In any sport, being big and strong is never enough. What good is that 500-pound squat if you’re taking a knee in the fourth quarter desperately gasping for air? If you want to be great, that sure as hell ain’t gonna cut it. That’s an embarrassment to you and your team.
What you need to be a true warrior on the gridiron is strength, speed, AND conditioning.
But there is a real problem with the methods some athletes or coaches use to condition. Methods that can actually make an athlete slower, smaller, weaker, without improving their shitty conditioning! This is something no athlete wants, regardless of their sport.
I’m here to tell you how to condition the right way, and how to avoid the garbage that will break you down.
The first thing I want to address is that football, like most sports, is anaerobic in nature. Anaerobic means that your body is producing energy without oxygen. Which means that your conditioning should train your anaerobic system to prepare you for your sport. An example of anaerobic training would be a sprint followed by a brief rest or less intense phase.
On the other side of the coin, aerobic training is dependent on the oxygen from the air you breathe. An example of aerobic training would be going for a jog.
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What happens when you train aerobically is your body begins to produce high levels of the stress hormone cortisol. This stress hormone is extremely catabolic which means it will actually break down muscle tissue.
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see how detrimental that will be for your performance in the weight room and more importantly, on the field.
Feeling skeptical? Take a look at the often used example of the physical differences between marathon runners and sprinters. Sprinting is anaerobic, long distance running is aerobic. Who looks stronger? Who is faster? Who would you rather have on your team during battle?
I’m pretty sure all of you said the sprinter.
In addition, when you increase your anaerobic conditioning levels your aerobic conditioning will also increase. But that doesn’t work the other way around. So someone who trains anaerobically will have better conditioning all the way around.
All that said, if you want to perform at the highest level possible you need to condition anaerobically. This should be aside from your speed and agility/misdirection work (which is anaerobic in nature) but I want to remind you that this post is to teach you how to condition, not train for speed. Conditioning trains your actual energy system in way more depth.
One thing to be sure of is that if you are doing your conditioning work on the same days as weight training, it is imperative to condition AFTER weight training. Otherwise you’ll be weak and depleted before entering the weight room and will certainly not perform at max potential.
So, here are some of my favorite ways to condition.
Hill Sprints
These are awesome. They require max effort and are a “fun” way to get your sprinting in without too much stress on the hamstrings. You can sprint up then jog down and repeat 10-12 times. Once that gets easy you can add more sets, decrease rest or increase difficulty in some other way. Just make sure you take advantage of these.
Strongman Training
Using odd object lifting is not only great for building real world strength but they are awesome to use for conditioning. Set up an obstacle course with kegs, tires, sledgehammers and heavy sandbags and go through in circuit fashion.
The Prowler
The prowler is one of the best methods of conditioning in my opinion. They develop great lower body strength and muscular conditioning. Another bonus is that there is no eccentric component to this exercise so it will not cause any soreness. Stack it up with some heavy plates and push it or pull it for set distances. Maybe 20 yards, maybe 50 — it doesn’t matter. Make it hard and get your hands on one of these.
Some other methods of conditioning you can use are battle ropes and jump ropes. You can do them when your lower body needs a break or if you’re recovering from an injury. You can do something like 60 seconds on followed by 30 seconds of rest for 15-20 minutes, as an example.
You will instantly notice the difference between this type of conditioning and the outdated three-mile jog. Which, by the way, bores the shit out of me.
Start training anaerobically and watch your performance on the field go through the roof. The season will be here before you know it which means now is the time to get things right.
There are other benefits to proper conditioning, too. Let's discuss the significance of building mental toughness through conditioning. As we all know, football is a game where you need an iron will — a never say die attitude. This is something that you need to build in the weight room, on the field, and during conditioning.
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First, you have to be willing to go outside your comfort zone. Get comfortable being uncomfortable. If you coast through your workouts, you will coast on the field of battle. Man up and push yourself. If four plates on a sled is a piece of cake, then it doesn’t matter if it’s a great exercise or not — you are making it suck. You should use a weight you can handle but it should also be challenging. Unless you think that middle linebacker is going to take it easy on you in the fourth quarter, you need to fucking push it.
