– 4.8 %	+ 16 lbs	– 17.5 lbs

“Someone like Damieon, he has lost a lot of fat already and put on a lot of muscle. For whatever reason, we’ve already been able to put on a lot of muscle and strength on him. It’s almost like he was an 18-year-old coming in (the way his body responded),” Miles told Gators Online. “When you play interior offensive line and you go against these nose tackles, we know that he needs to be stronger but then what does he need to be stronger in? For him, going up against defensive tackles, let’s look specifically at his shoulder strength and see where he’s at. So we test that and we see, hey, Damieon Georgia is in the 40^th percentile for shoulder testing — I’m not saying he is just using it as an example — and we know he’s going to be engaging with 300-pound d-tackles, we’ve gotta get his shoulders strength into the 75^th percentile. We’ll attack it like that.”

TE Hayden Hansen

Date	Total Mass (lbs)	Body Fat Percentage	Lean Muscle (lbs)	Fat Mass (lbs)
January scan	270.3	19.6%	217.2	53.1
April scan	262.4	16.8%	223.0	39.4
Difference	-7.9 lbs	-4.6%	+ 5.8 lbs	– 13.7 lbs

“Hayden Hansen, for sure. He lost 14 pounds of fat and it’s not like Hayden Hansen had a lot of fat to lose. He lost five percent body fat, 14 pounds, and gained six pounds of lean mass. It’s not like he lost fat and got skinny, he gained muscle too,” Miles told Gators Online. “He’s not one of those people, an o-linemen or d-lineman that is a super big guy that had a lot of fat to lose. I would see him eat his meals and it was like watching a bodybuilder. Chicken and rice and a vegetable. He was on it. He was doing a great job.”

QB DJ Lagway

Date	Total Mass (lbs)	Body Fat Percentage	Lean Muscle (lbs)	Fat Mass (lbs)
January scan	239.6	18.5 %	195.2	44.4
April scan	239.5	16.0 %	201.1	38.4
Difference	– 0.1 lbs	– 2.5 %	+ 5.9 lbs	-6 lbs

OL Austin Barber

Date	Total Mass (lbs)	Body Fat Percentage	Lean Muscle (lbs)	Fat Mass (lbs)
January scan	307.4	33.4%	204.7 lbs	102.7
April scan	309.5	29.8%	217.3 lbs	92.2
Difference	+ 2.1 lbs	– 3.6%	+ 12.6 lbs	– 10.5 lbs

“Austin missed spring ball, essentially, because of his shoulder,” Miles said. “Even with that one shoulder he gained 13 pounds of lean mass and lost eleven pounds of fat with essentially one arm. That’s pretty impressive to do.”

LB Derek Wingo

Date	Total Mass (lbs)	Body Fat Percentage	Lean Muscle (lbs)	Fat Mass (lbs)
January scan	230.3	21.5%	180.7 lbs	49.6
April scan	239.6	20.9%	189.5 lbs	50.1
Difference	+ 9.3 lbs	– 0.6%	+8.8 lbs	+0.5

“On defense, you’ve got Derek Wingo. He put a lot of trust into us and he stuck around,”Miles told Gators Online. “He’s been the ultimate team leader. As a senior, he’s been here for years and for him in nine weeks he put on almost 10 pounds of lean mass. He also had a shoulder. It’s impressive for those guys to do that with having one arm, essentially.”

DB Sharif Denson

Date	Total Mass (lbs)	Body Fat Percentage	Lean Muscle (lbs)	Fat Mass (lbs)
January scan	181.7	13.3 %	157.5	24.2
April scan	190.6	12.7 %	166.4	24.2
Difference	+ 8.9	– 0.6%	+ 8.9	0.0

“Sharif Denson, he’s a safety or a star and he put on almost 10 pounds of lean mass. You can see him now when he’s in a t-shirt, just how much thicker he is.”