52-Week Football Training: Part 3

By Ben Cook

Thanks to an agreement with Human Kinetics Publishing, NFLHS.com is proud to present 52-Week Football Training, a book that provides the conditioning plan you need to maximize football-specific physical development and motivation. Players can gain the perfect balance of power, speed, and agility by implementing this proven in-season and off-season training plan.

Conditioning coach Ben Cook, who has worked with 27 players that went on to the NFL, includes more than 160 photos showing correct technique and nearly 200 exercises and drills.

Warming up briefly before a workout is beneficial in several ways.

1. It warms and prepares the muscle tissue for more intense activity. By gradually warming up the muscle, you ensure that your muscles are adapting to more intense exercise. This ability to sustain muscular activity can therefore benefit endurance activities like running and biking.
2. Warming up before exercise has been shown to increase nerve activity in the working muscles, resulting in both increased contraction speed of the muscle fiber cells and greater power output of the muscle. This type of response is especially beneficial for power and strength athletes.
3. Warming up before exercise may reduce the potential for injury by increasing muscle flexibility. This can help reduce the occurrence of strains and tears in muscles and connective tissues.
4. Your blood pressure naturally rises at the beginning of exercise. Warming up before exercise can lessen this rise in blood pressure and thus place less stress on the heart. This can be important to an athlete who might already have high blood pressure, as well as to all athletes who are concerned about their personal health.
5. Overall, research has shown that athletes who warm up before exercise can increase their performance.

So what constitutes an adequate warm-up period? I recommend first doing a 5- to 10-minute overall body warm-up at submaximal effort. Try activities such as calisthenics, form running, cariocas, and jumping rope. This overall body activity will increase your heart rate and the flow of blood to your muscles.

Then do one or two sets or spend a few minutes doing a more specific warm-up for the activity that you are about to perform, such as a warm-up set on the bench press if weight training. This more specific warm-up will increase your body temperature in the specific area of the body that you will be exercising.

I address warming up in the workout primarily before the conditioning workouts. The flexibility portion of the workout is composed of a pre-practice static stretching routine. Before resistance training, you can achieve an adequate warm-up by doing light calisthenics and light sets of the exercises you are about to perform (see table below). You may include light stretching, but understand that over-stretching the muscle before a resistance-training session can result in muscle instability, reducing your ability to stabilize the weight.

Find more information about the book 52-Week Football Training by clicking here.

From 1990 to 1994, author Ben Cook was the assistant strength and conditioning coach for the University of North Carolina (UNC) football team, where his assistance helped 27 players reach the NFL. He is currently the strength coach for the Tar Heel basketball team, one of the nation's top programs.