Complete Conditioning for Football

PS: I would imagine anything talking about Nebraska's strength program will be great but im just wanting some opinions on the book.

coach
I have had the book for a while and I think it is very good. We have adapted the program to fit our situation but it is very in depth with program development and the description of exercises

Me too John, I just gotta pony up the money and buy it.

The GREAT strength training coach at Nebraska (in their GLORY days) was BOYD EPLEY!!!!! Read ANYTHING by him!!!!!!!

CHECK THIS OUT (BELOW): We believe very much in his #5 (Progressive Overload):

Ten Principles for Power Sports

TEN PRINCIPLES for POWER SPORTS

by
Boyd Epley, C.S.C.S.
Mike Arthur, C.S.C.S.
and the
Nebraska Performance Team

1. Ground-Based Activities
Sport skills are initiated by applying force with the feet against the ground. You need to select lifting exercises and conditioning drills that apply force with the feet against the ground such as the squat and hang clean, hang snatch, or push jerk. The more force your athletes can apply against the ground, the faster they will run and the more effective they will be. Other exercises will do little to improve performance.

2. Multiple Joint Actions
Your strength and conditioning program should be based on exercises and drills involving multiple joint actions to improve athletic performance. Sport skills require multiple joint actions timed in the proper neuromuscular recruitment patterns. Otherwise you have no coordination or the ability to generate explosive force. Think of a core lifting exercise such as the hang snatch. It requires joint actions at the hips, knees, ankles, shoulders, and elbows to work together as a unit generating explosive force. Compare this to having your athletes focus on isolated muscle groups such as bicep curls, leg curls or leg extensions. There is no comparison. Isolating on single joint actions might work for body builders to improve their appearance, but athletes need to concentrate on activities involving multiple joint actions to improve performance.

3. Three Dimensional Movements
Sport skills involve movements in the three planes of space simultaneously: forward, backward, up, down, and from side to side. Your strength program should improve functional strength with exercises approximating these skills.

Only free weights allow movement in three dimensions simultaneously. This makes the transfer of strength and power easier to merge with the development of sport skills. Machines limit the development of sport skills. For example, when you use free weights, the muscles regulate and coordinate the movement pattern of the resistance, while machines use lever arms, guide rods, and pulleys to dictate the path of the movement. Try to use free weights as much as possible.

4. Train Explosively
The amount of force required for a given activity is regulated by the use of two different types of motor units found in the body, fast twitch and slow twitch, which vary greatly in their ability to generate force. Power sport athletes are interested in developing fast twitch while cross country runners are interested in developing slow twitch. The number of fibers a fast twitch fiber innervates is greater than with a slow twitch fiber, and the contractile mechanism of fast twitch muscle fiber is much larger. That's why all this adds up to a fast twitch fiber generating a force being four times greater than a slow twitch fiber. In most cases, power sport athletes are born with a higher ratio of fast twitch fibers which allows them the potential to be powerful if they train correctly.

Training explosively with free weights allows more fast twitch muscle fibers to be recruited and in return improves an athlete's performance potential.

5. Progressive Overload
The load or amount of weight lifted for each exercise is the most fundamental component of a strength training program. The application of the load has a crucial impact on maximizing performance and keeping injuries to a minimum.

Overload happens when the body responds to training loads greater than normal. The overload causes the muscle tissue of the body to go into a catabolic state or to break down. The body then adapts, through good nutrition and rest, by compensating through the development of more strength or endurance.

Intensity and volume are the key factors used to progressively increase the overload. The use of heavier loads increases the intensity. Adding more repetitions increases the volume. Each method causes specific adaptations. Increasing the weight and keeping the repetitions low develops strength and power. Increasing the number of repetitions and keeping the weight lighter causes improvement in endurance and muscular size.

6. Application of Periodization
Phases are different combinations of volume and intensity each translating into different responses by the body. Usually a cycle starts off with a base phase which progresses to a strength phase and finishes with a peak phase.

