FOOTBALL TRAINING

I am a college football player and we have a new football coach. I guess that happens when you have a season as bad as we had. Now that the football season is over we start our off-season conditioning program.

The program is broken up into conditioning, speed and weight training. The new coach has us weight training five days a week for about an hour a session. We are doing a lot of what I consider bodybuilding exercises and we are doing 15 to 20 reps per set. I have been through high school and a previous college coach's program and their training didn't include high reps and a lot of exercises. I am no exercise guru, but this program has to be wrong.

I called a couple of my friends from other college football teams and their coach has them doing much lower reps. Don't low reps build strength? Our program is 12 weeks and the reps stay the same the whole way through.

I asked the coach about his program and he yelled at me. He told me to do my job and he will do his. I am worried because I am probably going to be drafted by the NFL and the scouts told me I need to be stronger to play for the pros. What do you think about this training?

Leonard Willis
Springdale, Arizona

I can honestly say your coach has no idea about what he is doing. You said your program is broken up into three parts: conditioning, speed and weight training. The weight training part of your program is supposed to help you build strength. Well, the way he has you guys training, the only thing that is going to happen to you is you'll all look better on the beach.

Common sense will tell you that you need to train with a lower rep count if you want to build strength and size. Take a look at the strongest powerlifters and bodybuilders. Do you think they built all of that strength and mass by doing 20 reps a set? Of course not. They all worked in the 6- to 12-rep range.

Man, I hope your coach knows more about football than weight lifting or you will be in for another losing season. I also don't understand why you are training five days a week with weights. You should be training three days a week with weights, anymore than that would be counterproductive.

You are doing too many other activities in your program. Your body cannot and will not recover from weight training five days a week, practicing football, running and conditioning drills. Overtraining will make your overall athletic performance suffer.

Basically, your coach is an idiot. You should weight train three days a week, no more. This spacing will give you enough time in between each workout for your body to fully recover.

Your body grows and gets stronger when it is in the recovery stage. If you have recovered sufficiently between each workout then you will he physically ready to give a 100 percent effort for each workout.

One more thing, you said your coach has you doing bodybuilding exercises. I hope he doesn't have you doing cable flyes and concentration curls. Doing these types of isolation exercises are a waste of time. You should be focusing on basic compound movements. In a nutshell, I mean an exercise that works more than one bodypart when you train it. Stay away from isolation exercises and stick to the basics.

Here is a program that I put together for you. The program is a three-day-a-week plan that will help you to increase your strength and to build explosive power. That is what you should be after- explosive power. When you are running full speed at someone and ready to tackle that person you better have the strength to stop him or you'll get run over.

Basics help build this explosive power. Let's take the bench press for example. When you have the bar down on your chest you have to explode and push that bar straight up. When you are blocking on that line and you have to push someone out of the way you are essentially performing the same motion. You will not build this power by doing cable flyes. Here is your program.