Six bits of advice for football coaches
Tony asked me to write this article to go along with the “Feed The Cats Football.” I think it is very appropriate with the conditions that we are all facing with the upcoming season and the possibility of having a very small amount of time to get our athletes ready. Like most TFC articles, I am asking you to leave your comfort box of tradition into the realm of anything is possible. Grab what you can and bring it back into your box, or just get rid of the box.
♦ 1) Too much, too soon
A player goes from summer camp (or no camp) to camp. Even though we try to get them ready for camp, some don’t report ready to practice. I am sure that most of them did conditioning, but the context of what is asked of them is different on day one of camp. What is lacking in the off-season conditioning is the excitement, fear, and the shock of a new activity. Those three factors amp up the adrenaline which completely changes the chemical realm of the athlete.
To make it worse, coaches always assume that their players are not in shape. They feel the need that they need to condition them right off the bat. Whether it is a conditioning test, daily gassers, or suicide runs, all are used as a tool to try to get their athletes in shape as quickly as possible. Coaches seem to forget that the practice may have been stressful enough. Conditioning is just the tradition.
Additionally, coaches add as much as they can during a practice to see “how much they can get in.” Suddenly the 120 minute practice starts to edge closer to 3 hours. I remember in college when practice was not going well, we would go back and start from the very beginning of the script. Or, we will run 20 perfect plays. The attempt at 20 often ended in 60-70 plays.
A friend of mine, who is also a NFL head strength coach, did a great study to compare the workload versus the injury rate at the beginning of camp and followed the data all throughout the season. What it showed was there was a huge spike in workload in the beginning of the season which correlated to a high injury rate. As the season continued, practice workload dropped which coincided with a drop in injury rates. Football coaches are football coaches at every level. When they played a bad game, workload increased as did injury rates.
I think a good measure of how camp went is the number of injured players standing on the sideline for the first game. Imagine if you planned a season with the goal finishing the season with the same number you started with. Usually those are the teams that play for a long time.
♦ 2) Weekly workload
Tagging on to #1, how much work are you doing during the week. Is your practice plan going to result in being fresh on Friday night? Let’s look at it from a skilled player position. If I am a WR, how many fade routes did I run all week? Do I do them daily? Do I do them in individual, group, and team, everyday? All of that adds up. How much fuel is left in the tank for Friday night?
I was in charge of passing for our offense when I coached, so I will look at it from that perspective. This might be a better way to plan the week from a passing perspective.
Mon- PAP/2 min drill (conditioning)
Tuesday- 5-7 step drop game, outside run to practice stalk blocking
Wed- 3 step game, inside run
Thurs- Alignment and walk thru
Friday- Game
The volume of running has shortened during the week with the idea Thursday will help get me fresh for Friday. And if things didn’t go well on Friday night, running more the following week will not make you any better. Conditioning should not be a vent for a frustrated head coach.
How do we know if the volume was too much? You can check fly 10 times, vertical jumps, or even a basic Tap Test App on Thursday/Friday night. Have them fill out questionnaires on Sunday to check diets, sleep, and stress. Plan accordingly. Position coaches can also monitor reps in practice for those who didn’t pass their neural test.
♦ 3) Create challenging drills
In my four years of playing WR in college, I did the same 30 minutes of drills, every practice: mirror dodge, stalk block, push crack, Cover 2 releases and toe tap catches. There was never any variation. There was no challenge to get better other than getting the better of your teammate to talk trash later. It seemed like we did it to kill time to get ready for group work. Are you doing drills out of tradition or are you creating scenarios that force your athletes to adjust to more game-like scenarios?
For example, how often do WR’s get to run fades down the side-line without anyone around them. It is a completely different game when someone has pinned your inside arm and the WR has to go get the ball. If you don’t have any spare players to jam up a WR due to COVID restrictions, put your timer out at 10 and 20 yards and get a fly time before they catch a ball. In fact, you can set up any route and get a time. Amping the intensity of the route in practice creates game-specific conditions. Do sets of three with 40 seconds rest. Now a coach can see who is the best man for a 2-minute drill or how many reps someone should go before they need a sub. And if times are getting slower as the season progresses, it may be a good time to cut back on work load.
Drills are created to acquire the necessary skill for that position. I played on a wishbone team, so stalk blocking was what we did. Hopefully, as the season progresses, drills are dropped because the players have mastered the skills. Now, you can get more group-time and team-time and cut down on practice volume as the season progresses.
