5/3/1 for Football: The Physical Development
of a Hostile Team
Before you embark on any physical fitness
program, please consult a doctor.
This book may not be reproduced or recorded
in any form without permission from the
authors.
Copyright 2010 by Jim Wendler and Bob
Fitzgerald. All rights reserved.
Table of Contents
Introduction – 5 Weight Room – 8 Annual Plan – 18 Workout Structure – 27 Warm Up – 33Football Specific work – 46
Linear Speed – 53
Jumps and Throws – 63
Conditioning – 76
Jumps, Throws, Speed – First 8 Weeks (Skill) – 84
Jumps, Throws, Speed – First 8 Weeks (Linemen) – 92
Summer, 9 Weeks (Skill) – 99
Summer, 9 Weeks (Linemen) – 108
Summer Pre-Camp, 6 Weeks (Skill) – 117
Summer Pre-Camp, 6 Weeks (Linemen) – 124
Winter Strength and Conditioning: 8 Week Training Cycle – 132
Going into Summer: 9 Week Training Cycle – 147
Summer Pre-Camp: 6 Week Training Cycle – 156
In Season Training – 163
In Season Conditioning – 165
Introduction
Most high school strength coaches are football coaches
first, teachers second, and strength coaches third. This is understandable, but it also makes it difficult to decipher and understand all the training information that’s out there – on the internet, at clinics and through word of mouth in the weight room – today. As a coach, you don’t have time to sift through it all. Don’t feel bad about this, though – full time “professional” coaches can’t do this either, let alone the part timer who’s not getting paid anything extra to be his school’s strength coach.
Our goal with this book is to give you and your team the best training program out there – free of the fluff, BS and crap that does nothing but waste your time. There are no gimmicks in this program.
As players and coaches, we understand what it takes to play this game, and we’ve watched as training for football has suffered greatly at the hands of both tradition and
“science.” Unfortunately, fault can be found with both approaches. All the sophisticated speed training in the world won’t help you if your athletes are fat and can’t perform a chin-up. All the gassers in the world won’t help you if your athletes are too weak to press their way off the ground.
This book was written to give you the best of practical experience and science. Both of us were average athletes who performed at higher levels simply because we worked
harder at our physical preparation. That’s what made us better football players.
There’s tremendous wisdom in failure and grit, and good coaches and teachers are the ones that had to struggle to be good. Both of us, at one point or another, were players that everyone gave up on, and it’s that “failure and grit” that we both had to endure in order to get better. This is why we believe we’re qualified to write this book. We’ve done it. We’re among the scrappy few – or many – who had to run more, lift more and learn the game better in order to earn an extra minute or two of precious field time.
As lifters and former players, we highly recommend that you, as coaches, begin training hard. Your players will look up to you, you’ll earn their respect instantly, and you’ll become a better coach and person. You’ll be stronger and you’ll be in better shape, and those are two things that have never gone out of style. If you want to be better at everything in life, start NOW. Stop reading, put down this manual, and get going. NOW.
As for questions, exceptions and substitutions to this
program, we don’t have any. What we’ve put on paper is what has worked for us and what we think is best. If we didn’t, we wouldn’t have recommended it. Before you ask us any
questions about how to substitute “this” for “that,” or how this program would work for you if you trained for more days or with a different split, give what we’re telling you its due and work this program into the dirt.
Lastly, we’ve both coached extensively and we know what you’re going through – and what you’re embarking on in your
preparations for the season to come. Getting this program right is hard work. It’ll take some experimentation on your part, some serious study, and a good measure of brutally hard toil and struggle to make this thing run. We know, however, that it’s been done, it’ll continue to be done, and that you can and will make it happen. We wish you the best of luck.
Weight Room
Most high school weight rooms have neither the amount of equipment nor the space to accommodate the optimal lifting of an entire program. This doesn’t necessarily preclude you from running an effective strength and conditioning
program, but in order to do some of the things we’ll be suggesting later on, it’s a good idea to get some sense of what you’ll need in terms of equipment requirements.
Maybe your budget will cover the purchase of some of this equipment. With our economy in the shape it’s currently in, it’s more likely you’ll be asked to make do with what you already have. This is fine, provided you’re aware of the alternatives you have available for some of the movements and drills we’ll talk about later in this manual.
If you’ve just taken over a program recently, the need for alternatives and substitutions takes on even greater
importance because the chances of getting new equipment purchases added to your budget are slim. It took one of us three years of coaching to get one piece of equipment – a Glute-Ham Raise – approved for purchase. The bad news here is that we didn’t have a Glute-Ham Raise for three years. The good news is that we executed a dramatic turnaround with our program – 0-8 to 7-3-1 – without a having this piece of equipment in our weight room, so it can be done.
The point here is that a program can be run efficiently – and even optimally – without the benefit of the latest state-of-the-art strength training equipment. The key is
knowing how you want to structure your team’s training in a big picture sense, and then knowing as many alternatives and substitutions as you can for each facet of the program you’ve put together.
With that said, the purpose of this chapter will be
twofold. First off, it will provide you with something of a “wish list” in terms of what equipment to focus on if your budget allows for purchases. Next, as stated above, we want to let you know that this chapter is only a wish list. It would be optimal to have each piece of equipment we’ll be talking about here, but it’s not necessary, per se. For example, if all you have are a handful of bars and some plates, you’re an Olympic lifting program, and there’s no way around it, because that’s the optimal way to train with what you have. So learn to teach your athletes how to clean and snatch. If you don’t have any equipment at all, you’re a bodyweight exercise team, and you’re going to have to make it work.
Obviously, you’ll need enough barbells and plates to accommodate a large group of athletes working
simultaneously, and you’ll need rack of dumbbells going up to at least 80 pounds.
With that said, here’s a list of things an ideal weight room would have:
Power Racks: In terms of efficiency, safety and sheer ease
of use, there’s no substitute in your weight room for the power rack. And the more of these you have, the more you can get done. Two of the main weight room exercises in this
program are the bench and the squat, and the power rack is the ideal arrangement for both. For efficiency, no single piece of weight room apparatus can be used for more
movements than the power rack. If you have racks, use them. If you have a budget for buying new equipment, make this your top priority.
While price is always going to be a big priority, always adhere to the motto, “Buy nice. Don’t buy twice.” The use and wear on a power rack, especially in a high school setting, is incredible. Not only do you have the hundreds of athletes that are supervised using them, but you have to account for the kids and faculty that will use and abuse your racks without your consent - and few people can wreck a power rack or any piece of equipment faster than a high school freshman. It’s amazing what harm a weak kid can do.
