When to Do Speed Training and Why We Change Exercises So Often

When to Perform Speed Work to Get Faster and Why You Need to Change Exercises to Get Stronger for Football

It’s question and answer time….You guys submit your questions on how to get faster and stronger for football and I, being the great guy that I am, answer them for you.

If you have a question about any aspect of football training – speed, strength, agility, workouts, football drills and skills, etc…leave them as comments or email me at smorri8@gmail.com

I try to answer all questions within one business day and always ask permission to use them here on the site, so don’t bed shy.

Questions and Answers

1. When should I include speed workouts and drills in my football program?

This is one of the trickiest pieces of the “How to Get Faster for Football” puzzle. Its not always a straight forward answer as it will depend on a lot of things like:

• How often you’re lifting

• How much intensity you use in your lifting program

• How you lay out your football strength program

• Your experience level

Devin Hester knows a little something about getting faster for football

This is the pain in the ass of planning football strength and speed workouts…we have a hell of a lot to accomplish and only so many natural resources to do it with. Unlike the regular lifter, we can’t walk around sore all the time…or have the luxury of having 10-days between heavy leg work.

Nope.

If we are looking to get stronger, increase speed, get in better condition, get faster and, well, BETTER, on the football field, we need very careful planning.

The best way to go about this is to really asses how you feel during the week. Keep notes in your lifting journal.

• If you do Max Effort Lower on Monday, are your legs still tight and sore on Wednesday?

• Are you extra tired the day after a High Rep upper day?

• Are you conditioning (sprinting in some way) more than once a week?

Here is a good guide:

• Don’t do pure speed training the day after or right after Max Effort leg work

• You can do speed work AFTER a heavy upper session or the day after

• You can do it on Saturday if you follow a Monday, Wednesday, Friday lifting schedule

You may have to experiment and see where it feels best for you.  Remember, its much easier to move a conditioning day than a Speed day. When doing pure football speed training you want to be as close to fresh as possible.

Keep in mind we are talking about actual speed workouts…not simply agility drills or drills to improve sprinting form. Sprinting form is not as stressfull and can be done as part of your warm-up…use warm ups to improve skills, not just to run around.

So, when we say “football speed workouts” we’re talking about going full out sprint, timed. And, typically running sprints of varying length (for example, running multiple 10′s to prepare for a 40-yd test) with FULL RECOVERY. This is important. Actual speed training requires full recovery between sprints. If you’re not, then you’re doing conditioning and not improving speed.

So what does all this look like in the real world?

Monday - Max Effort Lower

Tuesday – Recovery work, sleds, athletic training and stretching/foam rolling

Wednesday – Max Effort Upper Body

Thursday – Speed training (no more than 40 minutes TOTAL, including warm-up)

Friday – Combo Upper/Lower Day (or Dynamic Effort Lower day if you’re on a 4-day a week schedule)

Saturday – Conditioning and/or Rep Effort Upper (again, the weightroom stuff is done if you’re on a 4-day schedule)

• If you’re closer to the season, condition after ME lower on monday and again on tuesday. Then do your speed work thursday and again saturday, doing upper body work on friday (high reps)

2. Coach, I notice in your (football strength) workouts, you change exercises a lot. Wouldn’t it be better to use them longer to keep getting good at them? I notice in some magazines they use the same exercises for 12 weeks or more?

This is a question I get a ton. The classical approach to lifting it to get a few exercises and stick wtih them for a long time…of course adding 5-lbs per workout. You’ll be benching 600 in no time!

That’s a great theory…except that its wrong. Unless you are a true beginner, that crap ain’t happenin’

Once you go past the first few months – year of being a beginner, those 5-lb jumps stop abruptly. Oddly, this is where the majority of people quit, when it gets hard.

See, your body is amazingly intelligent. It takes on new stresses like a champ and its friend, the brain, come up with ways to make whatever your doing to it not hurt anymore. So, when you first do Front Squats, your quads hurt like hell for a few days. Then the next few times, they are less and less sore, till finally you feel nothing EVEN IF you’ve increased the weight.

If you want to get stronger or faster on the football field, you need to train your brain.

We don’t ever judge progress by soreness, but, this is a good way to think of what happens during “accomodation” …the body reads the stress, reacts to it, and does what it needs to to take away its impact. So, after 4 weeks of any exercises, its effect is lost. And, if you’re looking to increase your football speed or become more explosive in a short amount of time, we can NOT waste one minute doing movements that have lost their way.

Some will point to Powerlifters or Olympic Lifters as using the main lifts all the time, but, even Powerlifters rotate exercises and also do supplemental exercises to boost the core lifts. Also note that many Powerlifters do the core lifts but variations of them…Box Squats, 2-Board Bench Press, etc. So, they are always changing but staying in the same ballpark, so to speak.

This is why we change exercises often. The more advanced you are, the more often you change. I know lifters with 10+yrs of experience who change exercises EVERY TIME they train. If you notice in the Members’ Workout Section, the intermediate workouts have exercise changes every 2-weeks in a one month cycle. Then, in the next month we may come back to something we did earlier OR a variation of it. This way, we continue to build strength and speed AND keep the groove of the core lifts.

What about beginners?

There’s a belief that we need a pre-determined number of reps early on in our lifting careers to teach the body and brain the lifts. This is, for the most part, true. However, we need to look at things over the long haul. I typically start newbies off with 6-week blocks. Let’s look at leg training as an example.

For the first 6 weeks, they will do Back Squats. Then, they’ll do Front Squats for the next 6. This is done on the heavy leg day. On the combo day, they will do some sort of puling movement, like Romanian Deadlifts or Trap Bar Deads or Power Cleans. Now, switching from Back to Front Squats changes things up, but, when we get right down to it, its still Squatting. Even if we went from Squats to Deadlifts in the second cycle, we’re still working the muscles responsible for both plus blocking, jumping, sprinting, etc.

And, remember that as beginners simply lift weights, they’ll almost automatically increase football speed and build the ability to be more explosive…but, this automatic-ness doesn’t last long!

So, there’s plenty of reps to learn. Also keep in mind that this kind of work is good for teaching the BASIC movement pattern. As many a disappointed lifter will tell you, spending months training a lift at 70% of their max will tell you, the difference between 70% and 100 is about 5 million Light Years. Once you’re passed the beginning stages, you need the imajority of your reps to be over 80%, and, as you become more experienced, this will pass 85 and even 90% (on the Olympic lifts, around 85 on the Powerlifts). Check out the book, The Science and Practice of Strength Training for a full explanation on this.

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