Performance during tryouts is a major factor determining if you are cut out for an NFL team. In addition, potential teammates will judge you based on your abilities during drills. Therefore, training specifically for these tests is crucial if you want to stand out from other players in your position group.
Many different types of workouts can improve your speed, agility, and strength as a football player. Here are some of the most effective workout exercises to boost your pitch performance.
Sprinting
Sprinting is the most basic type of speed drilling and one of the best ways to improve your general speed. Ideally, you may want to do most of your sprinting with short intervals (around 30-40 seconds) and full recovery between sessions. This aids you in building stamina and power while improving your cardiovascular fitness.
You can make this even more effective by making uphill sprints, which can support you in developing greater overall strength and endurance. In addition, you can make your sprinting more specific to football by making some of your sprints on grass or turf, which will be more similar to the surface you’ll be playing on during games.
Agility Drills
Agility training is another classic speed exercise, and it’s also very effective at assisting you in improving your pace and quickness. You can do many different agility drills, but some of the most common are the shuffle, the L-cut, the T-cut, and the carioca.
For these drills, start by marking a start and finish line. Then begin with a shuffle for about five yards, bringing your feet up and ankles taking a forward flexed position. Then, cut back to the finish line with an L-cut, T-cut, or Carioca. This simple change of direction will improve your feet’ quickness and speed.
Strength Training
There’s no doubt that power preparation is an essential part of effective training for a football game. It builds more muscle and increases your vigor, but it also assists you in getting more robust and more explosive. The best types of exercises to do for football strength coaching are the likes of squats, lunges, deadlifts, RDLs, and weighted jumps.
Pair your resistance training with plyometrics or other speed drilling exercises to make your workouts more effective. You can also do upper body strength exercises to help improve your overall toughness, explosiveness, and throwing power. Examples include weighted push-ups, weighted bench presses, and weighted pull-ups.
You can also make these exercises more football-specific by doing weighted throws. To do this, pick up a sandbag, medicine ball, or heavy ball and throw it as hard as you can onto the ground. The harder you throw the ball and the heavier it is, the more football-specific the exercise will be.
Football Specific Exercises
Many football-specific exercises help improve speed, power, and quickness. Toe raises, for example, can improve your leg power, while sled dragging can strengthen your leg durability and assist with acceleration. You can also do football-specific conditioning drills.
Sprints up and down hills are an excellent way to build strength and speed, while a shuttle sprint drill will aid your quickness and acceleration. Of course, you’ll want to push yourself as hard as you can for all these exercises, but make sure you stay safe, too.
Football Player Abs Workout
You’ll want to ensure you’re doing some core exercises like crunches, lying leg raises, and back extensions alongside other activities to build your core muscles and help protect you from injury. You can do these core exercises at the start of your workout or as part of a lower body circuit.
You’ll want to do plenty of exercises like leg raises, planks, and weighted sit-ups for your abs. You can also do some football-specific core exercises like football player slams and crunches to make your workouts more football-specific.
Cardio
You should incorporate moderate-intensity cardio sessions as part of your football training program. This helps improve your cardiovascular fitness while maintaining your strength and muscle growth.
Steady-state cardio exercises like running, swimming, and biking are suitable for beginners, but more advanced football players should do some more football-specific cardio workouts. Some good examples include ladder drills, shuttle runs, and shuttle sprints.
However, you don’t want to over-rely on cardio workouts by participating in only steady-state cardiovascular exercises such as running or swimming. Doing too much cardio can be counterproductive and slow your overall mass and muscle growth.
Pro-Training Tip: Always be training!
Many football players only start preparing when they’re getting ready for their next season. This is a mistake since you’re only preparing when your body is most susceptible to injury and only drilling when you’re tired and worn out from your season.
Instead, you should always be training throughout the year as well. This way, you can train while you’re fresh and not tired from the season. You can focus on building up your general fitness, which will help you better prepare for your next season and assist you in staying injury-free as well.
Conclusion
Training hard with persistence is the key to building a solid foundation for a long career in the NFL. To excel at the game, athletes must incorporate effective training methods and a nutritional diet for high performance in the field. To land a spot in an American football team, you must have the speed, focus, mental power, and agility of a wide receiver or runback combined with the strength and size of a lineman or linebacker.
The combination of these attributes makes for an excellent player on the field. NFL players are advised to keep track of progress, and if you end up featuring in statistics such as the NFL odds, you will know that you have made it.
