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The Strength Report: Linebackers

by: Jeff Pittman
Strength Coach, University of Colorado
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My general philosophy of preparing players for competition in the game of football is that the game is played with the hips. Football is played on your feet – running, blocking, and hitting. You have a triple extension of your ankles, knees and hips. You need to be extended into your opponent or toward the ball, when you’re trying to catch it for example. When a receiver explodes off the line, he’s using his hips. When a defensive end extends into a tight end or tackle, he’s using his hips.

    To build strength in the hips and legs I recommend the same kind of lifting and movement that you see in the Olympics – power clean lifts and snatches. This is important for improving the overall strength of your linebackers.

    In the off-season, I’ll assign our linebackers five sets of power clean lifts (including one warm-up) on the first day of the week. Five sets of hang clean lifts (including one warm-up set) are scheduled on the third day and five sets of hang snatches on the second day (See attached chart).

General Lifts
    I assign other lifts on a regular basis as well: overhead squats, power shrugs, leg curls, incline presses, lat pull downs, bicep curls, a twisting medicine ball throw, back squats, bench presses, bent over row lifts, neck lifts, heel locks, lateral lunges, leg extensions, triceps lifts on a machine, front squats and military presses. What you’re trying to do with your linebackers – as well as other players – is to improve their speed and strength. It really is about total body movement. In football you have to synchronize joints and muscles to work as one and be in balance.

    We don’t do a lot of plyometrics nor jumping exercises. The depth jumps, box jumps and jumps over hurdles are good for quick, explosive movements, but the players are so big nowadays that they start getting tendonitis in the knees. That being said a lot of guys do them  and  for the smaller position players I’m okay with that. To improve movement for linebackers, I use agility bags that players run over and crawl around on all-fours. We also use cone drills. Football is such a dynamic sport that requires quick change of directional movements.

    I don’t spend much time talking to players about the upper body, because most already are dedicated to strengthening it. Kids love doing benches and curls. They don’t like working on their legs. Whomever I’m talking to, that’s how I go about it. The legs are the most important thing you can train for college football players. The knees are probably the most vulnerable area for players. We do power cleans and squats – that’s what we do to help strengthen our knees.

    As for the upper body, our players do military presses and lift dumbbells bent over rows. The big thing is to make sure the back of the shoulders gets strengthened, because the shoulders take so many hits that we want to prevent shoulder injuries. You want to have auxiliary balance movements.

Boise State to Boulder

    We’re all on one page for now at Colorado with generally the same workouts. When the strength level is where it needs to be, then I’ll break them out by position. When I was at Boise State, I did different things for different positions. Over time you have to change things up to keep guys interested. Now we just need to get stronger, so we’re going basic. But for our linebackers it's important for them to work on hand speed drills. Linebackers need to be good with their hands. So we have them work with hand speed ladders and the heavy bag. That way they can learn to strike on the rise.

Warming Up
    As a warm-up to lifting sessions, we have a 10-minute regimen for the players. They walk over six hurdles, going over the front, backward, then laterally one way and then laterally the other way. The purpose is to get your groin warmed up. It also helps create flexibility in the hamstrings.

   We use the speed ladder too, having players do the Ickey shuffle (popularized by former Cincinnati Bengals RB Ickey Woods) and a two-in and two-out drill, where players face laterally, put both feet in, both feet back and then over and across the line. Finally for the warm up, we have the players perform static stretching. Whatever muscles we work that day in the weight room, we get them stretched out first.

In Season and Out of Season
    During the season, we have the linebackers lift twice a week for about 45 minutes per workout, and the younger players who don’t see much action during the games lift three days a week. The last workout is intense – maybe an hour. Out of season – in the winter, spring and summer – we instruct players to lift four days a week, for 1 hour to 1 hour and 10 minutes per session.

   One key element is to motivate your players to lift. In this day and age, with the Internet, cell phones, TV and ESPN’s NFL draft day show, some kids are more worried about going to the NFL than getting themselves ready for the college game. It’s not a problem here at Colorado, but some of the places I’ve been at, that’s an issue. When I talk to other coaches, they say it’s a constant battle. The guys who play well are always consistent about the weight room throughout their career. Guys who are inconsistent in the weight room are inconsistent on the field.

   We want our players to be both coachable and consistent in their training. Consistency in training is very important and each player should listen to their coaches. My Colorado strength staff – Vernon Stephans, Vic Cummins, Sara Ramey, and Allison Maurer – are ready to assist and instruct the players in all the elements of a strength training program. We want them to be the very best they can be.

Jeff Pitman joined the Colorado staff this spring as Strength Coach. For the past seven years he had been Strength Coach at Boise State and previously coached at both Montana State and San Jose State. He is a 1993 graduate of Boise State.





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