How-to:

Warmup: 30 second Grok Squat ^[3], lateral, forward, and backward leg swings (10 each leg). A few light, medium effort (70%) sprints to loosen the joints. Five jumping butt kicks (jump up and kick your own butt with your heels).

Professional football requires its athletes to be powerful, fast, big, and strong. This leads to some brutal collisions, years of which might lead to health problems for participants later in life, but it also leads to some interesting tests for determining said power, speed, size, and strength. You likely aren’t heading to the NFL anytime soon, but you can still enjoy the workouts. This one is based on the NFL Combine, which is the test that all prospective rookies complete before the draft to give teams an idea of their strength, speed, and power. Strength, speed, and power are generally desirable, right?

Some of the exercises should be familiar to you. A dash is just a short sprint. Pushups (or bench presses) don’t need to be explained. The rest? Let’s go over them briefly.

You probably know about vertical leaps, but paying attention to your technique should elicit greater results. Ideally, to mark your progress you’d stand flat-footed and measure your overhead one-handed reach, then jump, reach, and measure the difference. If you can’t measure, just jump as high as you can each time. Swing your arms to generate more power, as seen here ^[4].

Broad jumps are also performed flat-footed. Use the arm swing ^[5], like in the vertical leap, to generate power.

For the cone drill, set up three cones (or any object) in an L shape about 5 yards apart from each other. Start at the first cone. Sprint to the second, then immediately back to the first. Sprint back to the second and weave around it. Sprint to the third, loop around it, sprint back by the second and finish at the first. If that’s confusing, watch this video ^[6] of the cone drill done right.

For the shuttle run, start in an athletic stance. Run five yards to the right, touch the ground, pivot, run ten yards in the other direction, touch ground, pivot, then run five yards back to your starting position. Here’s a great video ^[7] showing how it’s done.

Take your time in between exercises. Don’t rush from vertical leaps to broad jumps to cone drills without stopping; you’ll want to allow time for recovery and, thus, the ability to give your maximum effort.

A few things to remember:

• Think about explosiveness in the jumps. Really swing those arms and extend those hips to get the most distance/height.
• The running drills are as much about agility and quickness as they are about raw speed. Heck, even more so. Work on pivoting and changing direction quickly.

Variations:

If the shuttle run or cone drill are too easy for you, you can always increase the distances between cones. So, instead of running 5, 10, and 5 yards for the shuttle, run 10, 20, and 10 yards, or 10, 10, and 10 for the cone drill.

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