7 Steps to Dominance - Building Dominant Linemen in the Weight Room and On the Field

Too many football strength programs train their linemen the same way as everyone else on the team. If your offensive and defensive linemen are doing the exact same workouts as your quarterbacks, they’ll never reach their full potential.

First, what makes a good lineman?

Qualities of the Ideal Lineman:

•  Extremely strong
•  Quick
•  Explosive
•  Fast for 5-yards
•  A master technician
•  The best conditioned player on the field
•  A mental attitude that is mean and nasty

All but one of these can be trained in the weight room. But, you have to take into consideration that, at the high school and college level, linemen need special attention. If they’re over-fat and big, they’ll have a longer-than-normal recovery time which is not good. Once you lean them out a bit, their work capacity will be higher than most of the other players on the team. They can handle more work and will generally progress faster.

So, how do you take the average freshman or sophomore and turn them into the ideal lineman? That is, big, strong and fast with great feet and superior technique? Follow these 7 steps and you’ll soon have a team full of dominating linemen on both sides of the ball. 

1. Build Maximum Strength, Year-Round

This may be the most missed point in all of football training. You have to build a linemen’s maximum strength. That’s the amount of force he can generate at once, not what he can do for 10-reps. Too many strength coaches think that having their guys start at 10s and work their way down is a great way to improve strength. This is not so.

What a player can do for 8 reps is 100% determined by what his max single is, but never the other way around. Maximum strength is responsible for all other facets of athleticism – speed, explosiveness, agility, starting strength, etc.

So, you need to have your offensive and defensive linemen doing heavy, low-rep sets, even as low as singles (when they’re ready for that). They need to be working at over 85% of their max for sets of 3 and below. This forms the base of their workouts.

Lead off a workout with a heavy movement like most of those listed below, for heavy, low reps. Then you can go onto more moderate reps and sets on assistance exercises.

The Top 6 Strength Exercises for Linemen are:

Box Front Squats

•  Excellent for learning to bring explosive power through the hips and legs in a very football-specific way.

•  Great for building overall leg strength and explosiveness.

Deadlifts

•  Deadlifts are the best football exercise, period.

•   For linemen, they are a godsend. They build tremendous starting strength (needed to fire off the ball) and overall power throughout the legs, hips and back.

Dumbbell Inclines

•  These usually take a back seat to bench and dumbbell bench, but, the DB Incline is by far the better exercise for offensive and defensive linemen.

•   Teach your linemen to keep their elbows tucked close to the body, palms facing each other and explode off the chest.
•   The pressing arc is much closer to what we do on the field than the bench. Plus, it will work the delts and triceps even harder.

Snatch Grip Deadlifts

•  One of the best speed building exercises around.

•  The lower position forces the hamstrings and glutes to work harder and teaches linemen to explode out of a low hip position.
Lateral Lunges

•   This is an assistance exercise, but that doesn’t make it unimportant.

•  Lateral strength is ignored by about 90% of the football strength
workouts.

•  Linemen move laterally quite a bit so build the muscles responsible for moving sideways.

Sandbag Clean and Push

•  What an excellent exercise for getting your O and D linemen to be strong in odd positions and from awkward angles

•  This is a great exercise for fixing strength gaps ( covered later).

•  Clean the sandbag and instead of pressing it, bring the hips and actually push it forward.

2. Build Quickness and Mobility

No matter how smash-mouth your team is, no one wants fat, slow linemen. Your guys need to be able to move. And, with the increase in speed and athleticism of defensive linemen, the offensive guys need to keep pace with them.

The Top 4 Mobility Exercises are:

•  Medicine Ball Side-to-Side Passes

•  Medicine Ball Chops

•  Game Simulated Conditioning (this is covered in #7)

•  Modified Dot Drill

The mobility exercises are best thought of as “athletic enhancement” exercises. Basically, they are there to make your linemen better overall athletes by making them move their bodies and be strong in multiple planes of motion.

Add these to the end of the workouts to get your guys moving in different ways. The side-to-side medicine ball passes will really improve the coordination between their upper body, hips and legs. 
 
3. Develop Upper Body Quickness and Explosiveness

Do you have a O or D lineman who seems to be strong in the legs and hips but can’t deliver a blow to save his life? Then, you might also have guys with slow upper bodies. This usually happens when football players concentrate too much on the bench, lifting slowly because they’re constantly trying to max out (maxing out and training with singles at 90% are two different worlds).

Luckily, this is a fairly easy problem to fix. Just have your linemen:

•  Always apply maximum force to the bar, no matter how heavy it is. The intent to move the bar quickly is what builds speed and explosiveness.

•  Add some pure speed movements for the upper body like Dumbbell Jerks, Plyometric Push-ups, Push Presses, Rapid Band Press, etc.

•  Have them lead off their upper body days with these quick movements, then go heavy while applying maximum force. In no time your guys will have fast, violent hands.

