If you'd like to train for football without having to go to the gym or wait for the official start of the season, there are a variety of methods for training at home. The key to working out at home is to use the right training method at the right time of year. Working on increasing muscle size may interfere with improving muscle speed because of the different types of muscle fibers used in those exercises. Plan your home workouts for a specific purpose to maximize your success.
Strength Workouts
To increase the size of your muscles, you'll want to do heavy lifting, using your maximum weight. Do this in the off-season because you'll want to train faster muscle fibers during your season. A good home workout for building muscle is the 5 by 5 workout, which has you perform five reps of an exercise and repeat to create five sets. During the first two warm-up sets, you'll use 60 percent, then 80 percent of your maximum weight. For the final three sets, you'll lift 100 percent of your max.
For an upper-body workout of this type, you can do bicep curls and tricep extensions to work the arms and flys and bench presses to work your chest muscles. For lower-body workouts, use weighted squats, lunges and calf raises. Deadlifts work the hamstrings, hips and glutes. Leg presses build quad muscles.
Rest your muscles 24 to 48 hours between workouts to let the recovery process strengthen your muscles.
Muscular Endurance Workouts
Once you've increased muscle size, you'll want to be able to use those muscles effectively for an entire game. To improve muscular endurance, use 50 percent or less of your maximum weight and perform 8 to 12 reps. A circuit training workout helps you build endurance by keeping your muscles working during a 30- or 60-minute workout, with only one-minute breaks in between reps. If you can't work at this intensity for 60 minutes, do a 30-minute lower-body workout one day, then work on upper-body exercises the next day while your legs recover.
An upper-body circuit training workout would include the same exercises you do in a limit strength workout, using lighter-weight barbells, dumbbells or resistance bands. You can also use body-weight exercises to create a circuit. Do push-ups to work the arms and chest, pull-ups to work the biceps and chest, crunches and sit-ups to work the core, and chin-ups and dips to work the triceps and lats.
Explosive and Reactive Strength Workouts
Immediately before and during your season, you'll want less weighted exercises and more movements that use quick, high-intensity bursts of speed. Box jumps, reactive squats, depth jumps, jump squats, one-leg split-squat jumps, high-knee skipping, giant steps, sprints and other exercises that focus on quick leg movements will help you train explosive power and speed. An example of an exercise in a reactive power workout would be the depth jump. Stand on a box or bench about knee height, jump off, and as soon as you touch the floor, jump in the air as high as you can. Repeat this six to eight times.
Cardio Workouts
Football is an anaerobic sport, meaning you work at very high intensity for short periods of time. Unlike aerobic activity, which has you maintain a vigorous but not maximum intensity for 30 minutes or longer, anaerobic, or sprint, training, helps you train your body's cardiovascular recovery system. Do aerobic work in the off-season to build your aerobic base, but begin using sprint training about a month before your season starts and through your season.
You can use a jump rope, running in place with high or low knees, butt kicks, jumping jacks, step aerobics, dancing or stair runs. Be careful on stairs as you begin to fatigue to avoid missing a step, especially if you are taking them two at a time when you are tired.
Perform these exercises at different intensities to create aerobic or anaerobic workouts. For example, for an aerobic workout, jog in place at a heart rate that has you sweating, but which allows you to talk during your workout. For an anaerobic workout, use high-intensity leg movements that cause you to approach your maximum heart rate for 30 to 90 seconds, then recover. Jump rope at a moderate pace or very fast, depending on what your goal is.
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