Prepare for Football Season with These Five Types of Exercise

If you want an edge this coming football season then preparation needs to begin well before tryouts. While you work to get your mental game on point, incorporating these five exercise principles into your weekly workouts will help you get game ready. The goal of preseason conditioning should be to prepare your body for the physical demands of both practices and games so that you can help lead your team to victory and stay off the injured list (Fullagar HHK, McCunn R, Murray A, 2017). 

A good trainer will help you periodize and structure your offseason and preseason workouts but a well-rounded training program should incorporate these five elements :

Strength training: Offseason is the time to focus on strength development and muscle hypertrophy. Compound movements like deadlift, front squat, side lunges, and isolated strength training like lat pulldowns or bicep curls when performed in sets of 8-12 at 40-80% of your one rep max with a 2-3 minutes break between sets will help increase muscle hypertrophy. Your coach or trainer may recommend you focus more on certain muscle groups depending on the position you play on the field but two to three training sessions per week during the offseason can help increase your strength. 

Speed and power: If all you were required to do on the field was lift or push something heavy then strength training might be all you needed. Football players, though, need to accelerate or decelerate a great deal of force at quick speeds. This is where speed and power training become important. Power lifts at >80% of one rep max, plyometrics, and sprints are great ways to develop explosive speed. This type of training is hugely beneficial to prepare for football season but needs to be incorporated carefully as it can be easy to injure oneself if not done correctly. Your coach or trainer can help you build a program for speed and power that meets your current fitness levels to improve your play and decrease your risk for injury. 

Agility: Since football is a multiplayer game you need to be able to react quickly to the actions of both your teammates and your opponents. The ability to make whole-body changes in speed or direction in response to a stimulus is called agility. You can have all the strength and power in the world but if you can’t harness that energy to make a quick change in speed or direction you will be at a disadvantage during a game. Ladder drills and cone drills like zig zag and four corners are examples of agility drills. These drills focus on quick feet with deceleration and acceleration as well as changes in direction–forward run, side shuffle and backpedal. 

Flexibility: We’ve already looked at how agility is imperative to both a good offense and a good defense but without enough flexibility in the upper and lower body and the spine it will be difficult to translate the speed and power you developed during pre-season training into quick changes in direction and fast passes on the field. Off-season is the perfect time to start working on your flexibility. Static and dynamic muscle stretches and joint mobility exercises that target the groin or adductor muscles, and the hip flexors, for example can help a player play low and generate power from these positions. 

Spend time at the beginning of each workout developing flexibility throughout your hips, knees, ankle and spine and follow it up with strength and stability exercises so that you learn to control your body and develop power within these new ranges. 

Aerobic Conditioning: while quick bouts of sprinting, backpedaling and cutting that challenge the anaerobic system are common during a football game, the typical rest time between plays and during advertising-, injury-, and tactical-timeouts averages between 25 and 40s (Fullagar HHK, McCunn R, Murray A, 2017) which may not be long enough to bring your heart rate and breathing rate down to resting levels. This places a high demand on the cardiorespiratory system and if you have been neglecting aerobic conditioning you may find yourself still trying to recover your breathing as the next play starts. 

Aerobic conditioning involves sustained exercise at 60-80% of your heart rate max. This could mean running, rowing, swimming,  jumping rope, or riding a bike, for example. If you have been training pretty consistently using the calculation below will give you a pretty good estimate of your max heart rate:

    220 - your age = max heart rate (MHR)

To estimate your aerobic training zone you can calculate the equivalent heart rate for 60% and 80% of your heart rate max and use those numbers to monitor your heart rate during workouts. If you haven’t been doing aerobic conditioning or if it’s especially hot out you may notice you have to go slower or at a lower intensity than expected initially. If you perform consistent aerobic training you will notice you can train faster and harder while maintaining your heart rate in the aerobic zone and you should notice a change in your recovery and endurance in the later parts of a game.

EXACTLY WHICH EXERCISES ARE BEST FOR ME?

Now that we’ve discussed the exercise principles that should be incorporated into a well-rounded offseason football training program you may still be wondering exactly which exercises are right for you. This article is focusing more on the principles of a training program than the specific exercises because a high quality training program will be individualized both to your needs as an individual player and to the demands of the position you play on the team. The kicker, the linebacker, and the quarterback have different skills and strengths they need to develop and working with your trainer and coach to target these skills in your workout will help you become a better player. 

Now that we see how offseason prep in the training room is important to prepare for football season, we should also acknowledge that offseason is the perfect time to rehab any injuries or irritations. If you are currently injured or have noticed a pain or irritation that develops as training and practices ramp up, now is the time to schedule an appointment with the physical therapists at Evolve so they can help you recover and build resilience ahead of football season. 

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