There are plenty of companies who will lure you in with a cheaper model, but you’ll always get what you pay for. A good way to save money on a quality rack is to get it without weight storage. In many cases, you can buy a
quality 7.5 foot rack without weight storage for well under a thousand dollars. Using weight trees to hold the weights for each station is incredibly cost efficient.
Benches: You’ll need a sufficient number of flat bench
stations for multiple groups to train the bench press at the same time. These can be dedicated bench stations – a bad idea, which we’ll address in a moment - or they can be individual flat benches you put inside power racks. If they’re adjustable to various inclines, this is
advantageous, but it’s not a necessity – and can even put your program at a disadvantage, as you’ll see below.
From a space perspective, a dedicated bench station is not efficient. These take up the same space as power racks yet can only be used for one thing: bench pressing. If you
already have these, see if you can sell or trade them in to get the money to buy more power racks. There are many high school gyms that have 2 power racks, 3 benches and 2
incline benches. This is a huge waste of space. Getting rid of the incline and bench presses would allow you to fit five more power racks in your weight room. Placing a
dumbbell bench inside each one of them would now give you seven complete stations that you can squat, bench press, chin (if you have a chin bar in the power rack) and perform any number of movements in. Now you can accommodate four athletes per power rack (that’s 28 kids at one time), and your workouts can move much faster.
Most people will try to get a 0-90 degree incline bench for their stations, but this is usually overkill. Unless
incline pressing is huge priority in your training, don’t even bother. A quality flat bench can run you under $300, while the same 0-90 incline bench will cost you well over $500. Plus, most 0-90 incline benches are not very well made. They are sub-par inclines and sub-par flat benches. Do yourself a favor: get a quality flat bench and save some money.
Glute-Ham Raise: The finest gift a strength coach can give
an athlete is a set of hamstrings, and the best hamstring exercise ever invented is the Glute-Ham Raise. We’ll go
into alternatives for this piece of equipment later in the strength training section of this manual, but if you have the budget for one or more of these, we’d advise you to pull the trigger. Get your athletes on an intelligent GHR regimen, and you’ll notice immediate dividends in their speed, agility and strength levels.
Dip/Pull-up Bars: Dips are the best assistance exercise
we’ve found for the bench press, and there’s really no
substitute for pull-ups (and/or pull-up variations) when it comes to lat and “pulling” strength. We’re advocates of sticking with the basics when it comes to assistance
exercises, and it doesn’t get any more basic than dips and chins. Pull-up bars (and the old Soviet-style “stall bars”) can and should also be used for a variety of hanging ab exercises.
Many companies are offering chin and dip stations that can be added to their power racks. This is a great way to save money and space. Chin bars will attach directly to the rack and often have multiple grip options. Dip stations can be added and removed from the power rack with ease and stored near the power racks. Add both of these options to your power rack and your kids will not have to leave the rack stations for most of their workouts. This is a huge time and money saver.
45-Degree Back Raise: This piece of equipment provides a
simple and effective means of strengthening – in
conjunction with, or as an alternative to, the GHR – the athlete’s lower back and hamstrings. Many weight rooms
it’s not glamorous or “sexy” enough, it’s ignored. If this applies to you, dust it off and start using it.
If possible, this can be substituted by getting a GHR with a split pad. Now you can use the GHR for back raises and glute-ham raises without the discomfort of crushing your genitals. Again, we can now use the glute-ham raise for lower back work, hamstring development and even abdominal training as a Roman chair.
Medicine Balls: Medicine ball work is vital for explosive
strength training, conditioning and warming up. We’ll cover the various uses for medicine balls later in this manual, but we suggest having on hand a variety of sizes – from 4-6 pounds up to 20 pounds.
Dragging/Pushing Implements: We suggest dragging and
pushing sleds – or whatever else you can reasonably drag or push – for a number of reasons. Drag or push for
conditioning, recovery, warming up, or for position-specific drills. The weight of what’s being dragged or pushed will vary depending on what you’re trying to accomplish, but having such implements on hand is very important.
The best thing about using dragging sleds is that their use is very easy to teach. Everyone knows how to walk. Sled dragging for lower body development is idiot-proof. This is also a great way for you to train the lower bodies of
athletes that have trouble getting a quality leg workout due to poor form or mobility when teaching the squat. Plus, there is something primal and fun about loading up a
sled and pulling. Not only does this give you strength, but it will add some fun into the workouts. Challenges with the sled are always a morale booster and can add some
competitiveness and camaraderie to your weight room.
Jump Boxes or Platforms: You essentially need something to
jump on and off, and whatever you use needs to be both adjustable and safe. We’ll get into jump training and what it does in a later chapter, but whatever your athletes are jumping on needs to be both sturdy and padded at its front edge in the event of a missed jump. We suggest cutting 1” thick mats into multiple squares to adjust the heights to which your athletes will be jumping.
High Jump Pits: If your school has a track team, chances
are you have a couple of these around. You should be using them on the field as a teaching aid for tackling
instruction (player to player contact without hitting the ground), but they’re also a great tool for some of the plyometric and medicine ball drills we’ll be covering in later chapters.
Bands and Chains: Bands are extremely useful for a variety
of assistance exercises, but we don’t really advocate their frequent use with your athletes’ main exercises (assistance work is a different story). The reasoning behind this is simple:
Accommodating resistances are a good idea on paper, but the practice has been popularized by strong individuals who all use equipment. The popularity of chains and bands has
had great success with them. We’ve seen LOTS of athletes and regular lifters shit the bed with them, though, and this is for one main reason:
The strength curve for athletes/regular guys is heavy at the bottom and light at the top, so they need more low-end work. The strength curve for geared lifters is light at the bottom and heavy at the top, so more high-end work is
needed.
Using chains/bands on a raw lifter will lower the use of bar weight and THUS lower the amount of weight that’s used at the bottom of a lift. Hence, the strength curve is all screwed up and not suited for a raw lifter.
There are some definite positives, though. The best thing that bands can add to your program is the elimination of the necessity of having an expensive pulley system in your weight room. Lat pulldown machines, cable crossover
machines or large Jungle Gyms (cable crossovers with
multiple lat pull and low row stations) cost a lot of money and take up room – all for some simple exercises that
aren’t even basic movements! Bands can be used for triceps work, assisted pull-ups, lat pulldowns, low rows, good mornings, pull-throughs, and rear delt work – and they can all be stored in a bucket or on the power racks. This is by far the biggest space and money saver in the weight room.
