Periodization i. Phase One: Loading ii. Phase Two: Muscular Endurance iii. Phase Three: Tempo d. Football Lifts i. Squats ii. Bench iii. Cleans 4. Rest and Recovery 5. Nutrition 6.
Before you start thinking about how to structure your plan, it's important to know exactly what you want to get out of this. The first thing you need to do is set a target for yourself. Goals give you a mark to shoot for and keep you motivated when you face adversity.
You should have short, middle, and long-term goals. In the short-term one to seven days , goals need to be specific and attainable.
In the middle-term one to two months your goals should relate to your fitness. Maybe that means you want to add 20 pounds to your bench press or cut 0. This will constantly remind you that your football offseason workout schedule isn't a nine-month commitment — it's a one-day commitment you repeat every day for nine months. Your longer-term goals should be more conceptual, but still specific and personal. These aren't goals for your team — you and your teammates can discuss team-goals before the season.
These goals are for you and you alone. Maybe your long-term goal is to be the starter on opening day, or lead your conference in tackles, rack up double-digit sacks, or get recruited by your dream school.
Commit this goal to memory and think about it often. Visualize it coming true. In this way, your college football workouts start before you ever set foot in a gym or on the field, or even on campus.
When you visualize yourself accomplishing your goals, you bring them one step closer to reality. Imagine how it's going to feel when you get there, and don't skimp on the details. What do your pads feel like? What does the crowd sound like?
What's your assignment? How does your body feel? The more you visualize before you get to the big day, the calmer you'll be in the moment because you've been there before — every single night. These visualization exercises will also help to keep you motivated when your offseason strength and conditioning workouts get tough. Your college football training program isn't a program unless it has a schedule. Write down a schedule you can commit to every week and make it a priority.
You don't need to plan the specific lifts or exercises you'll do, but you do want write the focus of each day and stick to this plan. There's no such thing as an off day, by the way — your body doesn't take them. Everything you do will either help you get better or make you worse, so make sure that even on your days off lifting, you're getting the most out of your rest and recovery.
We'll talk more about this later. Aim for six days "on", one day "off" per week. Your "on" days will cycle through several types of strength and conditioning workouts — some for strength and power, some for speed an agility, some for flexibility and stabilization, and some for endurance.
Most of your workouts should be a combination of all of the above. Obviously your college football workout program should be tailored to the demands of your position — linemen should spend more time on strength and power than defensive backs, for example, who should focus more on speed and agility — but every football player needs to be athletically well-rounded. Your offseason strength and conditioning program should include at least one of the following types of workout per "on" day.
Mix and match them to maximize your benefit, but be sure not to overdo on any muscle group. So don't do speed and agility after you do a lower body weight workout. Make sense? Men's Fitness has a good football lifting program you can use as a basis for your football weight training program. It's three days a week and focuses on "compound lifts" like squats, bench press, and power cleans.
These multi-joint lifts use more than one muscle group at a time to help stabilize, balance, and add strength to every movement on and off the field. Make sure to change up your football weightlifting program once every three weeks or so — your body is great at adapting to stress so you need to periodically change it up so you can continue to grow. They also talk a bit about football nutrition and training safety.
Core needs to be a big focus of your football training program as well. Hips, back, and core are a football player's powerhouse — if these aren't strong he's at a much greater risk for injury, and a much greater risk of getting run over on the field.
Incorporate planks, tire flips, wood choppers, and core circuits into your offseason training plan. Check out the video below for a circuit you can add to the end of your regular weight training routine. All the strength and power in the world won't help you if you can't get to your assignment on the field.
Focus on things like wind sprints, ladders, and cone drills — anything where you have to accelerate and decelerate quickly in short bursts. Between each drill, rest for long enough to get back to almost full recovery so you can go full-bore again.
This is how you'll develop "football speed. Endurance training for a football player isn't about long-distance running, swimming, biking, or any other steady-state cardio. An endurance football workout is more about repetitions. Lots of sprints. You want to exhaust yourself physically and mentally, since that's where you'll be in a game.
Check out these sprint workouts for football players to get an idea. This is how you'll get into "football shape. Football workouts should begin with a dynamic warmup. Every time. It doesn't matter if you're on the track doing speed and agility training, in the gym doing your weight training program, or on the field running routes — a good warmup is essential to preventing injury and performing your best. To start, get your heart rate up with a short jog.
Once you're warm, it's time to stretch. But avoid static stretching before you work out. A meta-study found static stretching prior to a workout can reduce strength by 5. Static stretching can be good when you're finished with your football workout, but not before. Instead, stretch dynamically — through movement — as demonstrated in the video below.
