The NFL's Reactive Strength Problem: Detroit Lions Case Study

You don't rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.—James Clear

Dr. Michael Chivers

and

John Quint

Jan 26, 2025

Welcome To The Reactive Strength Paradigm

For strength coaches skeptical that we’ve entered a new training paradigm, consider how reactive strength injuries have constrained the Detroit Lions this season.

As Singh, a reporter covering the team, explains:

The Detroit Lions began the 2024 season as the most dominant team in the league. They were just one of just nine teams since 1979 to rank in the top five of DVOA in all three phases of the game through Week 8. The defense, however, has been ravaged by injuries. Detroit is entering the final week of the regular season with 13 defensive players on their injured reserve list, including six defensive starters and several key rotational pieces.1

To our critics: please keep giving us feedback, as we welcome it! But calm down. We understand that not all the Detroit Lions' injuries are reactive strength injuries—many are joint-related. However, take into account that anyone with a basic understanding of kinesiology should recognize the connection: as Fritjof Capra would say, "systems nestled within systems."2 Joint function, also a fundamental element of Point B, is interconnected with reactive strength.3 In other words, the two are linked and cannot be disassociated—and when viewed through the systems lens of feedback loops it is beyond evident to understand that the two amplify into each other.

Enter The Arena at Point B: The Number One Seed Goes One and Done

There’s a cost to entering the arena of competition without oscillating at Point B—and the Detroit Lions are a case study of what happens when that cost goes unpaid. Their ship was sailing full steam ahead toward a Super Bowl run, but halfway through the season, the anchor of reactive strength injuries began to drop. The result? A cascade of injuries that tore through the defensive roster like a violent tornado. By the time the first playoff game arrived, the damage was done—leaving the Lions’ Super Bowl aspirations and their defensive roster in ruins.

The question now is whether this devastation will spark meaningful change in how the organization operates. Will the Lions address this reactive strength problem with a proactive, systemic solution, or will they continue to be controlled by it? Will they compete with the Browns and 49ers in how much of a reactive strength tax their ownership pays? The problem is solvable, and we’re rooting for them to take the necessary steps to solve it.

“You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.”—James Clear

What system of training reactive strength was in place for the Detroit Lions? This is a legitimate question—one they must ask and answer this offseason.

If no system existed to monitor the bottom-up biological element of reactive strength, then the Lions fell to the level of their connective tissue management and training systems—or lack thereof. When the bottom falls out, it falls fast—ask anyone in the Lions organization. Without a structured system to serve as a safety net or negative feedback loop, injuries go well past the edge of chaos. Nonlinear amplification and inverse Matthew Effects take over, causing devastating consequences at every level of the organization.

Sadly, it’s a real possibility that the Lions’ window to win a Super Bowl has closed. Their coaching staff’s phenomenal ability to compensate for reactive strength injuries and manage chaos led to their offensive and defensive coordinators being hired as head coaches with other organizations. Now, the Lions face two major challenges: solving their reactive strength problem and rebuilding their coaching staff. Solvable problems, but problems nonetheless. Let’s hope they use this offseason to implement the systemic changes necessary to avoid reactive strength injuries being such a limiting constraint.

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Training for the Carnage of Competition

Case studies like the total collapse of the Detroit Lions at the level of competition highlight how critical the level of adaptation is during the in-season phase for these athletes. Football is a chaotically violent sport, where connective tissues that cannot absorb and dissipate high-magnitude force vectors blow up and sideline the athlete from the level of competition. How violent are these forces? Look no further than Adrian Hutchinson’s injury. Watch it in slow motion a couple of times to grasp the demands placed on athletes at this level.

This season, we witnessed this reality firsthand when a player we trained was sidelined by a tibia fracture—just one instance of the carnage that accumulates throughout an NFL season. As players’ neurology becomes more efficient at generating force on the football field, their strength, speed, and explosiveness operate as positive feedback loops, amplifying both performance and the risk of injury due to escalating violence. Coupled with an aggressive intent, the conjugation of all these positive feedback loops often pushes connective tissues well past their biological threshold to transmit and dissipate, into the chaos of tissue failure.

Insights Into The Aggressive Intent At The Level of Competition

Point blank: on neurological days with the linemen we train, we cultivate violent intent in their lifts. Athletes are coached to get ultra-aggressive with the barbell—especially on speed-strength days. Through strategically calibrating the loads—using bandbell barbells, bands, and oscillating accommodating resistance, we create the training conditions for them to actualize this violence into reality through the barbell within the safe controlled setting of the weight room.

Nick Saban once said, “If you want to be the beast, you have to do what the beast does.” Our training philosophy ensures that athletes don’t just survive the chaos of competition—they generate it. This is the standard.

We share this information to provide insight into the mindset and intent of these athletes at the level of competition—it’s not all sunshine and rainbows.

Pushing All Our Chips in on Reactive Strength

In understanding how we coach our neurological training days and how potent that training is in regards to cultivating a neurological network of absolute strength and training that network to output explosive magnitudes of force at high velocity. Our success in actualizing the neurology has driven us to prioritize solving the reactive strength problem.

Athletes must have the connective tissue infrastructure to transmit and dissipate both internally generated forces and external forces beyond our control. Coupled with case studies such as the Detroit Lions, 49ers, and Browns, it’s evident that the number one constraint on performance is a lack of reactive strength. For this reason, reactive strength has become the central priority of the Absolute Conjugate Strategy.

We’ve seen how the reactive strength problem generates a ripple effect, leading to injuries that derail entire rosters and seasons—even the number one seeds coming out of the NFC isn’t safe. Three years ago, we wrote about stagnation in sport. Today, we have the data to show that without proactive strategies for managing and training reactive strength, these problems grow unchecked—like a cancerous tumor overtaking an organization.

We pushed all the chips into the middle of the table years ago, and we’ve spent the past two NFL seasons demonstrating to fellow practitioners that this is the training paradigm we operate within. We have worked to not just identify and define this problem but to innovate strategies to solve this problem. Just as Louie Simmons wrestled the gorilla of powerlifting until it got pinned by his strategies, we are committed to pinning reactive strength gorilla to the mat.

To date, we’ve published 37 resources on reactive strength, compared to just two on speed strength. Why the discrepancy? Because speed strength is a well-established special strength that coaches coherently understand how to train for,4 whereas reactive strength is the new and current paradigm.

As practitioners who operate our own practices and work directly with professional athletes—we have skin in this game, we’ve solved this problem at our level and scale. Our strategies for managing and training reactive strength enable us to operate proactively, giving us and our athletes a strategic advantage. Operating proactively in conjugation with our heuristics is what enables us to have the time to write this for you. Scaling this solution to the organizational level presents a bigger challenge, but our proven strategies are designed to scale to those levels and meet the demands.

Here are our three resources for the practitioner to get caught up on the reactive strength paradigm. Start here, but stay tuned as we have a couple of projects in the pipeline that we cannot wait to share with you!