Stopwatches: Every coach in your program should have a
stopwatch around his neck at all times. It’s that simple. If you see a coach without one, make him go get one. When it comes to football training, it’s vitally important to
time all work intervals and rest periods, both on the field and in the weight room.
Other items you may consider are: Jump ropes, Blast Straps, TRX Straps or a set of gymnastics rings, dedicated box
squat boxes, chalk, safety squat bars, rackable cambered bars, chains, tow straps, measuring tape, heart rate
monitors, and an assortment of high-quality lifting belts. Also, you might want to consider the importance of collars to secure plates at the ends of barbells. Ideally, every rep of every set will be coached and spotted so the bar stays even, but if you’ve ever been in a high school weight room, you’ve seen some bizarre imbalances and lifts with extremely poor form. It’s important to coach this out of your athletes, but in the mean time, invest in several sets of collars.
No matter what you put in your weight room, the most
important thing is to get the items that make YOUR program complete. Whether or not you follow this training program or something very different, it’s important that your weight room fit your philosophy. If you have a choice in designing your own weight room, take a moment and write down the workouts you would like to have your kids do. Now take into account the space you have and begin building it.
Summary
One of the big hurdles coaches have to compensate for is unsolicited input from other sport coaches and the school’s general population. Without exception, these people rarely use the weight room, but seem to want their input taken
seriously - and the equipment they want will usually take half the budget. Machines such as leg extensions, leg curls, chest presses and other cable setups run in the thousands of dollars and take up valuable space.
Compromises will have to be made, but fight like hell to get your team and your program the weight room they
deserve. The inefficiency of these items is apparent, and this must be expressed intelligently and calmly to the athletic director or whoever is going to have the final say. The success your program has will be in direct
proportion to your influence, so you’re going to have to make do with what you have. A good coach, however, can make a great program from nothing, so you must be creative.
Annual Plan
We talked a lot about what we wanted to say in this
chapter, and how we wanted to lay things out. We decided to write this disclaimer AFTER we’d written the entire
chapter, as an introduction to the material we’re
presenting here. First of all, for want of a better way to say this: DON’T FREAK OUT. If there’s something here that you don’t understand, read it again. It’s NOT that
complicated, and if you pay close attention to what we’re saying, the different workouts don’t vary THAT much from month to month. The shell, or skeleton, of the workout sessions remains the same. We’re presenting a lot of
information here so you can understand the thought process involved, not to confuse you. If all else fails, just
remember this: to the outside observer, the structure of the individual workouts will look nearly the same from month to month.
Rationale
Most coaches we talk to don’t think in terms of an annual
plan for their teams. They’re either thinking week to week
– or even workout to workout – or they simply do the same things in the weight room every week until the season starts.
Things are done for different reasons during each part of the year. We’ll get to this. What’s important for now is that you, as a coach or an athlete, always keep your eyes on what’s important: using all the tools at your disposal
to either become a better football player or, if you’re a coach, to create better football players. Numbers in the weight room mean absolutely nothing if they don’t transfer to the field. We’ve both seen guys who couldn’t lift crap in the weight room go out and wreak havoc on the field. We’ve also seen “workout warriors” who can bench and hang clean 500 pounds go into games and get tossed around by guys who can play the game and know about leverages.
Ask University of Pittsburgh strength coach Buddy Morris, and he’ll offer up Hugh Green as an example. Green, a three-time All American at Pitt, was one of the best
linebackers in the history of college football. He won the Walter Camp Award, the Maxwell Award and the Lombardi
Award, was drafted seventh overall in 1981 by the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, and spent ten years in the NFL – where he was selected to play in two Pro Bowls despite several major injuries during his career.
According to Coach Morris, Hugh Green’s all time max bench press was 315 – and this was during the era where...let’s just say testing for “ergogenic aids” wasn’t exactly at the top of the league’s priority list. In other words, Hugh Green simply knew how to play football, and he knew how to exploit leverages against bigger, stronger guys.
The primary goal of your strength and conditioning program is to make your athletes better football players. Getting them stronger and getting them more mobile will assist you in doing this, but again, the first thing we want to
caution you not to do is to hang your hat on lifting
stronger, chances are he’ll become a better player, but his ability on the field is your first marker, not his numbers in the gym.
Training for sports really comes down to two things:
mobility and strength. Are you mobile enough to get into
the proper positions for your sport? Are you strong enough to hold these positions and move from them explosively, efficiently and with purpose? Think about that for a second and consider a defensive lineman. Does he have the lower body mobility to get into a proper stance that will make him effective? Does he have the strength to hold this position during the offensive audibles? Can he fire from his stance in a low position while keeping his head up? Is this movement strong and explosive? Can he punch through the offensive lineman and rip through the block while keeping his hips square to the line of scrimmage? Is he mobile enough to stay low and keep his ground while fighting to get movement?
Every position on the field has different scenarios, but they all revolve around these two things: strength and
mobility. Think about that when you’re reading this manual
Planning
With that said, we’ll address annual planning. December is usually a wash for most coaches, because by the time your team has taken a few weeks off to recover following the season, the holiday break is on you and you usually won’t have access to your team until the beginning of January, so that’s likely where your plan should begin. From there, you’ll generally have about 30 weeks until mid-June, where you’ll hopefully be able to have the entire team together for your summer pre-camp program.
Things change somewhat if you live in a state whose
football programs have spring practice. Spring practice for high school football programs usually falls during March, April or May. This means you have anywhere from 12-16 weeks of general preparation time before your football-specific practices take over, and your general weight room sessions take more of an in-season tone.
Remember, however – and we can’t stress this enough – that the main goal here is to make your athletes better football players no matter what your schedule involves. To do this, you need to get them strong and mobile enough to
efficiently get themselves in football positions and hold them until their assigned task is accomplished.
As an overview, it’s wise to move, as the year progresses, from the general, to the general-specific, to the specific – at least in terms of what you’re emphasizing. This is a rather broad view of things, because you should be working on specific football skills and drills year-round as part
of your programming. You’ll only move to primarily
football-specific programming during spring practice and when camp starts in late July or early August – in which case you’ll be transitioning to an in-season strength and conditioning program.
Keeping Track of Stresses
Even at the high school level, your most important job as a strength coach is to keep your athletes healthy. Even when injuries have nothing to do with your program, when kids miss practices and games with non-trauma injuries, the coaching staff will put it on you. It’s almost taking the Hippocratic Oath as a physician: “First, do no harm.”
