Football Conditioning: Making them or Breaking them?


By Josh Luck



“Run… Keep running… we’re going to run all day, Ladies!” How many times have we heard this before? Well coach, I am sorry to say that it might make you feel good at busting their chops and maybe even punishing them, but the reality is that you’re only punishing yourself and their football performance!

The old school mentality of running players for distance and even for punishment isn’t an effective way to condition your players.

The average football plays last 4-5 seconds. Stop and think about this for a minute. To better condition players for the game itself and have an advantage over the opposing team, we would want to condition them as specific to the sports play and rest intervals the best that we could, right? Running for miles or for long distances isn’t the answer. We would only be training them to be slower, and de-conditioning them to the sports specifics.

If the average play lasts 4-5 seconds and in those 4-5 seconds, we want the men to be the most explosive well condition athletes on the field, that’s exactly how we would attack it. Short bursts of energy where the game is won, or in this case, could be lost. The quickest off the ball, the first to a block or to a gap is going to win every time. If athletes are trained at slower paces (due to the intensity required to manage the speed in which I need to complete the distance running) that’s exactly were their football conditioning and football performance levels will be.

Energy system development is a vital component to any football training program. It is important to note the work intensities and rest to work ratio that is required.

The rest period for football is any were from 25-40 seconds, depending on what level you’re playing. Therefore, athletes need to train specific to the work to rest ratio, 4-5 seconds of work, 25-40 seconds of rest. The game is completely changed for an athlete that is running 100’s all day and has to rest 2-4 minutes to perform the same intensity with consistency. As opposed to one that trains 5-10 yards with 25 seconds of rest and repeats the work load respectively for 10-12 reps as he would in a game situation (which is the average drive of any successful series). Do you see the difference?

Of course it’s ok to go outside the norm once and a while to push the bar further, but the majority of football conditioning needs to be spot on with the conditioning required for the sport.

The energy system development for football breaks down like this. Almost all of the football conditioning requirements are 90% anaerobic, 10% intermediate or lactic acid (sprinting), and 0% aerobic. This simply means that 90% of the football conditioning is strength and power development, and 10% of football training is sprint dominant.

Energy system requirements will change the outcome of your player’s performance in the later stages of a game dramatically. Trained properly, players will be able to out perform, and be suitably conditioned to handle the demands to play every down to their potential.

Think about the forty yard dash. It takes a well trained and explosive athlete to run the forty anywhere from about 4.5 to 5.5 seconds. That’s 40 yards in 5 seconds! Now I am not a breaker of bad news, but if your athletes are running 40 yards per down, either your doing something right and you don’t need my advice, or something’s terribly wrong and you need all the advice you can get! But on a more serious note, it just doesn’t happen. So why are you running 40 or more yards for the majority of your football conditioning? It doesn’t make sense. Get them quick, get them explosive. You’ll be rewarding yourself and the scoreboard before you know it.



Josh Luck is the creator and founder of Elitefootballtrianing.com and has been training athletes for over a decade from all levels of performance. For more information on football conditioning and program design, visit http://www.elitefootballtraining.com or email coach Luck at: coachluck@elitefootballtraining.com