In the highly competitive sport of Football, every player needs to optimize their workout regimen to out-perform the other guy.

Here’s the good news:

Getting stronger, faster and more explosive for football is actually not that complicated.

It’s gut-busting hard work, but it’s not really rocket science. True Football Training aids will assist in building your body, mind and character and you will become a better man (or woman) for having lived through it.

Here’s The Bad News:

The world of Football Strength Training is in a sad state of affairs.

There are any number of websites that promise to deliver explosive football strength, but very few actually deliver. Unfortunately, most of the workouts and programs are written by some 170-lb personal trainer (who no doubt couldn’t make the team in high school). They come up with these odd programs filled with high volume, stability balls, “core” work and lots of cool, new-age exercises they learned at the latest ACE certification clinic.

This sad state of affairs is avoidable, if you know where to find the good stuff. Even though there are about 180,000 websites with some sort of football strength training info, a handful of them actually deliver meaningful content by an expert with inside knowledge and experience in football weight training.

One of these quality sites is explosivefootballtraining.com. The following information is a sample of the wealth of helpful knowledge offered to assist you in creating explosive football strength.

1. Do Max Effort Work

Make no mistake about it, you have to be as strong or stronger than your opponent to be a great football player. Strength dictates all other aspects of athleticism (speed, agility, explosiveness, etc). The stronger football player will almost always win.

This confuses most people. They assume that you don’t need to be super strong to be a great football player. They also fail to see the correlation between strength and speed (we’ll cover that in #2).

We’ve been conditioned to think that doing sets of 4 – 6 and simply adding 5lbs to the bar every week is getting stronger. It’s not.

First, you’re not building maximum strength.

Second, you will plateau rather quickly. If we all added 5-lbs a week forever, guys would be benching 5,000lbs.

You must work with low reps, yes, even as low as singles, to build raw, max strength.

I know, “low reps are dangerous!” Bull. High reps are more dangerous. Ever watch someone do a set of 10 in the Squat? Reps 7 – 10 are ragged, they twist, their knees pinch in, and they use way too much back. The more reps you do, the more fatigued you will become and the worse your form will get.

If you’re a beginner or you train beginners, and you still fear the single, do multiple sets of 2 or work up to a max set of 2 – 3. This will build top end strength. And, for those of you who feel you need to do higher reps, think of it this way; you’re max bench is 200lbs and you can do sets of 8 with 150. You smarten up, decide to get stronger, push your max up to 250 and suddenly find that you can now do sets of 8 with 200. Which is better? 150 x 8 or 200 x 8?

Lead off one Upper Body day and one Lower Body day with a Max Effort exercise. Stick to big, compound movements like Bench, Incline, Deadlifts, Box Squats, etc.

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2. Maximum Force to the Bar

If there is one area of football training, and, strength training in general that confuses people and fuels the fringe, anti-strength idiots it’s the subject of bar speed. The HIT Jedis, the personal training crowd, the CrossFit Cults and the Wobble Board Wrecking Crews all have done a great job teaching young Football Players and lifters that lifting heavy will make you slow. “Just look at that big, fat Powerlifter Squatting 800-lbs! He’s moving slow, and if you get strong, you’ll be slow too!”

Much better to do Indian Club Juggling Front Squats on a Swiss ball, eh?
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.

Every set, every rep, every exercise…lift the bar like you’re trying to throw it off of you because it’s about to crush you and end your existence. That’s good motivation to get the bar moving.

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3. Posterior Chain

If you want to get faster for football, be able to drive a defender into the stands, or run people over, you need to work your posterior chain like your life depends on it. Your hamstrings, glutes, calfs, and all the muscles of the back must be hammered, often.

I don’t blame young players for training the beach muscles. They don’t know any better and that’s where you’ll notice progress the quickest. But, for coaches and writers who over-promote “bodybuilding” style programs, there’s no excuse.

You need to center your program around:

Box Squats
Box Front Squats
Deadlifts
Cleans
Deadlifting of odd objects (sandbags, stones, etc)
Snatch Grip Deadlifts
Romanian Deadlifts
Squats and Front Squats (regular, no box)
Lateral Lunges

If you focus your efforts on those exercises, you will be miles ahead of the competition. Do them heavy, lift them fast, and do them often.

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4. Build Transitional Power

Another place where many football strength programs fall short is in the area of transitioning weight room strength into on the Football Field power.

There are plenty of big, strong dudes who stink up the collective football fields of the world every year. Sometimes it’s because they are just dumb or hopelessly unathletic. More often, it’s because they lifted hard but never took the steps needed to transfer power from the gym to the field.

The two quickest ways to do this are:

Using a modified Dynamic (Speed) Training method
Using a simple Plyometric program

OK…..Now What?

I’ve just introduced you to a plan for increasing your explosive strength, get faster for football and become the kind of player you always wanted to be. The next step is to visit this site for more detailed information on this topic, and to receive your free book on “The 7 Steps To Building Insane Game Speed!”