The way to “do no harm” is to make sure you keep track of the various stressors that affect your athletes. Think of the entire layout of your strength and conditioning program in terms of the different biomotor abilities necessary for success as an athlete (the “5 S” list): Strength, Speed,
Stamina, Skill and Suppleness (flexibility). Your athletes
start their workout cycles with a finite amount of “gas in the tank,” so when you expend half of what’s in there on one biomotor ability during the course of a workout – a particularly brutal squat session, for example – there’s really only half a tank left for the rest of it, so you have to be careful how you program the remainder of the session.
You also have to know how they refuel this tank. The
cases, it really only regenerates from hard sessions every 48 hours. In other words, if you have your athletes perform a brutal squat workout on Monday, they won’t be “refueled” again until Wednesday at the earliest, so taxing the crap out of them again on Tuesday is pointless because they won’t be able to go full speed. When one thing goes up, another thing has to go down. It’s that simple.
The Plan
That may seem a little convoluted, so let’s simplify things and explain how this actually works in practice. First off, strength is the main building block of any successful
program. Get your athletes stronger, and all sorts of good things will happen. It doesn’t work the other way around. If an athlete improves his performance in a
football-specific drill – linebacker drops, for example – it won’t do anything for his numbers in the weight room. Bring up his squat, however, and there’s a good chance he’ll be able to move his body a lot faster, increasing his potential to move very quickly in his football-specific drills. The stronger you are, the better you’ll move, so start your off-season program with an emphasis on improving your
overall team strength. We’ll cover exactly how this is done in a later chapter.
As the year progresses, we certainly don’t de-emphasize strength, but in order to improve the other biomotor abilities, the volume of our non-strength related
activities will increase. So, if we’re tacking on 15 more minutes of linear speed work, those 15 minutes, generally speaking, need to cut into that hour of strength work – as
opposed to being added to it. That’s what we mean by
keeping track of, and accounting for, stressors. You don’t
have to account for these stressors strictly in terms of time (this is simply an example) – this is done more along
the lines of how much you’re stressing your athletes’
nervous systems – but as a coach, you have to pay attention to how the different things you’re inflicting on your
athletes are interrelated. Everything affects everything else. It’s your job to keep your eyes open and figure out how.
For most football teams, January through June would look something like this (any unfamiliar terms will be covered in later chapters, so when we lay out the different aspects of the plan and what these terms mean, you can come back to this section with more clarity):
January to Spring Practice: The first plan in the
programming section of this book is an 8-week programming cycle designed to take you from the beginning of the year into spring practice (if your school runs spring drills). If you don’t run spring drills, either take a deload week or proceed directly to the “Going Into Summer” plan.
This initial cycle concentrates heavily on the compound lifts – the bench, squat, trap bar deadlift and power clean – along with a heavy dose of bodyweight exercises designed to improve hypertrophy and muscular cross-section along with improving your players general biomotor abilities: speed, strength, stamina, skill and flexibility. You’ll introduce the basic dynamic warm-up and ease them into
direct speed work, jumps, throws and football specific work.
Spring Practice: If your program runs spring drills, this
training cycle allows you to plan out an almost in-season two weeks of lifting where stresses are accounted for and lifting volume and intensity are toned down to allow for the exponentially greater volume of football drills.
Going Into The Summer: This is the period that follows
spring drills while your players are still in school. It changes up the training a bit, while still accounting for the (still) limited time you’ll have with them. Weight room volume is decreased, speed work – direct speed work, jumps and throws – is increased, and things begin getting a more specific leading into your summer program.
Pre-Camp Summer Program: This six week period is when
you’ll have the most time with your players and the greatest player participation, since your athletes will neither be in school – in most cases – nor playing another sport. Weight room volume will continue to be regulated, while speed work and football-specific work will take
precedence – although you should continue to think, in the weight room, in terms of getting everyone in your program stronger.
Training Camp/In-Season: We address our thoughts on
in-season training in detail in the programming chapters of this book. Suffice it to say that you should still think of your in-season training – from August until December – as a training “block” or cycle just like any other part of the
year. You’re going to train differently – less weight room sessions using decreased volume – but it’s still a training cycle and you should still have specific goals you want your players to accomplish – namely, recovering, getting stronger, and becoming better athletes.
Summary
Again, the general idea here is to start thinking in terms of annual – and even, in some cases, multi-year – planning for your program, as opposed to simply thinking about what you can accomplish in the short term. Each month of the year has a specific mission that needs to be accomplished, and each of these missions fit together to get you closer to the main goal of any good strength and conditioning program: to make your athletes better football players by
Workout Structure
No matter what your primary focus happens to be in a
specific workout session, it’s vitally important that you put some thought into why certain things are done at
certain times during the course of a session. There’s a progression which, if followed, we and many others have found to be the optimal way to order a workout. This progression1
It’s definitely easy to be swayed by hype and exorbitant claims, but think about this. Some of the most strong and explosive athletes in the world come from the throwing events in track and field – athletes who are all big, strong, fast and mobile. These athletes perform basic movements. They train with racks and benches in – in many
applies primarily to your off-season training, but the concepts we’ll discuss here can be applied to your football-specific practices once your season starts, if you so choose.
Warning:
Perhaps the worst thing you can do as a coach is to fall for all the gimmicks you’ll see in the industry today. Weight training isn’t easy, but it’s simple. Developing a strong, functional body isn’t easy, but it’s simple, and the fundamentals of doing so haven’t changed in a hundred years. A well thought-out, organized and properly executed regimen of free weights, full range movements and
jumps/throws will outperform and outlast any overly complicated program or gimmick out there.
cases – very Spartan gyms. Gimmicks will cost a lot of money, but they’ll offer few, if any, benefits. Nothing will ever replace basic hard work in the weight room, so don’t fall victim to the claims and hype of people trying to separate you and your program from your money with false claims of greatness.
After years of experience doing things both the “old” way and the “new” way, the order we’re going to suggest to you has been highly effective in developing all the biomotor abilities essential for football players.
1. Warm-up: This, of course, is the obvious beginning to
a session, but what do we really want to accomplish during a warm-up? In some cases, depending on your psychological approach to a specific practice session, you’ll want to get your athletes mentally prepared for what’s to come. In every case, you want to prepare their bodies for the stresses of workouts and
practices in both a general and specific way. We’ll cover this in the next chapter.
2. Football-Specific Work (Skill Development): This type
of work comes first, with a fresh CNS, because we’re looking to learn, rehearse, refine and perfect the specific skills necessary for the sport. There’s a time and place for doing football drills under
conditions of fatigue, but in the off-season, when the emphasis is on learning and perfecting, it’s best to do this kind of work with a relatively untaxed CNS, at “full speed.”
