PRESENTACIÓN DEL PROGRAMA

In our experience, medicine balls are essential for success in any football program. To be perfectly honest with you, we’d be tempted to give up our power racks before we’d give up our medicine balls – almost, anyway. That’s how

important we believe they are. They’re absolutely essential in building explosive strength for both the upper and lower body, they’ll make your athletes faster, and you can use them in a variety of other ways – in your warm-up, for conditioning purposes, for abdominal exercises, and for position-specific drills. In fact, we can directly

attribute our medicine ball routine to the ability of our players to deliver a blow – an ability that we believe

stems directly from our use of explosive “chest pass” style throws.

Technique

The idea is to explode out with the ball and throw it as far as you possibly can. There’s no holding back with these movements. There’s no limit on how far you can throw –

other than your own capacity for throwing – and the object of the game is to throw the balls as fast and explosively as you possibly can. With that said, you don’t want your athletes using medicine balls that are too heavy for them.

Generally, balls between 6-16 pounds should be appropriate for this purpose, with most players utilizing balls between 8-12 pounds. If you’re looking to order these for your

team, you wouldn’t go wrong by ordering fifteen 8-10 pound med balls.

Also, the type of medicine balls you purchase can be problematic. You don’t want hard rubber ones that roll, because with explosive throws, you’ll end up chasing the ball down the field every thirty seconds. Leather balls are good for this purpose because they don’t roll. However, if your players are doing these drills on the field – where they should be doing them – and they’re wearing cleats, they’ll end up stopping the balls with their feet and tearing them open after a while. We’ve had to enforce the

“no stopping med balls with your cleats” rule with a vengeance.

Additionally, you want to mentally condition your players not to try to catch thrown medicine balls – at least on throws executed with large amounts of force. They’ll try, and you’ll have a yearly broken nose as a result if you don’t crack down on this immediately.

Once you’ve got the equipment, partner your players up for these drills. If you’re short on med balls, you can even go three and four-way on these. These are full-go, full speed efforts, so your players, especially at first, won’t need tons of reps to get the desired training effect.

Half Squat Throw

Beginning in a half-squat position, with the ball held evenly – chest-high, as though preparing the throw a basketball chest pass – in your hands, simply fire your hips and glutes and throw the ball as far as you possibly can. This entails throwing the ball at roughly a 45-degree angle, as though it were being shot from a cannon. Ideally, your momentum will pitch you forward into a broad jump at the conclusion of this throw.

Box Squat Throw

This is performed using roughly the same motion as the half squat throw, only you’re ascending from a slightly above parallel box. Again, your momentum should pitch you forward after the release of the ball.

Box Squat Dive Throw

Set up a box such that a high jump pit is about two feet or so in front of it. Start from the box, with feet at

shoulder width or slightly wider, in the same position you used for the box squat throw. This time, instead of

pitching forward, you’re going to explosively throw the ball at a 45-degree angle and follow it through the air, landing in a full, laid-out dive in the high jump pit.

Broad Jump Throw

From the same starting position as the other throws, perform a standing broad jump. When you land, reactively jump again, simultaneously chest passing the medicine ball as far as you can. Do not gather yourself for this second jump. As with all depth jump or bounding movements, you’re

looking for your players to have the shortest ground contact time possible.

Double Broad Jump Throw

This is performed the same way as the broad jump throw, only you’re adding a second jump – jump, jump, THROW! Both broad jumps should be as far as possible, with minimal ground contacts, and again, the final jump should be executed at the same time as an explosive throw.

Kneeling “Coil Drill” Throw

This drill has excellent sport-specific transfer for

offensive linemen. From a kneeling position, with the ball in chest pass position, simply throw the ball as far as you can, again at a 45-degree angle. Your momentum when the ball leaves your hands should land you face down in a pushup position. Catch yourself with your hands, push yourself back up, and await your partner’s throw.

Depth Jump Throw

This is executed the same way a conventional depth jump is – a step off a platform, followed by a quick absorption of force and explosion (the throw) – except instead of jumping onto another platform, you’re landing with both feet and throwing the med ball as hard and as explosively as you can.

A Word on Chest Pass Technique

When coaching your players in the proper throw-release technique for these drills, you’ll find that a lot of them are conditioned to play basketball, and they’ll throw the

med balls at first like they’re shooting jump shots. In order to throw a medicine ball as far as you can, you need to use two hands. When the ball is released, the hands should be even, with the palms turned over, thumbs down, facing the outside.

How Much is Enough?

Take a snapshot, in your mind, of an athlete in profile launching a medicine ball at a 45-degree angle. Picture the ball sitting on his fingertips, just about to be released.

