Earlier this month Nick Savage met with the media in Gainesville and said he liked how the football team had bought into what he was doing with them in the weight room. The workouts were tough but Savage reported that all of his players had trusted him and there was no complaining or dissension among the ranks.
Just five weeks into Savage’s program the players started seeing the results that were, quite frankly, startling. When you start seeing your body changing you’ll do whatever workout, no matter how grueling, that your strength coach gives you.
Savage found another believer in Taven Bryan.
“I actually saw the guys on the team now at Florida, they’re pretty yoked. That Savage dude, that’s some next-level stuff. I was wondering what they put in the water here. They all look really good.”
Bryan is the son of a former Navy Seal. He’s also from Wyoming where living outside fishing and hunting. There weren’t many days spent in front of a TV or playing video games and for years Bryan, even when Bryan was at Florida, would do workouts designed by his father.
“I mean the dude I looked up to the most was my dad. He was the big dude in my life growing up,” Bryan said. “I just think he brings a kind of a hardcore type of attitude thing. Never letting me slack off, getting away with things.”
But after the combine Bryan returned to Gainesville to train and get ready for the pro day. He ventured down into the weight room where Savage was working out some of his former teammates. Bryan was blown away by what they were doing and how different it was. It was the kind of lifting that Bryan would have liked to do and the style he often did in gyms around Gainesville on top of the workouts he would do with his teammates.
Bryan noticed the difference in his teammates, too.
“Just the way he changes everyone’s bodies. Like we looked like the Pillsbury Dough Boys and now, we’re like, swole,” said Bryan. “So, you should go look that them, they’re huge.”
There’s a reason Mullen made sure to promote Savage when there was an opening at Mississippi State and a reason why he made sure to bring the 29-year old with him when he came to Gainesville. It isn’t just Bryan either. Mullen says he’s had multiple players tell him they wish they would have worked out in a similar program to what Savage is doing.
I mean, they’re coming back and going, ‘I wish we worked the way they are working now.’ It just shows, Nick Savage, what he does, the program and our player development,” said Mullen. “We want to take pride. I want people to look and say, ‘Hey, you go play at the University of Florida, you’re going to be developed. They’re going to develop players better than anybody in America.’ And hopefully in just a short period of time, we’re going to be seeing that.”