Strength coach Andre Bernardi welcomes Western Michigan's new football weight room

Kalamazoo — The finishing touches are still to come, and and the rhythms of working out in a different setup will be established in due time, but Western Michigan football head strength and conditioning coaching Andre Bernardi is pretty giddy. 

“I'm a kid on Christmas,” Bernardi said. “Like, there's so many things — I like playing around, I like efficiency with it. I had the same initial rack setup in my old school. So, I have a good knowledge base of what works, what doesn't work, things like that.”

Bernardi’s amped because the Broncos are wrapping up an overhaul of the weight room as part of the Bill Brown Alumni Football Center, which the media got to tour and see on Wednesday. Along with being shiny and new, the weight room — and additional training room and nutrition station — were designed and built in close concert with Berardi and Co. to best fit what the Broncos want to do. 

The Stafford-Smith Football Weight Room, as it’s officially named, was largely funded by donations, including a sizable gift from David and Ronda Stafford. 

Sorinex — which supplies fitness and workout equipment — worked with Bernardi to tailor the new facility around being an efficient, optimized space for Western Michigan’s football team to max out their strength and conditioning regimen. Bernardi has designed two prior weight rooms with Sorinex, he said. 

“They are able to take your philosophy, take the way that you train, and help it come to life. It'll make, you know, our workouts much more efficient. Time is money for us. You know, we have an allotment of time, and just efficiency is really important.”

The crown jewel of the new weight room are the dozen or so barbell racks, which are modular for bench pressing, squatting, deadlifting, pullups in whatever iteration and various other lifts like standing rows.  

And along with an array of other machines, there’s of course a spate of other common items on hand: Benches, oodles of dumbbells and plates, medicine balls, workout bikes, resistance bands, foam rollers and some TVs on the walls. 

The whole of the new weight room is generally dark, with a strip of brown, field-striped turf in the middle of the weight room appearing black amidst the dark paneling, floors and brown-painted equipment. 

Various bits of WMU’s internal team branding and mottos — E.A.T., +3, and so on — are emblazoned on the walls in various points. And other than two offices needing to be finished and furnished, the new WMU weight room is looking like the ideal fortress for Bernardi and Co. to forge the Broncos into a formidable outfit. 

The new facility also comes after the Broncos spent the offseason working out in a makeshift weight room in the Seelye Center, something Bernardi and the team embraced. It helped feed the messages around grit and the like.

But there will be no let off in that department now that WMU football has moved into a shiny new weight facility.

“This new weight room is gonna be the same message, the same urgency, the same grit on how we do things,” Bernardi said. “You know, it's pretty, but, like, hey, if I’ve got to remind them, the standard is still the standard — we got right out there. It says, ‘Elevate the standard’ right when you come in. Well, that's what we're trying to do. Like, we set a standard, but every day we're trying to build a new standard at a higher level and be consistent with that. There's no finish line, it's always about chipping away and improving.”