College Football Workouts
Whether an athlete’s reason for joining a college team is the desire to become a top NFL recruit, or simply as a means to pursue some other career goal, every collegiate football player must work hard to achieve and maintain top physical position. Unlike professional athletes, who get paid to play, and are generally expected to do little besides perform on game day, a college athlete is expected to work out, practice, play, and carry a full academic load throughout the season.
Because collegiate athletes have mandatory commitments in addition to sport, college football workouts—whether in the gym or on the field—must make efficient use of available time. Highly structured resistance training regimens are designed to maximize size and strength gains in accordance with the demands of each athlete’s field position. For all college football players, gains in muscle mass need to be balanced with exercises designed to maintain and increase power, speed, and agility.
Those players that perform the best on the college football field are, more often than not, those who display outstanding athletic ability away from the game. ESPN’s 2008 list of “College Football’s Top Workout Warriors” includes a number of athletes who can run an electronically timed 40 in under 5 seconds. These same players have vertical jump abilities greater than 40 inches, and can clean and bench press heavier weights than the majority of the competition. Anyone skeptical that size and explosive speed are athletic virtues that go hand in hand need look no further than the best collegiate football players to be proven wrong.
The main goal for athletes throughout their college careers is to get up to speed (and size) with the competition, while maintaining and improving upon the speed, power and agility that made them stand out as high school players. For a college freshman trying to make a smooth transition to a much bigger game, putting in sufficient time in the weight room is probably the most important element of his off-season and pre-season training routines.
College football workouts today include much more than heavy lifting, conditioning, and working through plays. Exercises designed to increase an athlete’s overall power by combining strength with quickness, produce athletes better equipped to perform on the field than traditional methods alone.
Tags: college athlete, college football workouts, conditioning, Football Workouts, heavy lifting, NFL recruit, physical power, strength, weights room