Bottom-Up Front Squat, with Chains

One of the biggest mistakes that most high school football players and coaches make is to neglect weight training during the season.

The old logic that lifiting weights causes over-training and thus hurts on-field performance is simply not true. And, it can hurt your performance if you decide to stop your workouts in-season.

 

Why?

Because strength is the foundation of all we do.

Your maximum strength determines:

• Your Speed
• Your Agility
• Your Acceleration
• How Hard You Hit
• How Far You Throw
• How High You Can Jump
• How Explosive

When you allow your strength to fall, so will your speed, agility and explosiveness. Studies ahve shown that you strength can drop by as much as 20% in two-weeks!

There are a 3simple rules to follow to keep your strength growing during the season.

This means you can actually get bigger, faster, stronger and more explsive in-season…if, you train properly…

1. Do a lot of Partial Lifts

During the season, we have to manage oreness and fatigue. Our goal is alway son increasing our maximum strength.

Partials are perfect for this.

What are partial lifts?

• Quarter Front Squats, Quarter or Half Back Squats, Rack Deadlifts (from below the knee or higher), Bench Lockouts, Military Press Lockouts
• Bottoms-up Lifts (starting the lift with the bar on pins in the rack in the bottom position) combined with partials, i.e., Bottom’s Up Half Incline Bench

Bottom-Up Front Squat, with Chains

Partials allow you to work short ranges of motion at high intensities (85 – 90% of your max) while minimizing soreness and, more importantly helping us out with Rule 2:

2. Eliminate the Lowering Portion

Much of the soreness we get from lifting actually comes from the negative (concentric, lowering) part of the lift.

This is key to building strength & speed during the football season.

And, it’s very easy to do.

Take, for example, the Deadlift. Lift it, drop the bar.

Same for Cleans.

Front Squats from the bottom up? No negative

Bench from the bottom? Same thing.

If you’re doing partials in the rack, you can eliminate most of the negative without damaging the bars.

3. Use Sleds for Leg Strength

Pushing and sleds and Prowlers is ideal for adding more horse power to your legs in-season.

Again, it eliminates the negative and focuses on the concentric. Plus, it allows for triple extension (extending the hip, knee, ankles at the same time) which goes a long way to improving your speed and agility.

Sleds can be used heavily and contribute almost no next-day soreness. This is big for conditioning and strenght building.

4. (Bonus) Work on Your Recovery

If you’re not working as hard on recovering from your workouts, practice and games as you do on the workouts, you’ll fail.

No one likes to think about recovery until they’re already over tarined. But, if you focus on these ways to increase your recovery ability and decrease recovery time, you’ll be fresher for each practice and game:

• Ice baths
• Epsom salt baths
• Stretching
• Foam rolling
• Massage
• Proper nutrition/hydration

Better recovery means you’re prepared to take apart your opponent when he gets tired. This is a huge advantage that should never be over looked!

Steven Morris is a Strength Coach specializing in training football players to become stronger, faster, more explosive and dominant. He’s also a veteran Minor League Football player in the Philadelphia area.