Here is how you get much faster for football. The real, non-nonsense approach to football speed training, the kind that not only takes over a half second off your 40 but also helps you get faster where it counts - on the football field!
Getting faster for football really isn't that complicated. Somehow, football speed training has become more complex than advanced nuclear physics. As I wrote in the "3 Football Speed Training Myths, Busted" article, most football players are led astray by gimmick products like parachutes, cones and the dreaded track-influenced "Football Speed" programs.
The problem with most of the "get faster for football" Stuff out there is that 99% of the football speed training products out there focus on the 40-yard dash. Now, we all have to run the 40 during testing, so, investing in a testing preparation product like Joe DeFranco's DVD is a wise move. After all, some coaches put so much stock in your testing numbers that performing well could mean the difference between having a spot on the team and sitting on the bench.
But, I'm not concerned with testing speed right now. I'm talking game speed. The speed that gets D-lineman to the QB and gets Running Backs to the second level. This is the type of speed that wins games. Why some coaches over-rely on testing, I'll never know. As Chuck Knoll always says, "Watch the film, not the stopwatch!"
So, how do we go about building this kind of game speed? How do we really get faster for football? Glad you asked…
To Really Get Faster For Football, Get Stronger
Why do guys hate hearing this? I swear, every time I write an article about how you need to get stronger in order to get faster rather than running around cones, I get venomous hate mail. Something about those little orange cones makes people happy.
Well, sorry to burst your bubble, but a heavy Deadlift will do more for your football speed than 10-million cones.
How strong you are determines how fast you are, at least to a point. The first argument weak, cone-running, parachute-wearing types come up with is that Elite Powerlifters, especially the super heavies aren't super fast. "Those guys Squat 1000lbs, they should be the fastest in the world!"
There is a point of diminishing returns. But, for many guys, this might be in excess of 700-lbs. When you can Squat that much, let me know and we'll figure out how to further increase your speed without lifting more. But, don't come to me with your massive 405 and proclaim that strength work isn't key to increasing speed.
- If you want to get faster for football, you need to concentrate on getting stronger on exercises like Box Squats, Box Front Squats, Deadlifts and Deadlift Variations, Cleans, and Squats. Work them hard, Max Effort style. Continue to increase the weights and your flexibility (more on that later) and you will get faster.
Train Hamstrings Heavy & for Speed
Your hamstrings are your speed muscles. The hams, along with the glutes, act as your engine out on the field. Yet, we still see people missing the boat on hamstring training. In training the hamstrings, keep a few key points in mind:
- The hamstrings are made up of a high percentage of fast twitch fibers and must be trained heavily. They tend to respond best to low – medium reps.
- If you've been neglecting them, the hams will have to be worked more often until they catch up to the more powerful Quads.
- Your hamstrings are made up of the biceps femoris, semitendinosus, & semimenbranosus muscles – all must be worked for maximum speed
- The hamstrings must be worked from multiple angles with a variety of exercises
Now, with that in mind, the hamstrings must also be trained dynamically. Most players never stop and think about the insane force we place on our hams during a game. Thus, we must prepare them for those forces by training the hams specifically for speed.
Building crazy stength in your legs is the first step in getting faster for football. But, as many a disapointed lifter has found out, it's not the only one.
You must also work your legs in a dynamic way…or, simply put, you must do speed-specific exercises. No, I don't mean "speed exercises" where you run with a vest on or pulling your teammate around.
I'm talking about speed exercises in the weightroom.
Things like:
Box Squats
Kettlebell Swings
Cleans
Snatch Pulls
Box Front Squats
You must, after a certian point, add chains or bands to the bar as well. This is not for the beginner, so we'll save that for later. But, the point is, you must train for speed. How do you do this?
- 3 or 4 days after your heavy leg day, you do a speed day. Simply use your main exercise for the day, i.e., Box Squats, and do them for speed. Take about 60% of your max Box Squat and sit back and explode off the box as fast as humanly possible…then go a little faster. Keep rest periods short (around 60-seconds)
There's been debate over using the Olympic Lifts in place of Dynamic Effort. There's no debate. Use both and shut up about it.
Power Cleans and Power Snatches are great ways to build…hmmm…POWER!
