Training camp has arrived, and it is time to make the team, earn all-conference honors, get a scholarship or contract, or see other dreams come true.
Nobody is anything in training camp but a suspect or hopeful, even a projected whatever. There have been plenty of practice All-Americans, but it is game time that separates the pretenders from the contenders.
We are here to make the offseason gains work for you. More importantly, we need those gains to be useful for at least the next three months.
Every coaching staff has had their knockdown, drag-out staff meetings about X’s & O’s, the depth chart, and the 3rd and short options, but we have to put the players in a position to make plays.
We already know who is going where, and we need to make sure our backups are slotted in the right positions. As a football coach for 20 years, I wanted all of that, and I wanted offseason training to continue. There was an aha moment when a solution satisfied me.
We practice every day, run every day, and condition on consecutive days, so there has to be a lift, run, jump solution out there. “Run” in this context is speed training.
In the programs I have designed over the years, you can see that they are broken down into what I call segments.
The obvious answer was to do a different, non-redundant segment each day we lifted. There were similar exercises in terms of push and pull, but the old rule, “change the angle, change the exercise,” is applied.
No more than 3 sets, and reps depended on that lift. In my world, junior varsity and below were in off-season year-round. Cuff & Stuff is daily.
In-season jumps were limited to jump rope or unweighted vertical jumps. The jumps are to help remind the body how to go fast.
To keep off-season speed training gains alive as long as possible, here’s how the week looked. To make sure I am repetitive, this works for every sport.
The week may need to “slide.”
