Professional Football Workouts

Professional football is one of the most physically demanding sports in the world. It is filled with some of the strongest, fastest and most athletic players in the entire world. The only chance players have to compete and stay productive is to do the most demanding workouts. Professional football workouts require complete dedication and often are just as grueling as a professional football game. The workouts include weightlifting, core training and speed, agility and conditioning training.

  1. Weightlifting

    • Professional football weightlifting workouts are focused mostly on building strength and lean muscle mass. The game has become so athletic that it is not longer functional for players to just bulk up. Rather, the weight lifting often is done through sets of extremes reps and variance of weights. For example, the simple squat has been replaced by using a leg press machine that focuses the players leg muscles on exploding the weight. One day a player may do a lower weight and max out reps (doing the move until failure), to build muscle endurance and then a few days later, do 5 times as much weight, with the same intensity and again with max out reps. This will build muscle mass and strength.

    Core Training

    • Professional football requires players to have an extremely strong core. The primary object of the game is to stay on your feet and not be tackled and the stronger a player's core, the less likely they are to lose balance and be taken down easily. Typical core workouts for professional football include abdominal circuits, intense yoga and stability ball work. An abdominal circuit can include sit ups, crunches, oblique exercises, walking push ups (a person is in a push up position but walks on their hands and feet in unison forward and backward), bicycles (similar to a sit up, but the person moves his/her legs in the motion of riding a bike) and other ab exercises.

    Speed, Agility, Conditioning

    • Professional football players do a lot of training on the actual field. This training works on their speed, agility and their conditioning. Regular football wind sprints get turned into grueling interval sprinting drills that keep players a 70 percent running speed, only to sprint at max speed for a distance then return to 70 percent speed. For agility training, players will do cone drills but will also have to catch passes or call out signals that they see. Players will also do work on tires or ropes while also being timed to force them to push themselves. All of these drills are done with little down time so that the entire workout improves the player's conditioning.