My
first offseason high school football strength program.
The major project that I have
selected to learn more about and execute is going to be developing and
implementing a sport specific strength and conditioning program. Over the course of this project I hope to
effectively be able to run a strength program for a high school football team
that will increase the physical attributes of my players. These increases will be quantifiable by
records of each specific lift maxes, players gain or loss in weight, and by
body mass composition. I will first
learn to identify the weaknesses of my players.
I will categorize these weaknesses and create a weekly strength plan
that will be able to address and develop the weaknesses into strengths.
This is the first week of many that
I will be posting about my experience of implementing a strength program for
the St. Vincent St. Mary High School football team. Since I am only a month in, I believe that this will truly be a learning experience even though I will only be posting about it for a short period of time for my technology grad class. Starting at the
beginning, my biggest challenge so far was creating the program. I sat down with Armani Martin, a well-known
performance coach from Miami, Florida.
Before I got the job of strength coach, I took a trip down to Miami to
visit my fellow coach and refresh my mind of the workings of a strength
program. I spent a little less than a
week there and Coach Martin and I developed a sixteen-week program (see below).
Picture
1
I will remain in constant contact
with Coach Martin with the use of Google Sheets as seen above in arrow number one. Arrow number two shows my set up for each of
the sixteen weeks (only seven are shown), the exercise database, and each current
week. This past week, which I will be
discussing, was week seven.
I have created my program to run in four-week
cycles, the fourth week being the week that we retest for our maxes. I test four different lifts to gauge the
overall strength of an athlete: bench, squat, deadlift, and floor press. Week seven was our last prep week before we
max again in week eight, which begins on Monday the 12th. Next week I will be able to discuss the new
maxes and decide what went well during those four weeks and what I must
change.
For week seven I implemented more of
a corrective lift schedule, which means lifts that are lighter in intensity (or
weight) and lifts that are usually done with strength bands. This strength band approach to a max week will
be something I’ll definitely look to change or keep after I record the new
maxes. I say this because many professionals
believe that heavier lifts, that build muscle are required to have better maxes
and since I went lighter and somewhat eased off, I am excited to see the
results. Monday was our lower day and I included
two explosive lifts which can be determined by the xxx under the TEM column. I point this out because explosive lifts take
a toll on the body and usually the rule of thumb is one per day. Tuesday was our upper day which consisted up
a moderate bench exercise, one explosive, and strength band corrective
lifts.
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2
Wednesday and Thursday were our
single arm upper day and single leg lower day, which as I stated before, were
ran much more in the corrective lift/strength band fashion.
Picture
3
No unusual challenges this week
other then keeping on top of attendance.
I have about forty football players that I look over and about another
thirty football players that are involved in other sports so being able to streamline
my attendance program is something I will always try and advance. I am very excited to post next week after we
have recorded our second set of maxes.
The main goal of next weeks post will be to compare and contrast the strategy
I used to prepare ourselves for the max week compared to the past preparation which
I will delve into more next week.
#staytuned
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