This is the position you should be watching for when you’re coaching. The athlete should be in a straight line from the tips of his fingers all the way down to his toes. If he’s not – his back is bent like a question mark, or his knees are still flexed – one of three things is happening. Either 1) He’s using a medicine ball that’s too heavy for him, or 2) He’s not strong enough to perform this step in the

progression, or 3) He’s done.

The same applies to box jumps. In just about any full speed CNS-intensive movement, we know the athlete is finished when there is a breakdown in his form. If you’ve prescribed a set of 10 box jumps at a certain height, for example, and your athlete completes the set but just barely clears the height on his last three reps, those last three reps – and maybe more – were not effective for what we’re looking to do with this period. They were conditioning jumps, rather than explosive strength jumps. Although it’s admirable that the athlete perseveres and completes all the prescribed reps, he did so in a fatigued state, and these reps will not be effective in increasing either his explosive

strength or his reactive ability. Again, these drills need to be performed at full recovery.

How to Prescribe Programming

There’s no magic number for either jump drills or medicine ball throws. Some of your players will barely be able to perform one rep of any of these movements. Others will be at a more advanced level. All of them, we can assure you, will eventually experience a breakdown in form at some point during the period. We suggest starting with your own

“magic number,” except in the form of a highly conservative baseline number that will be increased weekly. Trust us, it’s better to start too low with these drills than too high.

You’ll see this later on in the programming templates, but after you’ve made an assessment of what you’ve got in terms of athleticism, set a number for the first week, i.e.,

“Today we’re going to start with 2 sets of 3 box jumps, and 2 sets of 10 medicine ball half squat throws.” You can work up from there. This initial number may be a bit arbitrary, but if you’re increasing volume each week – while still operating under the multiple biomotor ability scheme laid out in the chapter on annual planning – you’re eventually going to come to a point in your programming where

something has to give. In other words, if you keep increasing the volume, you’ll eventually know, instinctively, when they’ve had enough.

Summary

Olympic lifting is a useful discipline, and nobody is

arguing its merits for the development of speed, power and explosive strength. However, there is more than one way to skin a cat, and there’s more than one way to do it with a group of 30+ trainees of wildly varying levels of

preparation. Not everyone can clean and snatch, but everyone with at least one arm and one leg can jump and throw.

Chapter Appendix: Jumping Rope

In the developmental stages of a football player’s career, one of the best friends he can possibly have is a quality jump rope, and he’d be advised by both of us to carry the thing around in his back pocket if he can. Jumping rope, for a variety of reasons – coordination, footwork, agility, GPP, reactivity, etc – is one of the best things a football player can do, and we encourage you to implement this type of work into your program as aggressively as you can.

Conditioning

Being in shape to play football isn’t a matter of talent.

It doesn’t take talent to get in shape. It takes effort – and effort and a solid work ethic can be built in the weight room, on the practice field and wherever else you condition your athletes. The recipe for success in football is a simple strength program and getting your kids in shape – and the only way you can give your team a chance to win is to get them strong enough to kick ass in the first

quarter and in good enough shape to keep kicking ass in the fourth quarter.

If you’re a high school coach, you’re not choosing your team. Rather, your team is given to you based the area in which your athletes’ parents choose to live. Your job is to build the athletes you’ve been given, and the talent pool you get each year is largely based on the population of your school and the popularity of football in your area. If football is big in your community and your school has a large enrollment, you’ll have a bigger and better selection of athletes. If you coach in a rural area or a place where football isn’t emphasized, you have a bigger challenge on your hands. Either way, you simply have to take what you’re given and make it work.

With that said, there’s no excuse for your team to be out of shape. There are, of course, genetic limits to your athletes’ strength and speed. This isn’t a popular

statement, but if you’ve coached or played sports, you know it’s true. This, however, doesn’t mean you should

deemphasize building strength and speed. These are two of the main qualities in sports that determine winners and losers.

Let’s also be very clear about our goals with strength training here. The goal with your football team should not be to develop X amount of 300 pound benchers and Y amount of 400 pound squatters. Your goal should be the improvement of the individual and the improvement of the team as a

whole. If you take a raw athlete and improve his squat from 185 to 300, you’re going to have a faster, stronger and more confident football player. You’re also going to have a believer, and that something that can’t be measured in

tangible terms.

Philosophy

Over the years, we’re sure you’ve heard a lot of “coaches”

espousing the dogma that football doesn’t require extensive conditioning – that plays only last a few seconds, after which you jog back to the huddle and rest for 90 seconds.

What’s clear to us, when we listen to these people speak, is that they’ve neither played nor coached football in their lives. They’re so-called “experts” who only either theorize about training athletes or train very few who actually get on the field and play.

