To trace Dave Redding's path to the NFL is to trace a path through the history of weight training in football.

It starts with his father, the late George "Crump" Redding, who picked up some information during a tour with the Army Air Corps' 71st Fighter Wing in the European Theater of World War II. Most thought weight training was for freaks in those days, but "Crump" put it to use -- first as a football player at what was East Central State College in Oklahoma, then as he began a high school coaching career that spanned three states and three decades.

Dave spent long days by his father's side as a boy, handling everything from mop-up duty to pouring concrete into buckets, which were fitted with pipes to create primitive barbells. He started his own weight training, too, as far back as he can remember, and began sculpting the body that got him on the football field at the University of Nebraska in the mid-1970s.

He speaks with pride about the time one school board threatened to fire "Crump," whose methods were turning good Midwestern farm boys "into monsters." It's many of the same methods -- advanced with time and technology -- Dave Redding continues to utilize as he enters his 24th year as an NFL strength and conditioning coach with the Green Bay Packers.

"Now," Redding said this week, "it just has a real fancy name."

By any name, functional training is what Redding believes in.

It's free weights, not machines. Balance and coordinated movement, not max lifting. Position-specific conditioning, not straight-line speed work. Just about everything ground-based, just about everything football-specific and just about everything year-round, but something different every day to train the simultaneous extension of the ankle, knee and hip that defines movement in all sports.

"That's what you're trying to do in athletics," Redding said, "is to defy gravity by being more powerful at that movement."

He knows some players have different philosophies, but he'll ask anyway:

The backstory

Will you try this?

Tom Osborne was willing to ask the question in 1969.

The Nebraska football program had spent two years unsuccessfully trying to emulate the quick Alabama squads it lost to in bowl games in 1965 and '66, and some boosters in Omaha were rallying support to oust head coach Bob Devaney.

At the same time, five or six injured football players had begun following around a young pole vaulter named Boyd Epley, who was lifting weights to rehabilitate a back injury. When those players came back to practice stronger than before, Osborne talked to Epley, and together they went into Devaney's office to pitch the idea of having the whole football team begin strength training.

"Bob was kind of an old-school guy," Osborne said via cell phone Friday. "There was a thought at one time that weightlifting was bad for you, because it made you muscle-bound. So, Bob wasn't real excited. But on the other hand, those losses to Alabama were wearing on him, and we'd had a couple 6-4 seasons that had the folks a little restless around here, so Bob was willing to experiment.

Epley didn't really have a program; most of what he knew came from the summer he spent in an Arizona gym with a bodybuilder named Pat Neve, who years later became Mr. USA. But Epley looked the part -- besides setting a school record in the pole vault, he was so big he broke 16 poles -- and he convinced Devaney that weight training could make players not only stronger, but faster, too.

"He pointed right to me and he said, 'But if anybody gets slower, you're fired,'" Epley recalled. "Well, I hadn't even been hired. I was a student."

His Olympic dreams dashed because doctors wouldn't clear him to keep vaulting, Epley became the first paid college strength coach in the country, at the tidy sum of $12 a week. He gave Osborne a list of essentials -- squat racks, benches, dumbbells, pullies. He got the weight room expanded from 900 square feet by knocking down a wall that bordered a classroom. He talked to the chairman of the physical education department, who agreed to let him teach a class so he could take attendance, and borrowed stopwatches to facilitate testing that would prove to Devaney the progress was real.

When the program started, not a single football player could bench 300 pounds.

That fall, the Huskers went to the first of 35 consecutive bowl games and, two years later, walloped Alabama 38-6 in the Orange Bowl to seal a second straight national championship.

Redding arrives

Word was spreading about Nebraska's program when Redding enrolled after playing for "Crump" at North Platte (Neb.) High School.

Epley had crossed paths with Redding years earlier, when Redding was a ninth-grader attending a Nebraska football camp at which Epley gave a speech.

"He was a wiry defensive end, pretty strong guy and very determined player," Epley said. "Didn't have great eyesight in one eye, and yet he overcame all that and did a very good job."

Osborne succeeded Devaney as coach in 1973, when Redding won the first of three letters, and made a point to tell players they were conditioned to dominate every fourth quarter.

"Dave was a very intense guy, played hard," said Osborne, who compiled a 255-49-3 record in 25 seasons as Nebraska's head coach and now is its athletic director.

"I don't know what he weighed -- probably 190, 195 pounds. He did work hard in the weight room and certainly got bigger and stronger. But he was never a huge guy."

Knowing he was interested in strength training as a career, Redding volunteered to participate in a four-year NCAA study administered by Epley, who charted players' progress year-round. According to Redding, the study showed players could lose 60 to 80 percent of their offseason strength gains during the grind of the season, reinforcing the value of in-season lifting -- something few teams did then and a point of emphasis for Redding today.

Epley, who wasn't much older, worked out with Redding and forged a friendship that remains strong. After graduating with his physical education degree in 1976, Redding spent a year as one of Epley's assistants, 64 of whom went on to become strength coaches at the NFL or major-college level. Redding then spent a year at Washington State before becoming the first strength coach at the University of Missouri, where he also coached linebackers, handled the headsets, shot film for the basketball teams, developed his own film and made $3,500 a year.

Second act

In 1982, seven years after the Cincinnati Bengals made Kim Wood the NFL's first full-time strength coach, Redding got his first professional job with Sam Rutigliano's Cleveland Browns.

That same year, the Washington Redskins hired Dan Riley, who had begun to embrace machines as part of his training philosophy while working at the United States Military Academy at West Point in the mid-1970s. Machines soon became a significant part of the NFL lifting landscape.

But after all of Redding's NFL travels -- from Cleveland (through 1988) to Kansas City (1989 to '98) to Washington (2001) to San Diego (2002 to '06) to the USA Strength and Conditioning Coaches Hall of Fame in 2006 -- he's as much of a believer as ever in Epley's principles.

Free weights over machines, except in the case of injury. Feet on the ground. In every exercise, explosion. The free-weight philosophy is making a comeback, and it's not too different from that espoused by Rock Gullickson, Redding's friend and predecessor with the Packers. But Redding's gregarious personality is a change from the generally reserved Gullickson, and he freely admits he'll grind on a group if he's not getting results.

"He's the type of guy that don't take any crap off the players," said Epley, who is retired but continues to work with the 33,000-member National Strength and Conditioning Association, which he founded in 1978.

"He's a strong disciplinarian, he's a tough guy and a pretty innovative guy, too."

Redding considers his ability to read people a strength, and those who know him say he can push the right button with the right player, during the week and on game day. He acknowledges it will take time to learn his new charges' strengths and weaknesses, their bodies, their eating habits, their personalities, their motivations. So, he'll keep things relatively generic when the offseason strength and conditioning program begins next month, offering four variations of a single lift and allowing players to choose their apparatus. But Redding will be there, watching, analyzing, critiquing -- and letting his 56 years tell him when to ask the question if someone isn't falling in line.

When Gullickson was fired last month, Redding reached out to Packers coach Mike McCarthy, whom he'd worked, hunted and fished with in Kansas City. Redding was a Packers fan growing up, in part because his father, who passed away on Aug. 5, looked and coached like Vince Lombardi. "Crump" ran three plays on offense and one defense, and his teams won because they'd spent four hours a day on fundamentals.

In that respect, for Redding, Lambeau Field feels a lot like where it all began.

"It exudes positive confidence," Redding said. "The facilities, the people, the icons, the whole 9 yards -- the atmosphere is here, and I'm just lucky to be here."