Are they hard to teach? Maybe. But, getting an athlete to do a passable Power Clean isn't complicated. Deadlift off the floor, accelerate and jump once the bar passes the knees and catch it on your shoulders/upper chest.
Also, don't overlook leg curls. We do need to train the hams at this angle, but, the leg curl machines leave a lot to be desired. The solution is to turn to bands.
Band Leg Curls have the huge advantage over machines because you can easily go full speed in both the eccentric and concentric portion. Choke a band around a rack, step back until there's tension, then curl. You can do these one leg at a time or two, standing or seated.
Build Insane Starting Strength
Building starting strength is key to being faster for football. We usually refer to this as explosiveness…that ability to turn on all those muscle fibers to full power in an instant. This is so important, but the vast majority of strength programs I see totally neglect this!
Look, we don't have time to ramp up to full speed on the football field. We have to be able to go from 0 to 100 in a split second. To do this, we need to include exercises that build explosiveness and starting strength.
Remember that kid you used to play sandlot football with…he was fast but when he went out for football, he never made it. Wanna know why? Beause he was fast after a 10 yard ramp up. He had no starting strength.
If you're a lineman and you don't have sufficent starting strength, forget it. You're done.
Building this type of strength is actually very uncomplicated…though it's not easy. It, of course, takes hard work and balls.
There's 3 ways to build crazy starting strength -
1. Deadlift and Pulls off the Floor and Box Squatting
2. Squat from a Dead-Stop the Bottom of the Rack (or suspended off of chains)
3. Squat/Pull with lots of band tension added to the bar
Starting to see a pattern here? How many times have I already mentioned Squats and Deadlifts? Yes, these are what make you faster for football my friends.
We already covered doing Deadlifts and Box Squatting, so we'll skip #1.
#2 is pretty easy to set up. Set the bar on the saftey catches in the power rack right where the bottom of a Squat or Front Squat would be for you. Now, get under the bar, get tight, and explode up. Simple and extremely effective. You can do this with chains…it's a little harder to set up, but, it gives you more flexibility as far as starting positions.
Squatting and Pulling against bands is nothing new to most of the readers here. It's a great way to build explosiveness and teach the body to accelerate. Using them wisely can greatly increase your speed. If you're new to bands, I suggest using Elite's new Short Bands. Easier to set up for the beginner and much easier to manage to get even tension on both sides of the bar.
Build Football Speed Specific Flexibility
If you're tight, you're slow. You must perform both dynamic and passive stretching if you want to maximize speed. Trust me, no one hates stretching more than me, I've seen plays more exciting than a half hour of stretching, honest to God, Plays!
But, it must be done. A muscle that is contracted cannot contract further…
You need to concentrate your flexibility training on the:
Hip Flexors – tight Hip Flexors are often called "breaks"
Calfs
Hamstrings
Hips – Tight hips = tight hamstrings = low back pain = a slow you
You should be stretching the entire body but pay special attention to those areas. Honestly, taking a Yoga class is the best thing you can do on your off days.
Unmanly? Consider that Walter Payton and Hershel Walker both took ballet to become more agile. Are you better than Walter Payton? Good, then go take a Yoga class, tough guy.
Aim for 2 – 3 sessions of 20-minutes of passive stretching per week. This is easily done on your non-lifting days.
Maximum Force to the Bar
Ah, yes, this is the big one. If there's been one area where the HIT Jedis, the Crossfit Cults, and the Wobble Board Wrecking Crew have succeeded in convincing young, impressionable football players that lifting heavy will slow you down.
It usually involves them pointing to a video of some huge Powerlifter Deadlifting 700+ and screaming, "See! Look how slow that bar is moving! That's why lifting heavy makes you slow…now, come stand on this wooden skateboard and do a Clean & Jerk with an Indian Club and a half-Kettlebell"
What they miss is the intent to move the bar fast that counts. This might be the simplest concept in strength training yet so many miss it. Just try to lift the bar as fast as possible, every set, every rep, every exercise. You need to train your Central Nervous System to act fast. When it gets the message that we need to move several hundred pounds quickly, it can easily figure out to move just your bodyweight pretty damn fast. Try lifting a heavy weight slowly and see what happens.
