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Week 5: Leg Day

 Hello readers, today is the 5th week of off season training and today I’m talking about our leg day lift. Leg day is always a highlight in our summer workouts. For anyone who plays football, strengthening the lower body is absolutely necessary for both power and performance. Today’s workout was all about pushing the limits and leaving everything in the weight room. For Coach Walker each workout is always about building explosive power, endurance, and stability, but today’s focus was on squats and hang cleans, two lifts that are integral to both our training and on-field performance. 

We started with hang cleans, which are one of the best exercises to build explosive power, especially for football players. This lift best reproduces the movements involved in sprinting, cutting, and tackling. With a decent grip on the bar, I explosively pulled it up from a dead hang, quickly snapping my hips to create explosive speed and momentum. The barbell flies up, and you catch it at shoulder height. Hang cleans activate nearly every muscle in your body, from your legs to your core, and they’re a big factor in helping develop fast-twitch muscle fibers. For football, we need that burst of speed, and hang cleans are a staple in achieving that.

But the real highlight of the workout came with squats. Squatting heavy is a key part of building leg strength, and for a football player, it creates greater power during explosive movements like sprinting and tackling. I took my squats up to 355 pounds today, and I’m proud to say I pushed through 11 clean reps. Each rep was a grind and made me really have to strain, but I made sure to stay in the correct form I was taught my whole life. The feeling of powering through that weight, rep after rep, was absolutely satisfying.

For those that are unfamiliar with what squatting 355 pounds for 11 reps feels like, it’s a challenge and really pushes you. The first few reps are always the hardest because your body is still adjusting to the heavy weight. But once you find that rhythm, it’s all about staying locked in and maintaining proper form. When you get to those higher reps, it’s all about mental toughness just as much as physical strength. I was constantly reminding myself to drive through the heels, to keep the core tight, and to make sure I wasn’t messing up my form. It’s easy to push yourself too hard on leg day, but injury prevention is key.

Squatting heavy has been a major part of my journey as a football player, especially being a defensive linemen. The more strength you have in your legs, the more powerful and explosive you can be and after hitting that 355 for 11, I felt a surge of confidence. This session was a big reminder that pushing yourself, whether it’s with hang cleans or squats, always pays off in the long run. Football requires strength, agility, and power, and leg day is where it all begins.

Comments

  1. Olive BarricklowFebruary 25, 2025 at 12:43 PM

    This was such an interesting post for me to read! I'm sort of familiar with football but reading about your weekly training schedule has been so cool. It's cool to get a view of the behind-the-scenes of your sport and all the work that goes into it even when "out of season." Keep up the incredible work!

    ReplyDelete

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