4. Build Lateral Strength

Linemen shuffle, scrape, move laterally and on angles, yet most strength programs have them go up and down and maybe forward and that’s it. Won’t the muscles responsible for lateral speed get worked with regular old squats, deads, cleans, etc?

While the hips and legs as a whole are worked, these exercises tend to leave gaps in strength, especially in the inner thighs and hip abduction and adduction. Just ask your guys how they feel the day after their first time doing Lateral Lunge. They’ll let you know some muscles weren’t getting worked!

Simply adding Lateral Lunges, 45-Degree Angle Lunges and Asterisks Lunges to your linemen’s workouts will work wonders for their lateral speed. And, if they’re really lacking, have them get a band or cable and do standing abductions and adductions. A few sets of 10, once a week, will make sure these muscles stay strong and injury free. 

5. Improve Technique Year-Round

Never miss an opportunity to have your big men improve skill and technique. You can build technique drills into their weight room workouts, conditioning drills, and speed workouts. Just starting every single workout with taking their steps (Bird-Dogs for O-linemen) or firing off the ball and working hand play for D-linemen will cause absolutely dramatic improvements.

Take the average O-lineman, have him do his steps every session, and on off days, at home. In the course of one off season he’ll have taken several thousand perfect steps (doing them perfectly is crucial). Obviously, working on a skill a thousand plus times is going to make him much better so begin to put these into their workouts.

They can warm up with blocking shields, firing off the ball, hand play, pass blocking drills, etc. It’ll only add 5 minutes or so to their workouts but the effect is amazing and long term. 

6. Cure “Strength Gaps”

Using weight is the #1 way to build your strength for football. Barbells, Dumbbells and Kettlebells are the foundation of any good football training program. But, they do have some limitations when used alone. Yes, they build tremendous strength, but they can leave small gaps between weight room strength and football strength. We call this ‘strength leakage or strength gaps.’

We’ve all seen the guy who can bench 400 lbs. but can’t block the sun. This guy might even be a decent athlete, so why can’t he dominate on the field? He allowed himself to develop gaps in his strength so that he can’t take what he gained in the weight room and apply it to the field. He literally leaks strength from his joints or at his waist, and can’t apply his power to an opponent.

By using sandbags, especially when doing cleans, c and j’s, or any kind of squatting, you are teaching the body to transfer power from the ground up, through the hips and mid-section. You also train the stabilizers, tendons and ligaments because the bag changes shape on almost every rep. There’s no way to settle into a groove when lifting a sandbag. This is how they prevent leakage – they train you in odd positions and hit those stabilizers in a way that weights alone cannot do.

To ensure that you transfer your weight room gains to the field, sandbags are essential. Work those stabilizers in odd positions from varying angles with an implement that never stays the same shape twice. Sounds like a recipe for football success.

Use sandbags for exercises like:

•  Clean and jerk        •  Clean and push
•  Bear hug and carry    •  Shoulder and carry
•  Shoulder and squat    •  Bear hug and duck walk
•  Shoulder and lateral lunge

6. Build Real-World Conditioning and Toughness

If you have your linemen jogging, stop it now. They have no business jogging as a form of conditioning or as a warm up. This is a sport of power and explosiveness If you want to coach joggers, I suggest you apply for a job with the cross country team.

Seriously though, linemen are too big for that kind of running and it’s slow-twitch fiber running. Your linemen (and all your players) should be working on the fast-twitch end. Plus, conditioning should both mirror what you do in a game and build mental toughness.

On the mental toughness end, any sort of sled pushing/pulling mixed with short sprints and/or strongman type exercises like Tire Flips, Farmers Walks or Medleys are all recommended. For football-specific conditioning, use game-simulated conditioning. Basically, you have your linemen line up in a good stance, take the steps they would in a game, then sprint in ways that are similar to what they do on the football field.

For example, a defensive linemen’s conditioning might look like this -

Set 1

•  Base step right and 5-yard sprint.

•  Step right, 5-yard shuffle and 10-yard sprint.

•  Pass rush up field 3-yards, turn and sprint 15-yards on an angle (as if pursuing a QB who broke contain and started to run).

•  Fire out, drop step and 20-yard sprint (pursuing a draw or screen).

•  Pull right and sprint 5-yards (following a pulling guard to the ball).

•  Fire out and 30-yd sprint.

•  Fire out, shuffle 10 yards left, 5-yard spring forward.

•  Fire out, fight across 3-yards (short shuffle), turn and sprint 15-yards down the line

•  Pass rush upfield 3-yards, turn and sprint 10-yds left.

•  Step and backpedal 5-yards, turn and spring 40-yards on an angle (dropping into coverage and perusing the ball).

About the Author: Steven Morris is a football strength coach in the Philadelphia and South Jersey areas and owner of Explosive Football Training. He can be reached at his email smorri88@gmail.com or web site (www.FootballStrengthWorkouts.com).