When I get high school players telling me they were taught to lift the bar with a 4 seconds up and 3 seconds down bar speed, my head explodes. They wonder why they can't get faster! Well, they just spent an entire off-season teaching their brain, body and muscles to be slow, what else would you expect.
Dave Tate wrote something to the effect of, "Warm up sets should feel like maxes and maxes should feel like warm up sets." That, my friends, does a hell of a job summing it up.
Use Plyometrics to Build Explosive Football Speed
Plyos are great for getting faster and more explosive for football. But, I'm always a little hesitant to write about them. Why? Well, mention plyos and next thing you know, guys are buying 10-grand worth of Plyo equipment, complete with more wires, cables, and jumping platforms than the set of the Matrix.
Plyometrics, by definition are exercises that allow the muscle to reach maximum strength
in as short a period of time as possible. Re-read that and think of its applications to
football training! That's what it's all about.
Producing as much force as possible, as fast
as possible.
Adding something as simple as Box Jumps will do wonders for building football game-speed. They teach reactive ability, explosiveness, and acceleration. If all you did was simple Box Jumps, Multiple Box Jumps and Lateral Jumps, you'd be light-years ahead of your competition and much faster on the football field.
- Start off with Sub-Maximal drills like simple bounding, hopping, Standing Long Jumps add them to your warm-up along with High-Knees, Butt-Kicks, Walking Lunges, etc. Then begin to progress to simple Box Jumps. Once you feel comfortable leaping onto one box, add more. Now, this is where guys go wrong.
is too long when doing Plyo jumps, the exercise loses its effectiveness. I've seen so many young football players doing multiple box jumps.
They hit the first box, drop down and then pause for sometimes over a full second! The time you spend on the ground must be as close to 0 as possible. Hit and react. Delaying the next jump reduces the stretch reflex. If you do this in training, your CNS will learn it and it will
have you do the same on the field.
Coaches can use a simple verbal queue to get the guys moving quickly. Also, make sure the guys step off the box, not jump.
The easiest way to break into plyos is to use them after your warm up, before your strength training sessions. So, before a heavy leg day, start off with 3 sets of 3 – 5 Box Jumps. This is a great way to get your players ready for more advanced movements and for the larger volumes of jumps that they'll progress to.
Play Games
This is by far the most underutilized form of both football speed and conditioning. We come up with complex training programs, books and books about conditioning methods, and buy every lame speed training device on the market but we overlook the most obvious way to improve game speed (and conditioning)…play a damn game!
We have an entire off-season to train in the weight room. Guys are lifting, running, doing plyos, working hard…let them have some fun and improve speed and conditioning (don't tell them they're actually working though).
See, lining up for some 4-on-4 (or any combination of guys) and playing touch or flag football in the off-season is a tremendous way to get the players to train their bodies to be fast in football-specific situations. As long as they are doing things correctly (WR's run crisp routes, DB's cover correctly, RB's use good mechanics, etc.) then they will improve greatly. It's also an amazing way to get guys who bitch and complain after running 3 sprints to go out and run at full speed for 90-minutes.
I stumbled across this years ago when I was making the transition from D-line to Tight End. I was fast enough and could catch, but, I didn't move like a receiver.
So, every day I went out with one of our QB's and usually another receiver, Linebacker or D-back. We would rotate and essentially run 5 sets of 10 pass routes. Sometimes the sessions would have 10-on-10 complete with lineman blocking (and occasionally catching passes, glory hogs).
After a few months the difference was unreal. I was able to make adjustments mid-air, turn and catch balls thrown behind me, and was overall just more agile. I was making moves that no respectable 260-lb man would every make. So was everyone else, including the lineman. And, we all could easily play both ways without as much as breathing hard.
All this gave every position speed specific to what they need on the field. LB'rs got to cover TE's and Backs. This had them running in real, football-specific patterns and, combined with all the strength training they were doing, make them much, much faster.
If you want to give this a shot, start small. Get a QB, WR and maybe a DB. Throw, catch, run, repeat. Soon more guys will join in and everyone will benefit immensely from the improved game speed and agility. This seems insane to say, but, yes, playing football will make you better at playing football.
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