At the end of the 2015 season there were three things at the top of my list of improvements for my team’s overall physical performance: speed, explosiveness, and flexibility. Improving strength is always a priority, but not at the top of the list because I believe we have a great weight training program in place and I have seen consistent gains in our players’ core lifts and body composition over my two seasons as head coach. It has also translated to the field by how physical we are when we play. I wanted to focus on and make a conscious effort to build on our team’s weaknesses. We have a few athletic players who can make big plays offensively, but overall our linear speed, explosiveness, and flexibility (especially our big boys) were lacking.
Wanting to improve our overall team speed, explosiveness, and flexibility is probably not much different than what every football coach wants for his team during the training season. I believe the difference within teams who don’t achieve those goals and teams that actually do lies in being deliberate, specific, and consistent in planning how to make it happen while out of season. You would never go into a game without having an offensive, defensive, and special teams plan that was built off of strenuous film study, breakdowns of plays, and ideas on how to attack the opponent’s weaknesses in every possible situation for four quarters. So why wouldn’t you attack the training season in a similar fashion? I break the entire year down into 4 quarters: 1st quarter = Winter training (January – March), 2nd quarter = Spring (April – May), 3rd quarter = Summer (June – July). The 4th quarter starts with August camp and ends when the season does.
I wanted to make a conscious and deliberate effort in planning how to attack my teams’ weaknesses over the course of the three quarters leading into the season. The first step was to type up my goals and plans for the team and post them in my office where I can see them every day. I also broke down my goals by what I wanted the team to work on and achieve in each quarter of the training season. This guaranteed several things for me: I could literally see and visualize my teams’ goals every day, I could keep track and make notes of any progress made, and make the necessary adjustments if needed, and I could keep myself accountable for implementing the plan.
The second thing I did, and probably the most important, was to look for ways to improve my knowledge on speed development, explosiveness, and flexibility. I have several friends and colleagues who are certified strength and conditioning coaches that I consult with, but the best thing I believe I did this off season was attend a speed clinic at East Carolina University.
The information I gained from the speed clinic helped me to understand how I needed to approach and apply my plan to fit the kids in our program. The next thing I did was to look at what we were already doing in the weight room and take out the supplemental lifts that were not focusing on what we needed and add in the lifts that did focus on explosion and flexibility. One example of how I did that was to incorporate band stretches that focus on the hips and hip flexor. Another thing I did was take out a few stretches in our dynamic warm up and replace them with ones that focused more on players’ hips and range of motion during the stretch. We would also begin every workout session with some type of form running drill that focused on arm rotation and position, leg lift and knee drive, and the position of the foot (toes up).
The summer is where we are able to get the most work done with the team as a whole due to school being out and no other sport is in session (except basketball in June). This is where my focus and plan has become the most significant, because after writing out my goals for the team, doing my research, and improving my knowledge, I re-designed my entire summer workout to fit what I wanted my players to achieve.
This summer I have been a lot more stringent with what lifts we’re doing compared to what type of running and conditioning we’re doing each day. We focus on our power lifting (squat/power clean) on Mondays while focusing on form running and technique for conditioning. Tuesdays, we bench while doing more long distance running for conditioning (100yd sprints). Wednesdays, we focus on some explosive lifts (clean pulls/speed squats/or box jumps) while having high intensity agility and acceleration drills. Thursday is all upper body (shoulders/arms) lifts while being their most challenging day for conditioning. So far, I can tell that our players are becoming a little more explosive and gaining more flexibility from their numbers.
At this time we have 7 players who can parallel squat 400 lbs. or more and at least 8 who can power clean over 230 lbs. In my first year as head coach (2014) we had maybe one player who could put up those numbers. Improving overall team speed remains to be seen. In May we had every player run and record three 40 times and I took the average time of the three recorded. In the last week of July we will be running 40’s again and I will record three times for each player and compare it to their average from May to determine how much faster they have gotten.