Second, do your conditioning work with a great coach or training partner that is going to make you earn it. Competition brings out the best in us, and if the guy next to you is trying to kick your ass in every sprint you do, you will have no choice to work that much harder. Unless you are a push-over, of course. In that case, you don’t belong on the football field anyway.
Finally, you need to stay consistent. Make conditioning a habit. It’s something that not everyone loves doing, but it is necessary for success on the gridiron. Make sure that even in January you do conditioning at least once a week to make it routine. You don’t have to go too crazy in the winter, but you should at least do something so as the spring approaches you are in decent shape. I recommend doing stuff like the prowler, bleachers, hill sprints and jumprope in the winter months to give your knees and hamstrings a breather, as flat ground sprints tend to beat you up a bit.
So just to summarize, condition using anaerobic training by doing a high intensity sprint or set, followed by a brief rest. Avoid steady state cardio and aerobic conditioning, and get mentally tough by getting outside your comfort zone, training with someone who will push you and staying consistent.
Start taking massive action right away and separate yourself from the competition next season. I hope you guys liked the article and if you have any questions feel free to ask in the comments below or email me at chris@tutelatraining.com.
Until next time guys, thanks for reading!
Chris Tutela is a strength and conditioning coach in Clark, New Jersey. He is the owner and operator of Tutela Training Systems, where he trains mainly athletes and some regular people. He has multiple years experience as a strength coach at the high school level as well a professionally in the private sector.
The aerobic system is the hook that reels in the alactic fish that is trying to swim away into a sea of lactate.
The good news is that by conditioning anaerobically you will increase your aerobic capacity simultaneously. But the opposite is not true. Considering the negative effects of training aerobically listed in the article, it is much more beneficial for football players to train anaerobically and enhance the aerobic system that way.
The two systems need to compliment each other. The majority of training should either be aerobic or alactic. While coaching at the high school level, I often saw coaches implementing lactic loads in practice, so there is no need for us to put our athletes' bodies in a lactic environment.The more you can keep an athlete in an aerobic environment before he goes into lactic, the less stress on his body to produce the work. The more powerful the aerobic system, the greater the lactate buffer system.
You need to raise an athletes aerobic capacity which is essentially an athlete’s ability to recover quickly between intensive bouts of alactic work, or how well the athlete will recover between plays. Aerobic endurance and restoration work is compatible when training alactic abilities. Just understand that when you are training for increased aerobic capacity, the goal is not to exceed the anaerobic threshold or the lactate threshold (due to an associated increase in blood acidity). What we are trying to develop is a functional recovery system by making our muscle fibers as dense as possible with mitochondria.
My choice for building aerobic capacity is tempo work—aerobic work performed in an interval fashion. Tempo work will not only promote recovery, but it will also enhance aerobic and general work capacity during the early stages of training while exposing your athletes to sprint work (if you choose to use running). I utilize tempo work by creating a running program that incorporates sub-maximal linear or multi-directional running performed at <75% of one's maximum velocity. Now, you can do this with running, sled dragging, Prowler pushing, battle ropes, medicine ball work, jump roping, etc." - Nic Bronkall The Spot Athletics
Was going to post my own words but this sums up it up really well. The aerobic system needs to be developed for all athletes. Chris, the kind of conditioning you are suggesting is highly lactic in nature and will actually inhibit and destroy the mitochondria of cells, which is the powerhouse of cell functions. Looks into Charlie Francis, Joel Jamieson, James Smith, and Buddy Morris, all great minds of our industry and they all say the same thing.
James “The Thinker” Smith describes two different kinds of outputs. First, there is maximal output. This is the maximum amount of force that an athlete is able to produce. Secondly, there is operational output. This is the output that an athlete will display during a game and is a percentage of the maximal output.
An athlete cannot work at maximal outputs on a consistent basis during competition because the environment is not optimal and neither is the athlete's energy reserves because of insufficient recovery.
However, if we can get the athlete’s maximal output higher than his potential operational output, we will be dealing with a very dangerous athlete who can consistently perform near maximal outputs.
Yet, while football is a anaerobic/alactic sport, we need to have a very powerful aerobic system to go along with the powerful alactic system. When writing a program to improve these two systems, the program needs to be developed in such a way that there will be no negative effects between improving the alactic and aerobic systems. The two systems need to compliment each other.
