Training Stuff You Never Even Knew Existed

It's 3/4 time in the Bombers / Demons game and it's 102 points so there could simply not be a better time to put together a little blog post.

How do most blokes train in the gym?

Go in, lift some weights for 3 sets of 8 - 12 then go home.

Not much thought goes into it. It's been done like that for years so it continues to stay that way. What stands out more than anything is that this style of training will rarely give you much in the way of actually making you a better footballer. You might get stronger in the gym buy when did you ever do a 100kg bench press in a football game? You might leg press (yes, leg press actually made it into my blog...it only took 3 and a bit years!) 200kgs but when did you ever do something resembling that on a Saturday? Never I hope.

Before I go on just be sure that I am not one of those people that thinks genetics is everything otherwise this blog would be useless but AFL players have something genetically over most of us. They are either bigger, faster, stronger or much better natural runners then everyone else. So for them, a lot of their gym training is based around just keeping the body strong, not to actually shatter powerlifting records, and to build enough armor to combat collision after collision as well as to ward off non contact and contact injuries.

Take someone like Lewis Jetta for example. He is freakishly quick so I assume a lot of his training is to build his endurance and strength. That is piss easy to program for and it's basically all up to him to how far and how hard he attacks this to become the complete player.

Most of us in amateur and local football leagues need to train differently then most blokes described above. We might not be blessed with blistering speed or natural body strength so we can't train the way someone who does have these traits and expect to be just like them.

Over the coming weeks I'll list some things that I have trained in my own training that you probably didn't even know existed, why to train them and how to do train them.

Things like force absorption, eccentric overload, forefoot, breathing patterns, core training, speed strength, strength speed, contrast methods, sprinting and anything else I can think of that I haven't really covered yet on this blog.

As always if there's something you've heard about or seen that you'd like to know more about then let me know via the Facebook page and I'll put something up on that too.