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We here at MuscleDog have heard the demand for football-specific information, and we have answered. This series, entitled “Building a Football Foundation”, will give you workouts to …
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Great article! Takes me back to my high school days when I played football. I was a wide receiver and defensive end (small private school, we all played both ways) and we would have lifting sessions and do cleans and other Olympic lifts. Man I miss it.

Do you guys handle their nutrition as well? I’d be interested to see what you give to these big guys!

thanks Jester!

yeah, writing up these articles and working with my high school and college athletes takes me back to my playing days too. i was always more of a track guy than a football player but i really did love the days with the team.

we do do some nutrition work with the athletes as well. California Strength has several nutritionists, and a couple of them actually are on the site here. hopefully they’ll answer your question about what we feed the big fellas.

  
We do handle their nutrition (I do a lot of that work for California Strength).  
In general they eat A LOT. Usually 4-6 meals and thousands of calories. 
We take a very effective approach that is also very simple. We sit down with each one individually and with the coach and talk about goals (gain weight, lose weight, stay the same weight, etc…). Then based upon their goal we adjust their eating accordingly. But no calorie counting! Ever! We use simple portion sizes as that is really all that is needed to adjust their intake. 
After that we focus on hydration and eating between exercise sessions. We find with football players especially, that they don’t eat enough carbohydrate and water after training and will become “flat” by the end of a hard week of training. They need to be replenishing their glycogen (muscle carbohydrate) and water stores. So a lot of our time is spent working on individual strategies to time their carb and water intake.

i love that you guys don’t count calories! it’s so much more important to get people to understand things like portion size and meal timiing, and it makes it less discouraging not having to count calories and things like that. it becomes second nature to eat healthy if you integrate concepts like portion control and meal timing into your everday habits.

wow the reps are very low.  That would be weird for me becuase I am a bodybuilder I am use to doing 10 plus reps everyworkout.  The lower the reps and higher the weight make you stronger?  Because I have heard that you still can get strong with higher reps and lighter weight.

Ive always been told for football the higher the weight and lower the reps is how you increase strength, and higher reps lower weight is if you want definition and mass.

The reason for doing less reps and more weight for football players is to help build their power and explosiveness. Bar speed, bar speed, bar speed in everything you do. This is especially true for position specific workouts. For example, with your Lineman, Running Backs and Linebackers you will find that their lower body workouts will be a little different than a skilled position player focusing more on speed and agility. These positions I just mentioned tend to focus more on explosiveness in the hips, legs, and of course the upper body. Great weight training workouts to throw in are Towel Bench or Boards, Box Squats, Hang Cleans, and deadlifts. My personal favorite workouts during college were days we would do pyramid sets (ex. 1-3-5-7-9-7-5-3-1) starting your first set at 30% of your max and go up accordingly. This is a great forum, thanks for starting something football specific.