For the coaches who want to keep their daily fundamental drills, we can apply some motor learning challenges to the daily drill by changing the environment. Add time pressure, fatigue, contact, or a change of surface. The drill is the attractor and we can create fluctuations to get to the drill
Fatigue: five burpees and get to line and do drill
Surface: slick or unstable surface to learn better footing
Contact: a slight shove
Time: adjustments to speed
♦ 4) Better conditioning
Some coaches may not be ready to give up conditioning. That’s OK. Keir Wenham-Flatt has come up with the best conditioning drill I have seen in over 30 years. He calls it the Tribe Test. He uses it as a conditioning test. I think it is a great workout. He broke down what football is about and concluded that there is generally a short hard sprint with 1 cut and a shorter sprint after the cut.
You can change lots of variables in the drill. Not only is it a great drill, but Kier’s presentation was one of the best I have seen in all of my years of clinics. If you are serious about greatly improving your conditioning aspect of practice and understanding what actually happens in all of the traditional forms of conditioning, I would highly recommend Kier’s presentation. In fact, I’ll make it 50% off!
♦ 5) In-season lifting
When creating an In-season program, you have to do the following:
♦ Prioritize what is important to your athletes succeeding.
♦ Figure out what attribute gets depleted during the season by the nature of the game.
♦ Figure out what you can do on and off the field to keep those attributes at their highest.
First, let’s start with being realistic. Let’s dismiss the notion that there will be great gains during the season. Keeping body mass is very difficult as well. Most athletes, at all levels, have a hard time eating enough during the season.
While max strength is very important, along with body weight, it is also something that disappears during the season. So, what in the weight room can we do to try to maintain strength? Isometrics are a perfect solution to get something out of the weight room in-season. There is minimal muscle damage. Iso’s can be applied during the week anytime because the recovery is much quicker than the other types of lifts. It equally benefits both skill players and linemen.
But before I give an example, remember the goal is a fast Friday. I would start all weight room work with a vertical jump test. If they are close to their best (5-10%), they can go to the weight room. If not, they aren’t ready to do any more work but need to recover.
I would do 3-4 lifts per session.
Monday: 10 sec holds 3-4 sets; unstable bench using weights hanging off bar, one arm lat pull with slight rotation, split squat
Wednesday: 10 sec holds 3-4 sets; bench one inch off the chest, lat pull (scaps retracted bar under chin), leg press (something with two legs that doesn’t stress the back)
Why no hamstrings? They get plenty of work sprinting during practice.
Doing lighter weights and more volume will just add to the accumulated workload that comes out on Friday night. But, if building some kind of GPP base for next season is a goal, then it would be the right selection.
Don’t be afraid to dump lifting. Usually athlete’s bodies get to the point where they have enough for what they need to do. Their bodies get to their natural fighting weight.
♦ 6) Warm-ups
Let’s say that “Boules” is the unit just discovered by scientists to determine how much energy an athlete has to perform per set of time and factors in hormones and emotions (completely imaginary and I know something like this exists but I don’t feel like looking it up in Supertraining). Time blocks can be daily, weekly or monthly. Athlete X has 200 Boules a day, 1400 a week and 5600 a month. Daily life costs 50 Boules. Daily practice costs 100 Boules.
If a warm-up costs 30 Boules, is there a better way to spend the 30 Boules for practice? Maybe the dynamic warm-up could easily become individual drills?
Now, jump to Friday night. You have some Boules stored up from cutting back on the amount of work done during the week. But, we start losing Boules on Wednesday when social media says your team will get killed. Butterflies on Thursday start to drain Boules as well. It doesn’t help that AP Calc has a huge test on Friday as well. That costs some. Now, go through the amped up music, the pre-game pre-game. This is one when teams go through a warm-up and drills off the field. Now get on the field for the obligatory 25 minute warm-up. WR’s run at least 20 fade routes. Cue the music. How many Boules did all of that cost? Imagine as a head coach, each Boule was a chip that you held and held dearly. How many Boules did you want to pay for all of that activity before the game even starts? What if it costs so many Boules that you are in deficit spending by the fourth quarter?
What is Boule saving warm-up?
I am a purist. I would do 5 min team breathing, RPR and the Fichter neural warm-up, then go to individual. If all of those things work as advertised, there is no need for a dynamic warm-up. All of the appropriate movements and muscles needed can be covered in individual periods.
Friday night warm-up?
It would be a film session. Starting with great plays from previous games, perfect plays in practice, and highlights from previous games with the opposing team. All players should have a personal highlight tape of their favorite plays both by them and favorite players. Tape session/ dressing. Once on the field, some basic individual drills and some team work. The goal is to save energy and adrenaline for kick off.
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PS- Thanks to Bob Dylan for recording Rough and Rowdy Ways which I listened to repetitively while writing this blog. It’s a perfect album for the COVID days, with great reflective lyrics and a solemn, melancholy music. And it gives me hope that I may still be relevant, creating new things when I am 80.
