Loren Landow Is On Board With Marcus Freeman's Notre Dame Vision

Strength coach Loren Landow is new to Notre Dame, but he is far from a novice in the strength and conditioning game. Notre Dame’s new director of football performance has been with the Irish since he packed up and left his Colorado home behind while bringing 25 years of experience with him.

The decision meant leaving his successful training business, Landow Performance, to someone else to run while focusing his attention on one of the most high-profile college football programs in the country.

"When I heard about the opening, my agent asked me, 'Is this something you want?' I said, 'It's Notre Dame, how could you not',” Landow recalled. "I've been fortunate to do a lot of great things in my career, but to ultimately be a part of a program that has history and the legacy that Notre Dame does, it was a no brainer.”

When Irish head coach Marcus Freeman announced Landow’s hire in December, some of the top criteria he said he was looking for was someone with a background with group training, but who could individualize training as well. Someone who can enhance power, explosion and speed development and someone who can also enhance the vision of the head coach. Part of Freeman’s vision for the position was someone who embraces the sports science aspects of training.

"It's awesome to have somebody that embraces it, because at the end of the day, you don't always have a leader in a situation like this that does," Landow explained. "Sometimes it can be really challenging to, hey, we need to pull back today, or, hey, we need to go today. Here's what the data says. So, the good news about the sports science is like Coach Freeman and his staff, they know what it looks like, they know what a well-prepared team looks like, technically, tactically and physically. So ultimately, having somebody who then will also listen to the science side and say, 'Tell me what you think.' I think that's huge. As he says, we always challenge everything. To me, that's important that we have a group around here that isn't going to sit there and say, 'I have the answers'.”

Landow was the Denver Broncos head strength and conditioning coach from 2018-2022. He has also worked with athletes to prepare them for the NFL Draft and NFL Pro Days, and trained players during the offseason. He has worked with more than 70 All-Pro players, including current San Francisco 49er running back Christian McCaffrey, and more than 20 NFL first round draft picks. His list of clients also includes former Notre Dame offensive tackle Ryan Harris, who won a Super Bowl with the Broncos.

Those players are mostly in their 20s and 30s, though, while the student-athletes he is now working with at Notre Dame are predominantly 18-22.

"It's the foundation that's been laid,” Landow explained of what the difference is ages means. "Now you'll have some young kids that come in, and they've got a great body of development already, but in most aspects they don't. So it's making sure that we lay down our foundation broadly before we start building up. Then you have the athletes, and we have different programs that we put the guys on at the different times of the year, to be able to sit there and say this person needs to further their development, this person needs to continue and enhance off of what we just did in this block, but they're not ready for that.

"So, in our field, we have this thing called training age and biological age," continued Landow. "Biological age and training age is this thing where we sit there and say, this person has one year of training age. Well, by the time they come out of a college program, they should, between high school and college, they should have six to four years of training age. So when you bring these young guys in at their training age, you have to set that foundation well. Then you have to teach technically.”

The offseason conditioning program is where so much of the foundation for the culture of a football program is developed. Matt Balis, Landow’s predecessor in the position from 2017 through last summer, was renowned for that culture curation. That responsibility now falls on Landow.

"I think what I do is I listen to Coach Freeman and I try to echo his messages,” Landow expounded. "I think that's why he and I probably hit it off so well in the interview process, because we speak the same language. We have the same expectations, we have the same standards and what our principles are in development. I think from my standpoint, I look at it as a challenge to be able to walk lockstep with my head coach and know that I'm being held accountable to his message and his staff's message. So for me, I take it as a great opportunity of responsibility.”

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