Just about every sport needs aerobic capacity work. It’s an athlete’s ability to recover quickly between intensive bouts of alactic work, or how well the athlete will recover between plays. Aerobic endurance and restoration work is compatible when training alactic abilities. Just understand that when you are training for increased aerobic capacity, the goal is not to exceed the anaerobic threshold or the lactate threshold (due to an associated increase in blood acidity). What we are trying to develop is a functional recovery system by making our muscle fibers as dense as possible with mitochondria.
You’re idea of conditioning is wrong. You say football is anaerobic, which it is but so is powerlifting and olympic lifting. Lets break football down:
Football:
• Average play: 4 to 6 seconds
• Average rest between plays: 15 to 40 seconds (depending on the style of offense)
• Average series in a game: 10 to 18
• Average plays in a series: 3 to 15
• Distance typically covered: 5 to 40 yards
•
Now, if a player doesn’t go both ways, he usually will get anywhere from 5 to 7 minutes of rest before he takes the field again. (High schoolers are typically the only football players that go both ways). Also, there is a half time that varies from high school to college to pros.
So, from this information we can see that football players needs to be fast, strong, and explosive. They also need to be able to do it repeatedly—so explosive bouts with short rest intervals. WOW! Looks like we found a simple way to condition a football player. Yet, let's take it a step further and figure out what energy systems are used in football (since we are awesome coaches and that's what awesome coaches do).
The most important energy system that should stand out is the anaerobic energy system. Within this energy system there are two different types of systems. First, there is the ATP-PC system (Alactic). This system does not require or produce oxygen. It’s used for explosive activities that last up to 10 seconds. The second system is the Anaerobic Glycolysis System (Lactic).
This system doesn’t require oxygen either, but it does produce lactic acid. It’s used during activities that last between 10 seconds to 90 seconds. Most sports are based on short term explosiveness (AKA: alactic anaerobic power). Now, stay with me here. Each of these pathways has a power component, which is how fast the system can derive energy, and then it also has a capacity component, which is how long the system can be sustained.
Athletes with great alactic power can only produce a few extremely intensive bursts of energy at an extremely high level. These athletes are your Olympic lifters, powerlifters, shot-putters, 100-meter sprinters etc. On the other hand, an athlete with great alactic power and capacity can repeat these intensive bursts time and time again throughout his or her sporting event. That is why all athletes should have a high capacity.
You need to do aerobic training for your athletes but it must be performed properly.
You’re statement that when you train aerobically your body produces high levels of cortisol is wrong and misleading in the manner you used it. Secretion of cortisol is typically elicited at exercise intensities between 80-90% of VO2 max, which means you’re pretty much doing endurance training. So saying that this is detrimental to ones performance is flat out wrong.
Raising ones aerobic capacity is extremely important. I utilizing tempo work by creating a running program that incorporates sub-maximal linear or multi-directional running performed at <75% of one's maximum velocity will pay extreme dividends. As Charlie Francis explains, “The more heat generated around the motor neuron, the more the fiber begins to take on characteristics of white fibers.” Aerobic work generates a lot of heat around motor neurons, the more heat generated around the motor neurons, the more the fiber begins to take on characteristics of a white fiber.” Which means that when you training aerobically, you’re still enhancing your fast twitch fibers.
Having athletes perform tempo runs at 60-75% of maximal speed. It is extremely important to stay within the range of 60-75%. Anything lower than this range is too slow to elicit the necessary heart rates to develop aerobic capacity, and anything faster puts us in a lactic environment and releases high levels of cortisol. We just don’t want lactate to accumulate. A tempo run session should have you huffing and puffing while doing it, but you should still be able to talk in full sentences.
Stop with the comparing of a marathon runner and a sprinter. Neither are football players.
You need to develop an athletes aerobic capacity in order to develop a functional recovery system. Without the ability to recover and repair, the body is incapable of progression or optimal performance.
Take some time and read the work of Vladimir Issurin and his worked compatibility and non-compatibility charts. The aerobic endurance and aerobic restoration work are both compatible the training galactic sprint abilities.
Both systems need to be trained. Not just the anaerobic. Also