AFM RSS Feed Follow Us on Twitter       
AMERICAN FOOTBALL MONTHLY THE #1 RESOURCE FOR FOOTBALL COACHES
ABOUT |  CONTACT |  ADVERTISE |  HELP  



   User Name    Password 
      Password Help





Article Categories


AFM Magazine

AFM Magazine


Maximizing Spring Agility Drills

by: Jim Kielbaso
Director of the Total Performance Training Centers (MI)
© More from this issue

Click for Printer Friendly Version          

If every athlete used the spring to improve their speed and strength, summer conditioning would be really simple. Everyone would be faster and stronger than before, and with a couple of  weeks of basic conditioning, you’d be ready for football practice. Unfortunately, things never seem to turn out that way, so you need to have an effective plan in place.

It’s important to analyze the metabolic requirements of football and design conditioning routines that train the proper energy systems, movement patterns, and “rhythm” of the game. In order to do that, let’s take a look at the way energy is created in the body and how this impacts football conditioning.
 
Understanding Energy Systems

    The three main ways the body produces energy for physical activity are:
 
• ATP-PC System – ATP is basically energy (the molecule Adenosine Triphosphate) which is the substance that makes our bodies work, and, phosphocreatine (PC) which helps make ATP. This is obviously an abridged version of a complex biochemical issue, but it’s really about all we need to understand for our purposes. There is a small amount of ATP stored in our muscles that allows us to make sudden, explosive movements without having to wait for the necessary ATP to be made. Intense activities under about 10 seconds, like a football play, utilize the ATP-PC system to satisfy the energy demands.

A short sprint like a 40-yard dash uses the ATP-PC system to supply the energy to run the race. You can only run at that intense pace for a short distance before you are forced to slow down. You have to slow down because your body cannot produce energy fast enough to keep up with the demands being placed upon it. There is only a small amount of ATP stored in the body at any given time, so when it has been used up, your body has to manufacture more. We cannot manufacture ATP fast enough to supply the muscles with enough energy to keep up an extremely intense pace for very long, which is why we’re forced to slow down. When you stop to rest, your body can regenerate the ATP you just used so you can perform another burst of energy.

Football relies heavily on the ATP-PC system. There is an intense bout of exercise that uses a tremendous amount of energy (ATP), with breaks between plays that allow athletes to replenish their ATP.
 
• Anaerobic Energy System – When you perform a fairly intense activity for longer than approximately 10 seconds, your body has time to start making ATP through the anaerobic energy system. The anaerobic system can produce energy very quickly and is able to maintain this production longer than the ATP-PC system. Most physiologists agree that the anaerobic system is capable of being the prime energy source for 2-3 minutes, but most people will not utilize the system that long before a rest is needed. The anaerobic system is typically used in conjunction with the ATP-PC and aerobic systems to produce energy.

Football players use this system heavily between plays to replenish ATP supplies. With training, significant improvements can be made in the efficiency of the anaerobic system in just 3-6 weeks. These improvements are very useful to performance on the field because this helps your athletes recover quickly between plays and maintain energy throughout a game.
 
• Aerobic Energy System – The aerobic system is the most efficient, but slowest, way to produce energy. This system will produce a nearly unlimited supply of energy, but it can’t keep pace with the high demands of an intense burst. In football, the aerobic system will be used extensively, but never exclusively. It is the system that will help to replenish ATP between plays when the body is nearly at rest and there is plenty of time before another burst of energy is needed.

Whenever the heart rate is elevated for an extended period of time, the aerobic system is contributing. Football is obviously full of short plays that utilize the ATP-PC and anaerobic systems. The aerobic system is still contributing what it can and will take over as the primary energy producer when an athlete is on the sideline. In fact, for many athletes, the heart rate will be elevated for the entire game, placing a large demand on aerobic metabolism.

Now that we understand how energy is used and produced in football, let’s take a practical look at how to train these systems.
 
Agility Drills for Conditioning
 
Using agility drills for conditioning is an excellent way to prepare for both the metabolic and neuromuscular demands of a sport. Straight-ahead running on a track will effectively train the metabolic pathways used in football, but the movement patterns are severely neglected in this type of “track” workout. Football players are required to perform numerous starts, stops, and changes of direction during competition, so using drills that closely mimic both the metabolic and movement demands of the sport will elicit the greatest positive transfer of training to performance.

When programming for conditioning, we need to understand the work to rest ratio and how it affects the different energy systems. A 1:2 work-to-rest ratio means that the rest interval should be twice the length of the work interval. So, if the drill lasts 10 seconds, the rest period between reps should be 20 seconds.

Most experts agree that training the anaerobic energy system requires somewhere between a 1:2 and 1:5 work-to-rest ratio, and training the ATP-PC system should be done with even greater work to rest ratios.

During an actual training session, you’ll notice that there is quite a difference between 1:2 and 1:6, so it’s important to understand the differences. The shorter the rest period, the more metabolically challenging the training will be. This is good if metabolic conditioning is the only goal of training. The flip side of this low work-to-rest ratio is that the intensity and quality of movement will quickly decrease due to fatigue. A higher work-to-rest ratio, such as 1:5 or above, will allow the quality of movement and intensity to remain high during the workout. There is not a better or worse work-to-rest ratio, but the training goal must be clear when choosing rest intervals.

In team training situations, agility drills can be set up with specific work-to-rest ratios in mind. Let’s say you’re working with 60 athletes and your goal is to train the ATP-PC system. You can choose a basic 3-cone drill and set up 10 stations with 6 athletes per station. To make this happen efficiently, break the team up into 10 groups of 6 players and you set up the 3-cone drill for each group (so there are ten, 3-cone drills laid out on the field, one for each group). The first player in each line runs through the pattern twice, goes to the end of the line, and the next player steps forward for his turn. The coach gives the command, the next athlete takes his turn, and this pattern continues. In this case, each athlete will rest while the other five run through the drill, effectively creating a 1:5 work to rest ratio. If the goal is to train the anaerobic energy system for sport-specific fitness and a 1:2 ratio is preferred, simply create 20 groups of three players (Diagrams 1 and 2).



Diagram 2:  4-Cone Drills

When there are “left-over” athletes (i.e., only two in one of the groups), instruct that group to leave an empty space between them so everyone performs the same amount of work. If you’d prefer to keep the groups the same, simply pause for a period of time between athletes before giving the signal to go. This will lengthen the rest interval without having to change groups.

This is a simple concept that will help you set up drills to quickly change the metabolic demand of the training.

I also like to change the distances on the cone drills for different positions. For example, on the drill shown in Diagram 1, change the distance between the bottom and top cones for different position groups. Set it at five yards for linemen, 10 yards for big skill players and 15 yards for skill players. This makes the conditioning more position-specific without having to change the entire drill. 
 
About the Author: Jim Kielbaso is the Director of the Total Performance Training Centers in Michigan and the author of “Ultimate Speed & Agility”. He is a former college strength coach and a co-creator of the free football training resource FootballTrainingPros.com and the high school strength and conditioning program, Maximum Football Training.






NEW BOOK!

AFM Videos Streaming Memberships Now Available Digital Download - 304 Pages of Football Forms for the Winning Coach



















HOME
MAGAZINE
SUBSCRIBE ONLINE COLUMNISTS COACHING VIDEOS


Copyright 2024, AmericanFootballMonthly.com
All Rights Reserved