Stronger Than
How to Get Faster and Stronger for Football - Recovery Methods
How to Get Stronger and Faster for Football: Recover Methods to Get Stronger and Faster Quicker
Getting stronger and faster for football isn't an overly complex issue...but it is hard. And, if you train hard, you better be prepared to recover harder. This is one of those long lost keys of football strength & speed training…you must recover. So, make sure you're working hard and follow these "Steps to Super Recovery to Get Faster and Stronger for Football…
1. Plan Your Recovery
I've been asked to write football workouts for people maybe 1,340,831 times. How many times have I been asked about recovery?
Zero.
Yet, it's just as important as the training end. I've often thought about putting together a whole recovery manual…know why I don't? It would have 0 sales. People just don't wanna hear about it…till they experience the results of a properly planned recovery program.
In his excellent book, "The New Toughness Training for Sports," James Loehr writes extensively about the relationship between mental and physical toughening and recovery.
Some take home points from the book are:
√ Without Recovery, there is only stress…a living organism can only take so much stress before it shuts down…or dies
√ Recovery occurs at three levels – physical, mental, emotional. All three need to be replenished or you will not perform at peak levels.
√ You must "Balance Your Energy Checkbook" – Stress (training) is spending money, recovery is making a deposit. Spend more than you put in and you're broke.
Remember, every time you lift weights, run, sprint, or practice you're under stress. When you're in class, you're under stress (some more than others, I'm sure)…fight with your girlfriend? Stress. Parents givin you hell? Stress. Coach being extra critical lately? Stress. It all adds up quickly. So, you need to make recovery a huge part of your football training program.
Once you understand how to recover, you need to plan how to use your methods. #'S 2 – 9 are all actual recovery methods, and in #10 I'll show you how to structure a plan.
2. Sleep More to Get Stronger
It still makes me laugh that guys will easily drop $100+ on some BS supplement then sleep for 3hrs a night. I know, its cool to stay out till 3am and then get up early and act all F'd up. Super cool. …until it catches up with you and you find that you all the sudden suck.
It only takes one night of sleep deprivation — getting less than six hour of uninterrupted sleep — before central Nervous System performance begins to decline. But how much sleep do you actually need?
The standard suggestion is seven to eight uninterrupted hours. However, if you've been chronically sleep deprived, you may need to spend several weeks "paying down" your sleep debt.
The "easiest" and most obvious way to do this is to simply sleep more! Add an hour at night and grab a nap as often as possible (even a 15-minute power nap helps). Eventually, you'll be back to "normal" and you can go back to the suggested seven to eight hours per night.
Funny, I often talk about how everyone in High School used to ask what wonder supplement I was taking…what special exercise I was doing…truth is, I became a better player and set records in the weightroom because I went to sleep by 9pm, especially during the season. When it came time to put the extreme work in in the weight room, guess who was ready while others would bitch about how tired they are…
If you lack sleep, you won't recover from your training properly. If you don't recover, you'll be sore, tired, and unable to perform. Not a good combo.
Here's how to get better sleep:
• When you're first getting used to afternoon naps, find a good meditation CD, sleep tape, or white noise machine. They're incredibly helpful.
• Keep your bedroom as dark as possible. Cover LCD screens (on alarm clocks, the television, the DVD player, etc.), and put heavy "blackout" drapes over any windows.
• Wear a sleep mask, even after you darken the room. As someone who always had trouble falling asleep, I found wearing a sleep mask helped tremendously.
Try melatonin, ZMA, or even the classic warm milk and turkey cocktail (but not blended together). The key is to find something that works for you.
3. Get Flexible to Get Faster for Football
When you lift, you get sore. You get stronger, but, if you ignore flexibility, you'll also get tight and slow.
Flexibility training (stretching) may not be exciting, but, next to sleep, it's one of the most effective (and free!) roads to recovery.
Hip Flexors – If they're tight, forget getting faster for football!
The best description for how flexibility effects your football speed came from Kettlebell Master Pavel…he refers to tight hip flexors (an epidemic among football players) "breaks" because of their ability to inhibit speed! Most of us need all the help we can get when it comes to getting faster for football…don't let something as easily fixable as tight hip flexors ruin your chances of being fast!
Same goes for hamstrings, calfs, quads, glutes…and just about every other muscle. But, while we all love to talk about training the muscles of the posterior chain to get more explosive and faster…most neglect to think about the flexibility angle for those same muscles. They are responsible for football speed so you must not only train them in the weight room but take care of them in the stretching room as well.