3. Linear Speed: The idea, simplified, with linear speed
development, is to have your athletes moving as fast as they can with full recovery, so linear speed
development is performed toward the beginning of the workout. Too many coaches treat their speed work as conditioning work. You wouldn’t expect a kid to squat his personal best after doing multiple sets of 10 reps with limited rest times, so don’t expect your kids to get faster if you don’t give them TIME to get faster.
4. Jumps/Throws: Since explosive jumps and medicine ball
throws are best performed under the same conditions (a relatively untaxed CNS) as the first two segments of this program following the warm-up, they, too, should be drilled in a non-fatigued state. The idea is to jump as high or far as you can (or as many times as you can in a given timeframe), or to throw a medicine ball as far or as hard as you can – and then to do each drill faster, longer and harder the next time out. This requires near-full recovery of your
athletes’ CNS.
5. Lifting: It may seem odd to see weight room work
listed 5th in a football “strength” manual, but there’s sound reasoning behind this placement. First of all, remember that your athletes are football players, not powerlifters. Secondly, the stresses incurred from the first four steps won’t impact lifting – especially maximal strength lifting – nearly as much as lifting will affect all of the steps we’ve suggested
performing before going into the weight room. If you’re doing a good job of keeping track of and
accounting for stresses, this won’t be a problem, and doing a decent volume of football-specific, speed, agility and explosive work before lifting won’t have as great an effect on your athletes’ lifts as you think it will. In fact, studies and experience have shown that such work will actually improve your athletes’ lifts.
6. Conditioning: The use of the term “conditioning” in
this context is a catchall, because there are various forms of “conditioning” necessary to make up the whole of a football player’s program. Again, we’ll cover this in a later chapter. There are certainly times when it’s appropriate to put your athletes in various states of fatigue. For off-season work, it’s generally a good idea to save this for the end, so the biomotor abilities that require full speed and a fresh CNS are not adversely affected.
7. Recovery/Stretching: Once a session is over – as soon
as a session is over – your athletes are now in
recovery mode. You don’t want to put them through an intensive conditioning session and then simply send them to the locker room. Encourage effective recovery and restoration with a brief cool-down period,
followed by a session of static stretching – or other more advanced means if you have them at your disposal - before they’re dismissed.
Important Programming Note
Take note of the fact that your time with your players during any given practice session or workout is limited. With football-specific work, speed work, jumps and throws, it’s important to the process that your players be fully recovered between rests, because this kind of work needs to be done as quickly and as forcefully as possible. With that said, the reps you program are going to seem somewhat low, simply because you can’t sit around all day waiting for your players to recover.
For example, the suggested full recovery time between two 20 yard sprints is 2-3 minutes. If you’re going to do this ten times, followed by full recoveries between sets of jumps, med ball throws and football drills, that’s a
serious time commitment that has to be factored in. Note, in the programming section of this manual, that as the volume of your sprints, jumps and throws is increased, the volume of your team’s lifting will decrease. This is partly due to the need to account for stresses, but it’s also due to the time considerations you’ll undoubtedly be facing as a coach.
Summary
Events, or aspects of a workout, that require motor learning or the production of maximal force, speed, or explosiveness should be performed in a relatively non-fatigued state for optimal results. With each aspect of your program, remember what the goal of that individual
timeframe happens to be, and stick to that goal, because everything your athletes do affects everything else.
In fact, as stated earlier, doing the football intensive drills, speed work, jumps and throws first will have a positive effect on your athletes’ lifting. Not only will their central nervous systems be ready for a great lifting session, but you’ll need less of a warm-up in the weight room. Their bodies are warm and their mobility is going to be at its peak. This is essential for doing full range movements in the weight room.
The thinking that these things are going to negatively
affect your lifting is a paradigm that you’re going to have to erase. While strength training is a huge portion of
developing a football player, it’s not the only thing. Allowing the weight room and chasing numbers in the weight room to dominate your program is a surefire way of being a one-dimensional coach.
Warm-up
When the head coach of a program asked one of us to design a warm-up for the team, he was looking for two major
characteristics:
1. We needed a warm-up that could be duplicated under any
circumstances, whether it was performed before practice, before games or before workout sessions.
2. We needed something that had a set time limit. Some of
the dynamic warm-up programs you’ll find online and
elsewhere are comprehensive, but they’re simply too long to be practical. This head coach wanted a progression that covered everything in 20 minutes, no questions asked.
We’ll get to what “covers everything” means later in this section, but we want to relate a quick story that’ll
illustrate some of the difficulties you’ll encounter when you try to design and implement a quality warm-up for your own program.
“When I was asked to do this, the first thing I did was to make a list of the movements I thought were essential, and I put them in the order I believed they should be done. After that, I went out to the field with a stopwatch and performed the entire thing, timing each individual movement in order to give myself a better idea of what to keep and what to take out. Once I did this, I was left with a solid
20 minute warm-up plan that I believe met all the criteria laid out for me by my head coach.
Once this was accomplished, we decided to hold a meeting about it. The “too many meetings” problem is something about which I have a lot to say, but it’s probably beyond the scope of this book, so I’ll just present this story as evidence of my thoughts on the matter. Just suffice it to say that we had a long, contentious meeting about what we were going to do for a warm-up. Given these circumstances, I’m sure you can imagine how ridiculous things became
whenever we tried to install something new on offense or defense.
We all sat down in the meeting room, and I stood up in front of the dry erase board and presented the warm-up movements one by one – even going so far as to get down on the floor and demonstrate and explain the purpose of each individual movement. When I was finished, the JV head coach raised his hand to speak.
“I can’t do this warm-up,” he said, his voice full of conviction.
“Why not?”
“There’s no butt kicks. I can’t do this warm-up if there’s no butt kicks. Why don’t you have butt kicks?”
This coach had a moderately successful career as a Division II running back, and went on to explain to us why butt
done in his life. As he went on and on (and on), I sat at the conference table with my head in my hands, thinking, ‘Does it really have to be this hard?’”
As we talked about in the chapter on equipping your weight room, you’re going to get crap from everyone about every aspect of your program, and the design of your
pre-practice/pre-game warm-up is no exception, so be prepared to defend yourself against the onslaught. What we hope to do here, however, is to present the characteristics of a good warm-up, to give you the movements your athletes should perform, and to arm you with the knowledge you’ll need to 1) know why you’re doing these movements, and 2) justify the warm-up you’ve designed to the committee of “experts” who’ll try to explain why you’re wrong.
