Why you should incorporate football-style training to your summer regiment
Every athlete has an offseason. Baseball players and runners, for example, have a winter off-season, while football players and hockey players (generally) have a summer off-season.
Regardless of what sport you play and train for, the off-season presents an opportunity to grow stronger and faster for the next season.
I recently sat down with Jordan Foley, the Gryphons football team’s new strength and conditioning coach, and Stu Lang, head coach for the football team, to find out more about what kind of commitment football players make over their summer off-season to prepare themselves for the fall.
“Starting April 27 through to camp in August, we [train] four times a week on speed, power, and endurance, but we up the volume from the previous winter months,” said Foley. “We look specifically at what each guy needs. Some guys already have enough strength for their position, so we’ll move more into a speed and power-based program.”
That, in a nutshell, is what an offseason should be all about for an athlete: recognizing their weakest points and improving them.
Lang spoke extensively about the specialization young athletes are practicing nowadays. “The big change from my era to the young men at this time is that back when I played, each season was a different sport. You moved from football to hockey to, in my case, track or rugby,” said Lang. “Now, whether it’s the pressure of parents or the sport in general, the feeling is to succeed, you have to focus. Kids choose one sport and focus on it. If they play hockey, they play hockey, and then when the season is over, they go to these summer camps and strength and conditioning coaches.”
Sports are increasingly becoming about specialization, and the times when coaches and parents didn’t want to pigeonhole a player into one sport or position are quickly becoming an idea of the past.
“I don’t know if we get any athletes that are coming in that haven’t gone to a place to do speed camps or a place to do off-season lifting. I think guys are putting more attention into that and that it all trickles down from the top, where kids are seeing the top players are more developed and they see the programs at that level, so it pulls the bottom along,” added Foley.
That’s the reality of becoming an elite-level athlete nowadays. It’s one thing to run a marathon just to say you ran a marathon, but if you have a desire to be a great marathon runner, downtime from learning and practicing your sport is few and far between.
As far as each coach’s one favourite exercise for developing athletes, there is some variation. “Ninety to 95 per cent of our guys squat to develop strength,” said Foley. “It’s such a great combination of strength, stability, power, and mobility, and it tells you a lot about a guy.”
Lang, being a former Edmonton Eskimo receiver, had a slightly different “favourite” exercise that focuses more on position-specific abilities. “As a head coach, for me it’s skills. I challenge the receivers to catch 10,000 balls over the summer.”
Is there any coincidence that Lang’s goals fall in line with the old adage that says practicing any one thing for 10,000 hours will make you an expert at it?
“Train insane or remain the same” – unknown. Happy summer!