Teaching and toning

From the time his back first touched a weight bench at age 12, Mike Gerber has been in love with the weight room.

Gerber’s first exposure to strength training came in the basement of his childhood home, where his father, a football coach, guided him through workouts on a wooden bench.

“I was a typical, not-especially-talented kid, so I had to work to be able to compete,” Gerber said. “I just loved it right from the get-go.”

More than 40 years later, Gerber is still in the weight room — and still loving it.

After an extended career as a strength and conditioning coach at the college level, including a four-year stint at the University of Montana under Bobby Hauck, Gerber now resides in the Flathead Valley and aims to instill in local athletes the same love for the gym that drove him to his profession.

“I came back here essentially to retire, except I wanted to keep coaching kids,” he said. “I’m retired from college coaching, but not retired from coaching.”

All these years later, Gerber, who operates Montana Sport-Strength in north Kalispell, can’t seem to shake his first love.

Before he even snagged a full-time strength and conditioning job, Gerber had a fan in Jeff Stoutland.

Stoutland, now the offensive line coach for the Philadelphia Eagles, roomed with Gerber while the two were football graduate assistants at Syracuse in the mid-80s and was immediately blown away by his comrade’s tireless work ethic and near-maniacal obsession with constant improvement.

It was a different time then, one in which few programs paid mind to how the intricacies of strength and conditioning training affected play on the field. Gerber, Stoutland recalls, was far ahead of the industry’s curve in that respect.

His work proved as much.

Instead of adopting the orthodox approach of grouping athletes into a single workout, Gerber developed a strength plan for each individual athlete, exercising an attention to detail that Stoutland had never before seen.

“He’s extremely detailed,” Stoutland said. “He’s a perfectionist.

“He looks a little bit deeper into things than I think the normal strength coach would do.”

Gerber’s deeper dive into the specifics of his profession led him to utilize numbers and science in a way that was uncommon in sports before Bill James and Billy Beane helped push analytics into the mainstream.

Even so, Stoutland said Gerber learned early in his career that improvement does not happen on a spreadsheet or a computer program and has always used analytics as simply a piece of the puzzle.

“He doesn’t get lost in all that stuff,” Stoutland said. “He’s not one of those guys. He sees the whole picture.”

There have been many beneficiaries of the process Gerber developed in his early days as a strength and conditioning coach.

He’s worked with high-profile NFL athletes such as Donovan McNabb, David Tyree, Marvin Harrison and Dwight Freeney.

But some of his most rewarding work was done in Missoula, where he helped Hauck develop the players that led the Griz to back-to-back appearances in the FCS national championship game after joining the program as head strength and conditioning coach in 2006.

“Some were super talented and had hard work,” Gerber said. “Other guys became good because they had hard work.”

Colt Anderson falls into the latter category.

Anderson went to Montana as an undersized walk-on from Butte but became a key contributor in the Griz secondary before enjoying a decade-long NFL career that is still in progress. He attributes much of his enormous progress to Gerber.

“(Gerber) and I clicked right away,” Anderson recalled. “I fell in love with the process of working out.

“To this day, I go back to my roots, so to speak, with him and what I learned from him. I still believe in his formula for increasing speed and increasing explosion and power. At the end of the day, that’s what the game of football is all about.”

Gerber’s impact on Steven Pfahler, a tight end for the Griz in the late 2000s, was perhaps even greater.

Pfahler, a Frenchtown native, not only used the lessons learned from Gerber on the football field, but also in his life after college.

Partly inspired by his college strength coach, Pfahler opened a gym in Missoula, Pfahler Sport Specific, where he now trains young athletes much like his mentor. Gerber even officiated the wedding of Pfahler and his wife, Alyssa Pfahler (née Ssmith), a former hoops star for the Lady Griz.

“I wouldn’t have had the career I had without him,” Pfahler said. “He is one of the best in the business.”

Though many parts of college coaching were attractive to Gerber, he decided to return to youth coaching after following Hauck to UNLV for a four-year stint.

The grind — Gerber says 80-hour work weeks were “the norm” at the college level — became more than he was willing to endure more than 40 years into his career.

“Strength and conditioning coaches are there all summer,” Gerber said. “Vacation time maybe amounted to two weeks the entire year, and the rest of the year, you’re working 80-hour weeks. I just wanted a break.”

So he made his way north to the Flathead Valley, where he can continue enjoying his favorite aspect of coaching — watching athletes develop through hard work — while also giving himself and his wife time and space to pursue passions outside of work. (Gerber spends his spare time fly-fishing, while his wife enjoys raising and tending to her horses.)

Pfahler believes, despite all the help he provided college athletes, Gerber may be doing even more good at the youth level by giving teens an athletic foundation they can build upon.

“So many places these days, it’s just about what’s easy to teach and what looks cool,” Pfahler said. “All these new things come and then they go, come and then they go. Mike’s base foundation is Olympic lifting. That’s been around forever, and the phenomenal results have been around forever.”

“It’s like learning the fundamentals of basketball,” Pfahler added. “Would you rather learn it in the second grade or would you rather learn it as a junior in high school?

“It is so important for these kids to strength-train at a young age.”

Gerber plans to keep at it as long as he’s able.

The love he acquired on the wooden bench at age 12 has yet to leave him.

“I want to keep doing it as long as I’m healthy enough to do it,” he said. “As long as I have some fishing time.”