Football is NOT simply a 5-10 yard burst followed by a rest period. Get that out of your head right now before you go any further with this chapter. This game is a battle that involves running, cutting, fighting, scraping, throwing, kicking, punching, swimming, ripping, grabbing, pulling,

pushing, shoving, colliding, diving and throwing yourself in front of moving objects. Throw in the fever pitch of emotions athletes will experience, and you have an athlete that, although he seems like he’s in shape during your conditioning drills, is badly out of shape on the football field.

The “short burst” philosophy is theory. The game is reality.

Now, we’re not telling you to throw caution to the wind and simply run your team into the ground. You have to use your head and time things properly. The thing to remember is this: if a player comes to your off-season workouts out of shape, it’s his fault, but if your team shows up out of shape for the season, it’s yours.

Here’s our challenge to you:

Field the strongest and fittest team you can each season.

Get your players strong in the basic lifts, get them lean, and make sure they can run. Most importantly of all,

instill in them a sense of camaraderie, confidence, humility and an attitude that nobody will ever outwork them. If you do this, it won’t matter what the scoreboard says. You’ll have a team of winners.

Training

We break football conditioning down into three components, each of which is designed to elicit a different training effect. The main things we’re looking for here are fitness

in football intervals at game speed, cardiovascular

strength and health, and psychological toughness. If you combine these three elements in a football player, you’ll have a kid who can go hard from whistle to whistle for an entire game.

Football-Specific Intervals: What you’re looking for here is to get your athletes to give an all-out effort for the duration of a football play – anywhere from 3-6 seconds – followed by a jog back to the huddle, followed by a 20-30 second rest. You also want them to be able to do this without regularly putting them in a lactic environment – where lactic acid is produced and their bodies feel that burning sensation where they feel like they’re running underwater. There’s a place for these sessions – we’ll get to that below – but as a regular training method, they don’t have much of a place because they take too long to recover from and impede progress.

With that said, it’s wise to start this sort of training with longer intervals in between reps, in order to keep your athletes below their anaerobic thresholds – the heart rate above which lactic acid is produced. Early in the year, these sessions can have rest periods as long as 90 seconds between reps, with the goal of getting this period down to an actual 20-30 second football interval by the time camp rolls around. This conditioning can and should be as closely related to actual football movements as possible – and it can and should be incorporated into practices in the form of specific football drills, so you can be

creative with it to suit your needs. Examples of this type of conditioning by position are:

Linemen: One-man Blocking Sled Push – Begin in the end zone and instruct athlete to explode out of his stance and drive the sled downfield for 4-6 seconds. Set a time period for this drill (10-15 minutes), set the rest periods as

described above, then lessen them every week – generating more quality reps over the same time period.

Receivers: One-man Blocking Sled Jam and Sprint – Have your receivers release in a variety of ways, drive the sled for 2-3 yards, then break into various pass patterns, followed by a jog back to the huddle – using the timed rest period pattern described above. Defensive backs can be added to this mix for one-on-one drills with timed rest periods.

Running Backs: Gauntlet Sled or Sled-resisted Runs - As with other positions, start your running backs out of football positions and have them explode through in game intervals. Periodize rest periods as outlined above.

Linebackers: Trigger, Scrape, Fill, Drive Sled – Have your linebackers begin in their stance, trigger step at game speed, then scrape (alley run), plant and drive a one-man blocking sled for 2-4 seconds. Periodize rest periods as outlined above. You can also run one-on-one drills as outlined above matching outside linebackers with either slot receivers or tight ends.

Entire Team: Sled Resisted Runs or Hill Runs – Your entire team can benefit from both timed sled-resisted runs and hill sprints at game intervals if you’re looking for a less complicated method of football-specific conditioning.

Simply have then run for 3-6 seconds, then periodize the intervals as outlined above.

These are just a few ideas we’ve used successfully in the past. Based on the offenses and defenses you run, you have the freedom, as a coach, to be creative and devise

conditioning drills that mimic game play as YOUR team will experience it. If you run a no-huddle spread offense, for example, your rest periods on offensive plays can be as short as 15 seconds, so you’ll need to get your team ready for that kind of tempo. Your one-on-one drills will depend on the routes your receivers will be asked to run and the coverages your defense uses.

Perform some variation of these intervals 2-3 days per week.

Tempo Runs

On Tuesdays and Thursdays, we suggest having your entire team participate in tempo runs. These are runs of between 50 and 120 yards, performed at about 70% of their maximum speed, with anywhere from 45-75 seconds between reps. The idea here is not to gas your players out, but to allow them to recover from the previous day’s lifting while helping to make their cardiovascular systems stronger and more

efficient.

Here are two sample tempo running templates you can follow.

Here are two sample tempo running templates you can follow.