Basic Principles
A solid warm-up comes in two parts: the general part and the specific part. These two parts do two different things. The term “warm-up” comes from the general part, when you’re eliciting changes in the muscular system to prepare for the work you’re about to undertake. The general part of the warm-up entails a series of general calisthenics and stretches (both static and dynamic) designed to prevent injury by expanding the range of motion of cold muscles and joints.
The specific part of the warm-up serves a different
purpose. The idea is to “prime the pump” of your central nervous system (CNS) in a manner specific to the type of exercise you’re about to do. If you do it this way, it
fires up your CNS in a very specific way, and it’ll play a very large role in enhancing your athletes’ performance in whatever part of the workout follows the actual warm-up.
Even if you don’t do things in exactly the way we’re laying out here, you should still take care to think of your warm-up in these terms – from the general to the specific. Too many coaches don’t take this seriously enough, and as
athletes, we’ve all been there: playing for the coach who, on a freezing cold day, thinks it’s enough to tell the entire team, out on the field before a game, to bend over and touch their toes for 30 seconds. First, consider the reasons for each movement. Then, consider the order you’re putting them in. Think long and hard about each of these aspects and the warm-up virtually designs itself.
Static vs.Dynamic?
In our experience with designing warm-ups, we’ve found that there are two schools of thought. The first school is all dynamic. These are coaches and trainers who believe that static stretching has no place in a workout, pre-practice or pregame warm-up. “Old-school” static
stretching, they claim, takes all the tension and stretch reflex out of muscles, ligaments and tendons, rendering them weaker and more prone to injury. On the surface, this seems to make a lot of sense, but experience has shown us otherwise.
The second school of thought believes too much in static stretching, acting as though football players should be out
on the field contorting themselves like Hindu snake charmers before every workout.
So where does the answer lie?
Somewhere in the middle, as usual. In Bob’s first year of coaching, the warm-up he designed was completely dynamic. We didn’t static stretch at all, and we paid the price for it with a rash of pulled hamstrings and groins. The
following year, we decided to make the warm-up a mix of dynamic movements and static stretching as described below, and guess what happened?
That’s right, no more injuries. Take that for what it’s worth when you’re trying to decide which of these camps you’re in. Our advice to you is to start your own camp, right in the middle.
The Warm-up
The following progression is an ordered sequence of
movements that effectively serves both purposes mentioned above. Your team should be able to complete this
progression in approximately 20 minutes. Once we’ve laid out all the movements we’re suggesting, we’ll go over some of the potential hazards you’ll face in setting up and implementing your warm-up with your own program.
Prelude: We start everything out by getting the kids in two
straight, even lines and having them run a lap around the field – or, in pre-game – around half the field. This concludes by running through or around the near goalpost,
then streaming into their warm-up lines, which are spaced out on the field such that each player has a 5 yard by 5 yard zone in which to move.
1. 3-Way Jumping Jacks (10 repetitions each):
a. Flings: Dynamically stretches the shoulders, chest,
groin and hips. These are done in a fashion similar to jumping jacks. The beginning of the fling has you
starting looking like a "star" i.e. your hands are straight out to the side and legs are held wide. From this position, cross your right arm over your left and your right leg over your left. Go back to the "star" position and reverse the process.
b. Seal Jumps: Start in the same position as a Fling, but
instead of crossing your arms and legs over, your feet will be together and your hands will be clapped,
straight out in front of you with your arms extended, at the top of the movement.
c. Jumping Jacks: Done in the conventional manner.
Why: This series of jumping jacks, done correctly, is a
great low-intensity complex of movements to start off your warm-up. It serves to raise core temperature and dynamically stretch the shoulders, chest, groin and hips, setting the stage for the more intense movements to
follow.
2. Bodyweight Squats (10 repetitions): Interlock your hands
over your head. Or don’t. It doesn’t matter. Just get your feet about shoulder width apart and do the
increasing core temperature and initiating an increase in range of motion for the hips, knees and ankles.
Why: These continue to increase core temperature, and they
initiate an increase in the range in motion for the hips, knees and ankles.
3. Low Pogo Jump (2 sets of 5-10 seconds): With your toes
upturned (dorsiflexion), knees and elbows slightly bent (hands in front of you), simply jump up and down,
initiating ground contacts as fast and frequently as you can from the start of the drill to the finish. Imagine jumping rope without a jump rope, and you’ve got it.
Why: Increases core temperature, stimulates CNS, increases
range of motion in ankles and knees.
4. High Pogo Jump (20 repetitions): Same concept as low
pogo jumps, only this time, you’re getting more height on your jumps. Both forms of pogo jumps are great for beginning to stimulate the CNS.
Why: Increases core temperature, stimulates CNS, increases
range of motion in ankles and knees.
5. “Breakdowns” (10 repetitions): Begin with feet together,
standing erect. On the “breakdown!” command, drop quickly into the athletic “breakdown” position – feet slightly wider than shoulder width, knees bent, lower back slightly arched, head up, and with your weight on the balls of your feet. From here, you’ll jump back into
the starting position and drop back into the breakdown position to perform one rep.
Why: Increases core temperature, stimulates CNS, develops
and reinforces a football-specific motor pattern.
6. Forward Lunge (10 repetitions each side): Everything is
performed at 90 degrees here in terms of knee flexion. Head and chest should be up, and hands should be in a natural position similar to how they’d be if you were taking a running stride with that particular leg.
Why: Raises core temperature, stimulates CNS, increases
range of motion in entire lower body and lower back.
7. “Down!” Command: Entire team hits the floor, “up-down”
style, finishing in the bottom position of a push-up.
8. “Over!” Command: Entire team rolls over to a supine
position (on their backs).
9. Supine Leg Kicks (10 repetitions each leg): One leg at a
time, dynamically kick your leg (held straight) as far as your hamstring flexibility will allow. The heel of the inactive leg should be anchored to the floor.
Why: Dynamically stretches the upper and lower insertions
of the hamstring muscles – the areas typically at risk for the most serious pulls and tears.
10. Supine “Hold It” (15-20 seconds each leg): Hold leg
far as you can, resisting slightly with the affected muscle group (hamstrings). This is a static hamstring stretch.
Why: There are two ranges of motion (ROM) you want to
address in a warm-up: 1) The active range of motion, which entails the positions your athletes can get into on their own. This is increased by dynamic stretching. 2) The
passive range of motion, which entails the positions your athletes can get into through manual (external) placement or the pull of gravity. The passive ROM is increased
through the use of static stretching. This particular movement is a static stretch for the hamstrings.
