This program will all be completed before the beginning of Spring Ball. We want to use this time to regenerate after a long season as well as build work capacity and strength. The layout of the program will be a 4 day split with hi/low hi/low emphasis days. In meso 1 we want to reinforce good movement patterns with GPP work and technical drills on the field in warmups. We will reinforce movement patterns, and begin building strength with eccentric work on front squats and bench press. In meso 2 we will be working on base strength in the weightroom and return to some tempo work and a little bit of acceleration work on the field. In meso 3 we will hit our peak intensity in a strength phase at the beginning of the mesocycle and then finish the cycle with high intensity power and pull movements while we are doing fourth quarter program on the field. Throughout this cycle we want to develop necessary hypertrophy, strength, and work capacity to be able to develop power later on in the summer. The main way we will accomplish our goals of becoming powerful is by obtaining cross sectional area of the muscle through squats/bench. Once we have developed the cross sectional area we will be physiologically able to develop more strength and strength is the basis of creating more power outputs. We will also be performing Olympic weightlifting movements, which are going to be pivotal to rate of force development and rate coding of motor units in an attempt to create the most power. The program will also include plyometrics in the weightroom which will also increase the ability to synchronize motor unit firing which is an important aspect for it to be able to transfer to sport since sports are all about coordination and neuromuscular control that needs to be transferred to their specific position and skills necessary to perform in a football game. “Coordination at a high degree of mastery is the most performance limiting factor in almost all explosive sports” –Frans Bosch. Plyos create a link between strength and speed of movement. Through the development of the muscles csa and power outputs we must make sure we are developing type 2 muscle fibers because they serve as a foundation for higher power outputs. When muscle architecture changes, sarcomeres are either lined up in parallel or in series and the type of contraction used during resistance training can play a large role in how the CSA of the muscle is developed. Sarcomeres that are lined up in parallel result in significant increases in force generating capacity. This will be mainly provided by squatting exercises where there is a slower use of the eccentric and concentric muscle actions. Then there are sarcomeres that are lined up in series, which will result in an increase in the velocity of shortening during the contraction. These sarcomeres in series will be obtained by exercises that are in a high use of the SSC which include plyos or drop jumps. If we periodize correctly we will be able to use all methods of training in attempt to optimize the skeletal muscle size and architecture to optimize the ability to produce peak power. If I was creating a program for the developmental athlete I would focus mainly on developing the csa of muscle through hypertrophic training and then developing them a solid strength base before moving into the plyometrics because the power outputs of plyometrics cannot be fully realized unless there is a solid basis of strength. In studies by Cormie, Minetti, and Zamparo, it was shown that stronger individuals may better adapt to explosive type training once they have developed the basis of strength. In other studies, it was shown that over the course of a training program, weaker individuals were not able to handle the amount of progressed work and showed signs of decreases in RFD and explosiveness, which is another reason we need to make sure our athletes are strong. However, sports are plyometric based so there won’t be a complete lack of plyometrics in training, just a focus on building the strength base at this time. The athlete will need to be able to absorb the eccentric load and quickly transfer this load through the amortization phase into a powerful concentric movement. I want to progress from less elastic SSC movement like the squat jump into fast SSC jumps that are more elastic like a depth jump (<0.25s) when I am programming my potentiation jumps. Potentiation efforts are good to use in developing athletes because squatting heavy will allow us to recruit maximal motor units and then we pair this with an explosive jump for neural potentiation because we already have motor units firing at the highest level and we will be able to recruit them maximally in our jump and also rate code them quickly that will transfer to overall explosive power in those movements.
In the first meso I want the field work to just be the warmup and the technical SID drills to get the athletes back into the correct technique and rhythmic development that they have lost over the season. “Rhythm is the basis of movement” as said by Bondarchuk and the SIDS are the low intensity work we need in this time period to develop that. This base warmup technique work is also going to be good for a transfer of training based on the specificity of the movement to actual running, and these technique warmup SIDs will be used in the warmup throughout the entire program. In Transfer of Training in Sports, Bondarchuk states, “In the process of learning and mastering technique, it is necessary to pay attention so that the exercises used repeat precisely the same consecutiveness of including the athlete’s separate body links that correspond to execution of the competitive movement.” This is why the warmup is such an important and valuable part of the training program. I want them to be barefoot because we receive all signals in ground based sports through our feet and I want to go back to the basics of getting the athletes feet to properly feel how force is moving through our body from the ground. The warmups are based on the emphasis of the day with Monday being accel work and Thursday being top end speed drills. Tuesday and Thursday I have as both lateral days, because they are going to be doing a good amount of lateral work in the fourth quarter program so I figured the warmup would be a good time to drill this. This will move into some accel work on high days (Monday/Thursday) and tempo work on low days (Tuesday/Friday) in meso 2. Finally we will move into the 4th quarter program in meso 3 before spring ball. I put in a snapdown into vertical jump progression in the warmup so we are developing the brakes before we are putting on the gas. We have to be able to absorb eccentric force and develop that muscle quality before we can realize our true potential of the stretch shortening cycle.
This takes us into the weightroom. The weightroom movements are also based on transfer because it is shown that the Olympic lifts, squat, and pressing are going to have a very high correlation to strength and power development out of a stance, driving through another human, and a basis in acceleration which are what the physical side of football is about. I did bilateral squats on high days and Single leg work on low days because you can load a bilateral squat moreso than a SL squat which makes it a higher intensity IMO. I tried to do all my strict upper body pressing on the low days because I consider those to be a local muscle system lower intensity work than the squat. As for the Olympic lifts I did power cleans on the high days because I think they are higher intensity than complex 1 which is lighter weight and used for work capacity and also more of a global movement than the sumo deadlift also making it a higher intensity especially on the heavier day 3. The movements of the day are also based on the movement focus of the day on the field which will come more into fruition in the summer months as well. The volume is the same in meso 1 and 2 because I did eccentrics with front squat and bench in meso 1. I wanted to keep the same reps and the percentages will be the same as well, but the weight will still be heavier because in meso 1 I was going off of 91% of the max since I was doing 6 second eccentrics. I took off 9% because Poliquin says to take off 3 percent for every second over 3 seconds. For all the other exercises I continue to go up in intensity and in The System it says you should either go up in volume or intensity but be careful going up in both, so I chose to go up in intensity because I want to go heavy heavy in meso 3 so I dropped the monthly volume to 750. Week 9 I go heaviest I want to get the heaviest work out of the way before we start 4th quarter program the next 3 weeks. I will then drop down the squatting weight and stay relatively heavy with power movements and pulls from the floor. This is because I don’t want to load any eccentric movement of a squat too much to keep the CNS from being fatigued, the legs fresh, and the low back healthy, but we can still get some heavy work with Olympic lifts and pulls, since they are mainly concentric, and we can stay heavy on bench. I wanted to do a lot of posterior chain work in the spring to make sure the hamstrings are in good enough shape to handle the high velocity running that will take place in the summer and to build that backside which is where we are going to get a lot of power from. The glute ham raise will turn into an explosive band good morning and the clean pull + RDL will just become a clean pull based on wanted the strict concentric power in the later meso.
Overall, the spring is used to get build the athletes back into the correct technique, work capacity, and strength base that will allow them to be productive when spring ball starts, and also laying the foundation for the power and speed work to come in the summer months. We want all the selected exercises and the way we develop the intensities and volume in each micro, meso, and macro cycle to have a positive transfer of training to some extent to the competitive event of playing football.
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