STATE COLLEGE --

Gone are the days where the Penn State football team's practices and conditioning sessions were run completely behind closed doors.

Penn State football holds predawn agility and strength drills 32 Gallery: Penn State football holds predawn agility and strength drills

With new football coach Bill O'Brien now at the helm, the Nittany Lions have suddenly become much more media friendly.

Friday morning outside the Lasch Building, a group of about 25 reporters huddled against the cold on the sidelines of the practice field as they watched the football team run through a 5:30 a.m. conditioning workout under the direction of new strength coach Craig Fitzgerald.

It's the first time in the history of Penn State football that the media has been allowed to watch a full session of a winter conditioning workout.

With his gravelly voice, hulking shoulders, and intense, affable personality, Fitzgerald is exactly what you envision a strength coach should look like.

His energy was infectious, and the players seemed to feed off him.

The conditioning session started off with a dynamic warmup, then the players broke into three groups and rotated through three different stations.

At the end of the hour-long session, the media was invited to watch the players lift in the new Penn State weight room that's currently in the process of an extensive refit.

Gone are the weight machines that former strength coach John Thomas favored to supplement his High Intensity Training model.

Fitzgerald is a proponent of free weights and dynamic explosion. That means Olympic lifts and things such as squats, hang snatches and power cleans.

On this morning, he had a group of players dispersed among seven power racks because not all the new equipment has arrived yet.

By the time the weight room remodel is complete, there will be 24 power racks that will allow the entire team to work out at the same time if needed. The room currently accommodates only about 25-30 players at a time.

Check back for a more detailed version of this story, complete with quotes, later this morning ....