Most people who participate in extracurricular athletic endeavors often believe that an athletic pastime like boxing or wrestling can prepare you for a sport like football. As a result, in the youth football off-season, a lot of kids focus on activities like karate, crossfit or Brazilian jiujitsu as way of staying in shape while football is out.

While I do believe that, participating in multiple athletic activities will make your child an all around better athlete, activities like crossfire and jiujitsu cannot be used a replacement for proper physical conditioning for football. Regardless of the position, football requires the development and training of the lactic and alactic anaerobic system. This means that your body’s ability to have certain muscles contract and relax efficiently, as well as process ATP efficiently is crucial. This just isn’t a physical requirement of crossfit or grappling martial arts.

So what activities or exercises can a young person do in order to prepare for the football season:

• High knees, running in place. When doing this, it is important to focus on getting the complete range of motion. Range of motion and elasticity off muscle is also good for speed and explosiveness.
• running backwards.
• Do lots of running. However, do not let your workouts become an aerobic endeavor. Aerobic capacity comes at the expense of anaerobic capacity, and vice versa.
• Avoid long distance running. Make no mistake about it, aerobic capacity comes at the expense of fast-twitch muscle fiber development.
• Do high rep/low weight exercises sometimes. It’s not always about the amount of resistance, It’s about the range of motion and developing good movement patterns. This is how you develop a powerful athlete.

Taking these points into account, you have to remember there is a right way to go about training young athletes and a wrong way. The wrong way is often better than nothing but, there is a big difference between the results one gets from randomly throwing workouts together and proper training to develop athleticism. Trust me, without proper planning of the workout you are likely to get mediocre results.

Until next time …

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