11. V-Sit Rollover (10 repetitions): Roll back onto upper
back, then back down, with legs in a “V,” and reach forward as far as possible at the bottom of the movement. Repeat.
Why: This is a dynamic lower back and hamstring stretch,
done at this point in the warm-up because your athletes will be positioned on their backs.
12. Seated 3-Way V-Sit Static Stretch (15-20 seconds each
position): Perform this one exactly how it sounds. Reach to each foot with the opposite arm and hold, then reach to the middle with both hands.
Why: This is an old-school static hamstring and groin
stretch, and it’s an effective continuation of the static and dynamic hamstring stretches you’ve already performed.
13. Hip Crossovers (10 repetitions each side): With knees
bent and pulled toward your chest, and your arms out the your sides, palms down, in a “T” position, turn your hips from right to left, trying to touch the ground with the leg on the side you’re turning toward. Try to keep your knees locked together here, and your shoulders on the floor.
Why: This is a dynamic stretch that targets the hips and
lower back. The ability to turn the hips effectively is crucial for football players at every position, and this movement promotes mobility in the region.
14. Piriformis Stretch (15-20 seconds each side): Cross one
leg over the other, figure-4 style. With one hand on the outside of your bent knee, and the other hooked under your ankle, lean forward and pull your knee and foot toward your chest.
Why: The piriformis is a muscle in the gluteal region of
your lower body – essentially, it’s an ass muscle. Tight piriformis muscles cause lower back, knee and sciatica
pain. Static stretching of the piriformis will increase the ROM of the entire hip region.
15. “Over!” Command: Entire team goes back to the bottom
position of a pushup to await the next command.
16. Cobras (10 repetitions each side): Begin on your stomach
with your arms outstretched. Bend your left leg and try to sweep across your body and attempt to touch your right hand. Repeat on the opposite side.
Why: This is a dynamic stretch that promotes mobility in
the hips, the torso and the quadriceps muscles.
17. Hip Circles (10 repetitions each way for each side):
This is a tremendous exercise for hip mobility. Get on all fours – hands and knees. Keeping your leg bent, move your entire leg in a circular pattern. Try to get a
large ROM during this exercise and be sure to do it forwards and backwards.
Why: Again, hip mobility is crucial for all speed, power
and change of direction movements in football. This is a series of dynamic stretches designed to increase hip mobility.
18. “Step Forward” Hip Flexor Stretch (15-20 seconds each
side): From the all fours position, lunge forward with your back knee on the ground. Position your forward foot past your forward knee. Place your hands on your hips, or raise the same hand as the side being stretched over and behind your head. Straighten the hip of your rear leg by pushing your hips forward. This is a static hip flexor stretch.
Why: This is a static stretch for the hip flexors. Once
Dynamic Mobility Drills
The second part of the warm-up involves a series of drills designed to be done “there and back” over a distance of 20 yards. The idea is to have the entire team in a series lines across the width of the field or gym floor, with everyone starting from the same line. You have three
options for starting each movement: on the coach’s whistle, when the player in front of you reaches the 10 yard mark, or have a designated player call a cadence. The third
option, having the team go on cadence, seems to pacify most head coaches in terms of convincing them that these drills have utility in a football sense.
Players pass the finish line to the right (their right) of the line, then go to the back of the line. The first player in line takes his turn again when the last player in his line has finished his trip.
Why: Most of these dynamic mobility drills are
self-explanatory. During the course of a football game, players will run, scrape, side shuffle and backpedal. The purpose of the “high knees” aspect of these drills is to continue to increase the active ROM of the hips. These drills will also continue to raise your athletes’ core temperatures to a point where they’re ready for the more CNS intensive work to follow.
1. 50% Run: Simple “not a jog, not a sprint” run.
2. A-Skips: A basic, rhythmic skip, bringing the knees as
3. Side Shuffle: Shuffle to the side in an athletic
football position, with head and chest remaining at one level, and without allowing your feet to either click together or cross.
4. High-Knees “Alley” Run: This is a sideways run that
simulates a linebacker’s scraping motion, except each forward stride (when your knee comes across the body) will be made by kicking your knee as high up and across as you can.
5. Running A’s (Don’t Pass Me’s): You’ll need a coach to
pace these. He’ll be doing a slow walk (this can be anywhere from 5 yards to all 20), while the athletes pick up and put down their feet, running in place as fast as possible (with high knees) without passing him.
6. Backpedal: Butt down, head up, back straight, “nose over
toes.”
Summary
This warm-up isn’t set in stone. We designed it so that one exercise easily segues into another, making it more
efficient time-wise. You may want to add exercises,
subtract them, or do things in a different order. If you remember the “butt kick” story that opened this chapter, you’ll understand that it doesn’t matter all that much what you do as long as you have a solid mix of dynamic and
Football-Specific Work
Let’s reexamine the main point of this manual, which was covered in the chapter on annual planning. The primary goal of this or any strength and conditioning program is to make your athletes strong enough to get into football positions and hold them, and mobile enough to explode out of them and make plays. You’ll notice here that we still haven’t said anything about getting them “strong enough to bench press 400 pounds,” or “fast enough to run a 4.4 second 40.”
The point here is to improve your athletes as football players, and the only way to see whether what you’re doing in the weight room or elsewhere is transferring is to
actually get them on a football field – or, in some cases, a gym floor – and watch them play football. And the only way they’re going to learn how to play football in your system – and then learn how to play football with speed – is to perform drills and movements specific to what they’ll be doing on the field.
This may be stating the obvious, and you’re probably thinking, “Yes, that’s why we have practice.” That’s not what we’re talking about here. The concept we’re trying to get across is that football-specific work should be thought of as a major, major part of the off-season workout plan as a whole.
Let’s take linebackers as an example. Once a linebacker has the basic fundamentals of a solid stance, tackling and hit and shed technique down, what’s the first thing they’re usually drilled on? In our experience, it’s their trigger
step – the first step a linebacker takes out of his stance based on the direction he sees his key moving. This, of course, can be different depending on the program, because a linebacker in one system can be playing an entirely
different position as a linebacker in another system, even if he’s lined up in a similar position on the field.
Regardless, this is a good example of what we’re talking about here. Let’s say you’re coaching two linebackers, one of whom has mastered the trigger steps for your system, and one who hasn’t. The first player is going to take the
correct first step most of the time (hopefully), and he’ll take a direct line to his assignment. The second player’s first step will be a “false step.” This false step will require a series of corrective steps when he realizes he’s made a mistake. By the time he’s righted himself, the
player who didn’t false step will already have three or four steps on him toward his objective, and so will the ball carrier. The receiver he’s assigned to cover will also have a 3-4 stride advantage toward either getting open if it’s man coverage, or getting open in the incorrect
linebacker’s zone before the correction can be made.