The area of each building block of the pyramid represents the volume of the load. The base phase represents the greatest area or capacity of volume. The top of the pyramid or peak phase represents the least amount of volume done. The height of pyramid represents the magnitude of intensity. Your program should go from high volume/low intensity to low volume/high intensity.


7. Split Routine
Most fitness training programs include three workouts per week, not three successive days, but three alternate ones. For example, a Monday-Wednesday-Friday schedule, or a Tuesday-Thursday-Saturday program. This approach gives the muscles a one day rest on the off days.

With strength training for power sports, we use a much better program called a split-routine. This is a very efficient and widely used principle in stimulating gains. It simply means splitting the types of movement and working them on alternate days. For example, do the explosive lifts on Monday and Thursday and strength lifts on Tuesday and Friday. With the split-routine, you get at least two full days of recovery between types of movement.

8. Hard/Easy System
You make more progress over longer periods of time if you do not work at maximum loads during each workout. The Hard-Easy System eliminates overtraining and mental burn-out. With it, there is only one hard workout per week per type of movement. The other days are light workouts. With only one heavy workout load a week per type of movement, you will be ready both physically and mentally as the loads become greater.

The “hard” workouts are on Monday and Friday. This allows the body to be fresh for both of the more demanding workouts of the week.

Monday Explosive Lifts Hard
Tuesday Strength Lifts Easy
Wednesday Rest
Thursday Explosive Lifts Easy
Friday Strength Lifts Hard
Saturday Rest
Sunday Rest

9. Specificity of Training
The primary objective of conditioning is to improve the energy capacity of an athlete to improve performance. Many coaches and athletes are confused or misinformed on how to implement the correct conditioning. For example, an abundance of football coaches believe doing aerobic distance running in their conditioning program prepares football players for the fourth quarter. Many strength and conditioning coaches also believe in aerobics to build a conditioning base for power sports. But recent scientific research has shown that building an aerobic base contributes little to the improvement of a football player’s performance.

When specificity is applied to conditioning, it refers to training the same as you play in competition. The first step in setting up a conditioning program is to determine the intensity and duration of the activity. The athlete’s success will be largely dependent on speed, power, and agility. So why not incorporate a conditioning program that has drills and activities that involve speed, power and agility? The drills should be short and intense simulating game like actions. So why are coaches having athletes do distance running? Good question.

10. Interval Training
Your conditioning program should be based on interval training principles. Interval training is work or exercise followed by a prescribed rest interval. For example, the program must meet the following conditions to be specific for (It must include work periods that are very intense with a duration of three to eight seconds and rest periods lasting at least 30 seconds) for basketball it must allow for a 1 to 1 rest to work ratio. (If the basketball drill lasts 15-20 seconds then a rest interval of 15-20 seconds is required).

A common training error that coaches make in their conditioning programs is making the rest intervals too short. If the rest period is too short, the amount of energy is not sufficient to meet the demands of the next maximum intensity effort, and force output will be reduced. This problem is very common. Coaches who make the rest interval too short, cause the force to be reduced, and the slow twitch muscle fibers are trained not the fast twitch fibers.

Coach - I really cannot add anything to his explanation in the article above! Strongly recommend you purchase the book: It will answer ALL the questions about his theories. Many consider him the GURU of strength training in the USA!

"DYNAMIC STRENGTH TRAINING FOR THE ATHLETE" by Boyd Epley. This was his FIRST book. He has another out but I don't know the title.

You can get the one above USED by going on to ABEBOOKS.COM I saw one listed today in GOOD condition for $16.00!

Best wishes!

Coach, bascially Eply lists all of the olympic lifts and their varations (hang clean, clean pull, snatch grip high pull, etc.) are what make up the explosive lifts. All of the other lifts fall into the strength category.

You can also toy around a little with explosive lifts as any lift can be done explosively as long as you use submaximal weight along with maximal force. This can be done in the form of box squats, speed benchs (ala Westside Barbell).