There's been a huge debate over stretching pre-workout. Passive stretching (holding a stretch for a set amount of time) isn't the best idea pre-lift, but, that doesn't mean it should NEVER be done. You can stretch post workout, on your days off, or a little throughout the day.
Take a Yoga class if you find stretching too boring on it's own. Shoot for 20-minutes 3x's per week in the beginning. When you've reached the desired level of flexibility, you can do two sessions per week to maintain.
If you take nothing else away from this article, know that increasing flexibility can increase your football speed. Simply, easy, free.
4. Foam Rolling
I'll be honest here…when I first heard about Foam Rollers, I thought they were complete BS. They just screamed gimmick – the type of thing 2-bit personal trainers use on their clients to mask lack of results (like Bosu Balls, Swiss Balls…these guys are obsessed with balls).
Then, in the depths of feeling like crap, I broke down and paid the grand total of 10-bucks and got my first foam roller.
Foam Rollers – Excellent Way to Recover from Your Football Workouts
This is goin back a few years but, honestly, I thought I was done playing football and would be reduced to one of those big Powerlifters who can't move other than to Squat or Bench. I had let my flexibility lag and i was tight and sore constantly…a condition we refer to as being "Jacked Up."
So, I started stretching a lot and that helped but it still wasn't getting the job completely done…so, I bit the bullet and bought a foam roller. Well, after a week of everyday rolling I felt like I reversed about 10-years of damage! Two weeks later I was back on the field and moving fluidly like the old days…it really was that dramatic.
Foam rollers literally are a long cylinder of hard foam. You place it under your muscles and roll back and forth. It's like getting a lite massage. Now, if you're very tight, the first few times will hurt like hell. In fact, even now it still hurts my ever-tight calfs. There are tons of guides on how to use foam rollers and most come with instrustions but, you should target:
- The Back
- Hamstrings
- Quads
- IT Bands (the side of your thigh – this will hurt at first)
- Calfs/Shins
- Triceps, Biceps, Shoulders, Pecs
- Hip Flexors (again, will be painful at first)
After a week or so of daily foam rolling, you can cut back to 2x's per week. A Full Body roll should take 10 – 15 minutes. Remember, it might hurt the first few times, but, its worth the initial pain. You will not only get more flexible, but, you'll also recover faster, enabling you to actually do more work and gain more strength and muscle.
5. Epsom Salt Baths
I know it seems odd to have a section about salt baths on a site about football training, but, make no mistake, these are as useful as any supplement you can buy…and much cheaper.
This is no recent fad. My grandmother told me about the benefits of Epsom salt baths years ago, when I first picked up a weight. She didn't know why they worked, she just knew they did. It turns out that the high magnesium content in Epsom salt baths facilitates the removal of acids through the skin. Some minerals, like magnesium, are absorbed about 65% better through the skin, so the bath is ideal.
Add about two cups to your bath water, along with a handful of sea salt. Places like Bath and Bodyworks will have about a thousand bath time/relaxation powders to choose from. You can also look for a "bath Tea Bag," no joke. It looks like a giant tea bag you put in the bathtub.
As we talked about in "The Top Supplements for Football Training" article, magnesium is huge for football players. Turns out most of us are woefully deficient in magnesium (and zinc). By getting high quality magnesium into the system, you will recover faster. Plus, it's an excellent sleep aid, helping you achieve a much deeper sleep…again, helping you recover faster.
During the off season we have to be ready to go almost every day…lifting weights, conditioning, working skills…then comes the pre-season…we not only have to keep getting stronger and f aster, but we have to prove ourselves on the football field. If you're sore, you can't perform at your highest level. The ability to cut down soreness, recover faster, and actually be able to use all of your new found strength and speed on the field is key to your success.
Go with 1 – 2 Epsom Salt Baths per week. Any more and they lose effectiveness. Save them for after your hardest training sessions.
That's it for Part I. In Part II we'll cover how to eat for maximum recovery, post-workout nutrition, De-loading and how to plan your recovery to ensure you are continually getting bigger, stronger and faster for football.
About the Author
To get Free Football Training Reports "7 Steps to Insane Game Speed," and "14 Must-Do Exercises to Increase Football Speed," please visit Football Strength Workouts and Get Stronger for Football
Amy Winehouse - Glastonbury 2004 - Stronger Than Me
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