You can choose to structure your football weight training program in many different ways. Some people like to do upper body one day and lower body the next.
Others like to do a "push" day followed by a "pull" day, where you push weight away from the center of your body one day with lifts like bench press, shoulder press, and squats, and pull it toward you the next with things like dead lifts, rowers, pull ups, and curls. How you split it up is up to you. Whatever you do, just be sure not to work the same muscle group to fatigue two days in a row.
Your muscles need 48 hours of recovery time after you push them to failure before you can do it again. Whatever you decide to do on a given day, always think "middle out. The reason you do this is because you need your triceps to get the most out of your bench press. If your triceps are tired when you start your bench, you won't be able to work your chest as hard as you should.
But you don't need your chest to do triceps extensions. Big lifts first. The three most important lifts for football are squats, bench, and power cleans. These are compound lifts like we talked about earlier, and should be done immediately after you warm up, before you do any other lifts.
Each of these "big muscle" lifts requires several different muscle groups to work in unison, so if you fatigue one part of the chain before you start, you won't get as much out of them as you could.
Phase One: Loading At the beginning of the offseason, focus on building power by lifting high weight at low rep counts. Aim to fail between reps each set, and recover fully before you go again. Along with proper diet and rest which we'll discuss below , this will help you gain muscle.
The first weeks are called your "load phase. If you need to gain weight, this is your best time to do it. Nutrition is the biggest part of weight gain or weight loss, and we'll cover that below, but workouts are important as well.
You'll use many of the same techniques bodybuilders and strongman competitors use to grow muscle mass. In this phase, increase your rep target to between per set.
As you do this, the rest period should decrease from 90 seconds to around 60 seconds between each set. This will help develop muscular endurance.
You'll be able to lift the same amount of weight more times and therefore keep your strength up over the course of a game. You will reduce the rest even further through a principle called reciprocal inhibition — where you work opposing muscle groups on alternating sets. For example, after you warm up, you might start your workout routine with alternating sets of bench press and bent over rows with seconds of rest between each set.
When you flex your chest, your back muscles are forced to rest. When you flex your back, your chest is forced to rest. This is reciprocal inhibition, which keeps your heart rate high while still allowing each muscle group adequate time to rest and recover before you put a load on it again. Do that and you cannot fail to improve. Any effective training regime should be built on the back of a solid fitness assessment.
And it becomes exceptionally important in sports conditioning…. Visit the fitness testing section of the site. Spend one afternoon developing a profile of your athletic abilities and record the results. Click here to go to the fitness tests section. For example. A football training program lasts 12 months — even if the competitive in-season only spans from September to December.
And that applies to any football player at any level…. Even if you only have a couple of days a week spare for football conditioning, you should still adapt and vary those sessions over the course of a year. For the more ambitious players, this system of periodization is the ONLY way you can incorporate all the necessary elements of training without overtraining.
Wow — over half a year to prepare! Individual exercises and sessions are covered in separate articles. This is how everything fits together into one, complete football training program. The goal is to develop optimum strength and power so that it peaks just prior to the start of the in-season. Because this phase is so long you need to break into smaller cycles — often referred to as macrocycles….
Secondly, certain aspects of fitness are built on the back of others. Explosive power conditioning for example follows maximal strength training, which in turn follows functional strength training. You should also consider a functional strength program designed to correct any imbalances that occur as a result of a strenuous football training program. Football players are one of the few groups of athletes that can benefit from a hypertrophy program.
This type of weight training is designed to increase muscle mass. But contrary to popular belief larger muscles are not necessarily stronger muscles…. As such hypertrophy training in football should make up only a portion of the strength training program. Maximal strength training is an important element also and leads to significantly different adaptations than bodybuilding.
Linemen may want to place more emphasis on the hypertrophy phase than other players. As an example, they could split their preseason into just 4 phases —. Finally, following the development of muscle mass and maximal strength, conversion to sport-specific power is crucial….
It is power and not maximal strength that is most beneficial to football players. The cycle just prior to the season start should focus on developing peak power. For a detailed look at strength training for football, click here.
Too much running and interval training can detract from the development of muscles mass and maximal strength. Some light aerobic training may feature but more as a form of active recovery than intense endurance sessions. As the pre-season progresses more emphasis can be placed on speed and agility and intense interval training.
If you take the time to plan your football training program in advance, quickness and agility should hit a peak just as the season begins. You can get it here.. Your degree of range of movement impacts on your speed, agility and to some extent your power. It will also help to prevent injuries resulting from over stretching. While too much flexibility is not beneficial either, most football players are a long way from being overly supple.
Spend at least 3 days a week stretching — this is on top of stretching exercises performed as part of the warm up.
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