Tracy and Lisa's profileTracy and Lisa Get Stron...PhotosBlogListsMore  |  Tools Help |
|
|
January 21 Football fitnessFOOTBALL DRILLS TO HELP YOU MIX UP YOUR WORKOUT
(Or, the crazy crap Lisa and Tracy do on Sundays and Wednesdays in order to get in shape)
Yesterday morning was football practice number 4 since Lisa and I started the million pound match up. Conditioning is key to our team success and coach is always thinking up new conditioning activities to keep the feminine grousing to a minimum.
Yesterday, we did hillsprints and hill bear crawls. Now, I firmly believe in the importance of conditioning, but crawling uphill with my butt in the air and a 120lb receiver racing up my ass telling me to go faster is not my idea of motivation. If Coach wasn't 6'5" and 300lbs he might have been blowing that whistle every time he tooted.
Fortunately, the rest of the lineman types (women who are of sturdier body types) protested as well. Next time, we will split ourselves off so the "little" people we protect during the game can bear crawl up the hill like a bunch of striped-ass monkeys, while us bigger ladies lumber along in the fashion of actual bears. This drill is great cardio however with the added benefit of strenghthing shoulders, abs and arms. The hill sprints strenghten your thighs. If you can't bear crawl, crawling up the hill is still a good work-out.
After the bear crawling, we split up in our defensive units. Our defensive line coach loves to make us do a drull called the 4-point wave which is where we are on our hands and toes with our feet moving. When he points a direction, we roll that way and return to our 4 points. Now, it could look like 3 whales flopping helplessly on the sand, and early in the season is has resulted in a wreck or two, but the idea is to train your mind to think and your body to react quickly. It's good cardio, good for your abs and shoulders, but it also requires a sadistic friend willing to make you roll over 3-4 times in succession without laughing or otherwise.
At the end of practice we did 10 minutes of jog sprints. Now, if there is a group of you out there somewhere, or if you have a sadistic friend willing to sit and blow a whistle at irregular intervals, I highly suggest this type of exercise. We all line up on one side of a football field with the intent to run back and forth across the width. Coach blows one whistle for sprint and two for a jog (or vice versa-although by the end both my sprint and my jog are looking about the same-Lisa concurs). The whistle blows should be spaced erratically so the sprints produce both short burts of speed and long bursts of speed with recovery jog time in the middle. This one opens up my lungs and gives me a great idea of my progress. Every season I can gauge my fitness during this drill by what parts of me are burning, which parts are numb and which parts I left behind me on the last sprint.
A variation of this is the buddy run. We select a buddy and then line up on the sideline with the intent to run across the field. The first buddy takes off at the whistle. When buddy 1 reaches the opposite sideline, she raises her hand. Buddy #2 then runs across the field to buddy #1. When #2 reaches #1, #1 takes off back to the other sidline. This is a timed run, 5-10 minutes and you go back and forth this way until the final whistle blows or time runs out. This drill gives you good recovery time-unless you're like me and your buddy always seems to be the running back who can run a 40-yard dash in 5 seconds. But, I try to stay positive and hope that she appreciates the extra long recovery time she gets from me. :) TrackbacksThe trackback URL for this entry is: http://getstrongnow.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!DD0793F2FB3BE727!178.trak Weblogs that reference this entry
|
|
|
