Prepare for a Successful Football Offseason
Football relies on peak athleticism where athletes must be explosive, powerful, and have the ability to reproduce high level skill, play after play. Proper athlete preparation that focuses on developing a well-rounded athlete is crucial for optimal performance.
Football Academy – Foundations Phase
Our Foundations phase is designed to allow athletes the ability to assess and grow from the previous season. Athletes review performance, identify strengths and weaknesses, and commit to developing the habits required for a successful offseason. Through the Foundations Phase, athletes address injuries, restore / improve mobility, develop exercise technique, and reset base conditioning. Athletes are given the opportunity to connect with clinical staff and coaches to address musculo-skeletal injuries, mental performance limitations, and to develop fitness qualities.
Athlete Movement
Athletes must move well to play well. Movement is a broad term that encompasses aspects from injuries, to limitations in individual joint ranges of motion, straight through to the athletes ability to sprint, cut, and change directions. With a strong clinical background STRIVE Fitness places a high value on total body movement and development.
If the athlete is in pain or unable to optimally utilize joints, performance on the field will suffer. The movement of athletes’ ankles, hips, spine, and shoulders are crucial for maximal performance on the field. In worst cases, if lack of mobility goes unnoticed, athletes will likely compensate through other joints that, if fatigue, will eventually lead to injury. This Foundations Phase allows us and athletes time to address movement issues and set the athlete on a proper path for the offseason and upcoming season.
Teaching of Exercises
During the early stages of offseason training, Strive aims to develop movement competency in exercises that we highly value for athlete performance. Through this Foundations Phase we lay the groundwork for athletes to develop strength, power, speed, and higher levels of conditioning. Generally speaking, we can take an overview of the body separating it into lower, upper, and core development. We develop lower body movements through hip hinging and squats, ultimately setting up the athlete to learn more advanced lifting such as deadlift, squatting, and the Olympic lifts (hang cleans, and snatches). In the upper body the development of pushing (bench pressing, overhead press, and more) and pulling (chinups, rows, and more) needs to be developed and trained. Equally the core needs to be trained to develop strength, timing, and stabilizing ability. By establishing this strong foundation, we are able to add increased demands once the athlete fully recovers from the season.
As we move past the Foundations Phase, our aim is to prime and prep players for their training camps and seasons. As the upcoming season approaches we continue to increase athletes movement and speed by spending more training time on the turf to develop speed, power, and change of direction with reaction style technique drills.
Offseason Opportunities
Getting athletes ready for their upcoming sports season is what we love to do. By enhancing athleticism, increasing freedom of movement, and creating resiliency in the body and mind we see athletes flourish on and off the field.
We highly recommend all athletes to surround themselves with a team of professionals that follow a movement based approach to athlete development.
Reach out today and learn how you can utilize our team, or the competition will.