If you ever wondered whether you could cut it as an NFL player, you first have to see if you can make it through an NFL football workout. In this video, I take former Green Bay Packers Super Bowl Champion Greg Jennings through a dynamic leg workout to help him build explosive strength and athleticism. See if you can keep up as you follow along this complete leg workout.
WARMUP
To start, we have to make sure we warmup. Most of the time, people turn their warmups into workouts by making them too long. The only goal of your warmup should be to prepare your body to be capable of performing the exercises of the workout without form compromise or injury. The leg swings and hurdle unders are two of the fastest ways to mobilize the hips and muscles of the legs to prepare you for the work to come.
COMPOUND: BANDED BOX SQUAT
First exercise up is the banded box squat. As part of a lower body dynamic workout, the goal for this training is not strength. Instead, you want to focus on speed of movement and overall athleticism and power. This means that the overall system load you want to subject yourself to is about 60 to 75 percent of your 1RM in combined resistance (from both bands and the weight on the bar). Ideally, you will put about 20-30% of this in the form of bands.
Realize, in the case of this example, Greg is being represented as a 300 pound squatter. Sixty percent of this would be 180lbs. With one hundred and thirty five pounds on the bar and fifty pounds in band resistance, we are able to reach the goal system weight total. Keep in mind, this resistance is only realized at the top of the movement where the bands are fully stretched. At lower depths, the bands are more slack and there is less tension being contributed to the bar.
This does help to match up the strength curve of the added resistance to the natural resistance of the squat as an exercise however.
UNILATERAL: BULGARIAN SPLIT SQUATS
Next, we perform a combination of a front side loaded bulgarian front squat with a backside loaded version. The difference is simply the position of the body in space. When standing upright, the load is going to be borne by the quads primarily. When leaning forward, the hamstrings and glutes will take the lion’s share of the workload. The key in either environment is not to place your front foot up on a box if your back foot stays on the floor. This either limits range of motion of the working leg or completely eliminates the tension on this leg at the top of the rep.
DYNAMIC JUMP OR SPRINT: TWISTING BOX JUMP
To finish up the workout, you have to add more to this banded exercises and unilateral leg exercise. It’s important to include a dynamic jumping or sprinting exercise. In both cases, you can either do a straight vertical exercise, horizontal exercise or change of direction movement. Here we do twisting box jumps for that athletic change of direction.
The reps should be kept precise and at high energy. If you find that you are fatiguing and that the quality of the jump is declining then you need to stop your set and regroup before continuing.
HINGE: PULLTHROUGH
Finally, the hip hinge is a critical component that needs to be trained. We choose the cable pull through as a great option to get this done. Just like the upper body equivalent, the face pull, it is key that you fire up the right muscles here to perform this exercise correctly. Make sure that the often underactive glutes are what does the work here by keying on their firing and sequencing on every rep you perform.
CONCLUSION
This is just a sample of one type of lower body workout that an NFL player might do. Of course, you want to be sure that you are working on your max effort strength levels as well. For a complete program that works all of these training methods into one step by step program, be sure to head to athleanx.com at the link below and check out the Monster Maker program.
For more videos on how to train legs like an NFL player and the best football workout for building big strong legs, be sure to subscribe to our channel via the link below and turn on your notifications so you never miss a new video when we put one out.
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Jeff Cavaliere M.S.P.T, CSCS
Jeff Cavaliere is a Physical Therapist, Strength Coach and creator of the ATHLEAN-X Training Programs and ATHLEAN-Rx Supplements. He has a Masters in Physical Therapy (MSPT) and has worked as Head Physical Therapist for the New York Mets, as well as training many elite professional athletes in Major League Baseball, NFL, MMA and professional wrestling. His programs produce “next level” achievements in muscle size, strength and performance for professional athletes and anyone looking to build a muscular athletic physique.