If the correct player runs a 4.7 in the 40, and the incorrect player runs a 4.5 but is spotting the correct player four strides in a 10 yard race, who’s going to win?
This is an easy, obvious, football-specific example, but it should serve to drive home the fact that it’s essential to integrate football-specific drills into the workout program itself – and not treat this kind of work as existing
You can’t just “train like animals” and hope it carries over.
The question then becomes one of how this is best
accomplished. The first thing to consider is the placement of the football-specific sessions within the workout as a whole. In the off-season, we believe it’s best to do this work first. Performing these drills with a fresh CNS makes for an optimal learning environment, where players are able to perform their assigned tasks at full speed, and at full recovery. In the off-season, much of what you’ll be doing in your football-specific sessions will be new material for your athletes, and the best way to develop new motor
patterns – or to learn new skills – is in a non-fatigued state where all the athlete needs to concentrate on is the acquisition of the new skill.
What you want to do, when teaching a new skill, is to get to a point where your athletes are performing this skill as fast as possible. Take wide receivers as an example. Let’s say you’re teaching them a series of release moves. You want to first teach them exactly what they’re supposed to be doing, then get them to do it fast. If they’re doing this in a fatigued state, they won’t be going their fastest. You need them in a state of untaxed CNS, where they can take their steps faster and faster every time out – with full recovery – in order to increase their actual game (competition) speed. Again, there’s a time and place to do football drills in a fatigued state – and to use football drills for “conditioning” purposes – but this isn’t it.
When you’re trying to decide exactly what to do, this is when you have to actually be a coach. Every system is different – even down to the level of the stances you’ll want your players to assume and the first moves they’ll make out of these stances. With that said, we’ll offer some guidelines on how to construct the drills you’ll be using in your off-season football-specific periods. Later on, in the programming sections, we’ll offer examples of what we’re referring to in this chapter.
Guidelines
1. Examine your system. Put some serious thought into what
it is your players actually do on the field within the context of your system. If you’re a triple option team, and your playside receiver is cracking on 75% of your plays, take that into account and don’t have them
running skinny post one-on-ones for this entire period. Work them on stalking and cracking and whatever else they’ll have to do, in the proper proportion to what they’ll actually be doing in game play situations. If your offensive linemen punch, teach them how to punch. If they don’t, don’t waste your time. Develop a series of drills that echoes what you’ll need them to do on the field, in a very specific sense.
2. Specificity. To add to point #1, you can’t be specific
enough in this football-specific period. Your general work takes place in the weight room and with the other aspects of the program. This period is ENTIRELY specific to football skills, strategies and tactics. Teach,
coach, and implement the things you need into your
system. Turn your athletes into better FOOTBALL PLAYERS.
3. Focus on the purpose of the period. The same concept
applies to every individual segment of this program. The purpose of the 15-30 minutes – or whatever you deem
appropriate – you’ll be devoting to football-specific work is football-specific work. DO NOT TURN THIS PERIOD INTO A CONDITIONING SESSION. This is especially
applicable if, as we suggest, you’re doing a wide
variety of work afterward. We’d rather see a player do 5 high-quality reps of a movement at this point than 15 reps in a fatigued state, because doing things in a
fatigued state with both hinder his ability to learn and perfect new motor patterns AND tax his CNS – which will adversely affect the work that follows.
4. Make it a progression. Start your athletes off from the
most basic elements of what you need them to learn, then progress from there every day. Take defensive backs, for example. First, you’d teach them their stance, and you might take an entire football-specific period to teach them the first backpedal step out of a stance. The following session might be devoted to simply teaching them how to backpedal. The one after that would
incorporate the first two components, then teach change of direction and break techniques. Remember, the
overriding factor here is to teach each position to do things as fast and explosively as possible.
5. Make drills reactive. Once you’ve taught your athletes
your system, you’ll then devise drills – or use pre-existing ones – to simulate game situations. Our advice to you is to make these drills reactive, as opposed to pre-programming movement patterns. When you’re deciding which drills you want to use, ask yourself what the drill has to do with the actual technique of the sport. When, in the course of a football game or scrimmage situation, will a player be asked to sprint to a cone and perform some pre-set move, or maneuver his way
through an agility ladder with his head down? He won’t. He’ll be reacting to an outside stimulus, then acting on this reaction. Train this reactive ability. Don’t pre-program.
6. Make Drills Competitive. This has been said a thousand
times before, in a thousand different ways, and it’s a huge part of the infamous “atmosphere vs. programming debate,” but it’s 100% true. Athletes need to compete – both so they can cultivate their competitiveness and to stave off the boredom of a long, occasionally tedious off-season. In other words, setting up your off-season workouts in a competitive manner will make them more fun for your athletes, and they’ll end up working a lot
Summary
We can tell you how to get your players faster and
stronger, and we can tell you how to set up your workout plan, but we’re not about to tell you how to play or coach football. As a coach or a player, that’s up to you. The football-specific section of your strength and conditioning program is where you take our guidelines, plug in what you already know about the game, and coach. We can’t tell you what system to run – although we both have strong opinions on the subject. That’s 100% up to you, and so is the actual
content of what you’ll be doing during this period.
By adhering to the guidelines we’ve given you here – by concentrating on a progressive, competitive sequence of reactive drills that align with the on-field goals of your program, you’ll be well ahead of the game in terms of your off-season preparation.
Linear Speed
Technique
When you’re thinking about linear speed considerations for your team, put a game tape into your DVD player or VCR and watch how often – and for how far – your athletes actually run straight ahead during the course of a game. A long, linear run will happen occasionally – the vast majority of the time this is done by skill position players – but what you’ll find, on most plays, is that your athletes will run for a set number of yards (usually ten or less) before they’re forced to change direction. They’ll have to cut, jump or make a football play before either stopping the forward movement action altogether or starting again.
Now, some coaches advocate this approach – the short sprint approach – for the entirety of their running and
conditioning programs. “My guys don’t have to run more than 20 yards at a time during games,” they’ll say, “so we don’t have them run more than 20 yards in practice.”
While we agree that “top end” speed isn’t as vitally important for most football players as it is for, say, Olympic 100 meter sprinters, we also don’t agree with the repeated short sprint approach, at least in terms of
conditioning. We’ll get to this in a later chapter.
What’s important to think about with linear speed is the length of the average football play. Time-motion studies indicate that the length of the average play is at least 6
