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Football Summer Program Focuses on Speed, Strength, but Above All Else, Football Part one of a two-part series
By John Porentas
By John Porentas
It's becoming abundantly clear that the Ohio State summer program is not accurately described by the term "summer conditioning program". Eric Lichter's summer regime is far more accurately described as a "football season preparation program".
It may seem like a small distinction, or a trivial one, but it isn't to Lichter or to the players who are now immersed in his program. Lichter's program does not stop at getting into shape, or getting stronger, or getting faster. His program is squarely focused on getting into shape for football, getting stronger for football, and getting faster for football. Everything Lichter's team is doing this summer is geared to the game, and that is a point that he is driving home to the players at OSU, a point that he feels is essential for players to understand to make real progress, and a point that he feels he is making.
"I think they understand what we expect from them," said Lichter.
"It's an intelligent team. Obviously I'm impressed with their athletic ability. If they're at Ohio State, they're the top athletes in the country, but they understand how the training that they are being asked to do is going to help them on the field.
"When you get an athlete to understand, you explain to them the 'why' of what we're doing, they're not in there doing something because we told them they have to do it. They're in there because they understand how it's going to help them get to the next level, win a Big Ten championship, beat Michigan, win a national championship, help them become a first-round draft pick in the NFL.
"They buy into the program and it become contagious, and that's what I'm starting to see, a lot of guys who are working hard and understanding it more. It's becoming a team concept that this plan makes sense and we're going to follow it and give it our best effort," Lichter said.
Lichter builds football into almost every drill, every workout. When the team runs for conditioning, he sets up the activity to mimic a game and makes sure his players understand how the workout relates to the game. For Lichter, good 40 times and great strength numbers are not an end in themselves. They are means to an end, winning football games, and his program encompasses that thought constantly.
"We relate everything we do to football," he said.
"You can be the biggest, strongest, most explosive team, but if you give the game away by giving a team 80 or 90 yards in penalties, they don't have to worry about how big, strong and fast you are because they get those yards without going against your d-line. You're giving it to them."
Lichter says he uses his conditioning drills as a tool to create the mental discipline it takes to avoid mistakes...and win football games.
"A lot of times when I've got them at their most tired is when I challenge then mentally, and I make the stakes very high, because that's the way it is on the field," he said.
This week Lichter's workout schedule included some rigorous endurance training. Though he known most as coach who builds explosive athletes, he fully understands the importance of 'fourth quarter conditioning' and makes that an important aspect of his program.
"It has too," he said when asked if his program emphasized endurance.
"We can't just come out and explode on teams in the first quarter and expect them to lay down. It's a sixty-minute game, so to set up a conditioning program on the basis of not to build that endurance factor in there, we'd be setting the athletes up for failure. We condition very hard. We have long conditioning days. We have conditioning days that mimic a game," he said.
This week Lichter's team did cut-sprints. A cut sprint is a sprint at a distance which is run in two legs. The athlete must run half the distance, come to a full stop, change direction 180 degrees, then run back the other half of the distance in the opposite direction. It combines endurance running with the starting, stopping, and change-of-direction of football, and Lichter made good use of the technique this week.
"We started very long," he said.
"We started with cut-200s (100 yards out, stop, turn around, 100 yards back). That was the first thing we did. We ran 10 cut-200s on a recovery interval."
For those of you who are mathematically challenged, that's 2000 yards, or just over a mile, at a fast pace, and that was just the preliminaries.
"Then we run three cut-150s, then we run four cut-100s. Those guys are exhausted after that.
"They're running hard, their legs are tired, they're hurting. We then ran five cut-60s, then we run six cut-20s."
Lichter explained the reasoning behind his technique of shortening the distances (and increasing the speed of the sprint) as the session went on. As usual, it has a football-related explanation.
"We bring the distances down and the speeds go up as the workout progresses. We fatigue them then ask them to be explosive at the end. We're setting the conditioning up for them to exert explosiveness and speed and great top-speed after they have already drained their batteries. That builds a fourth-quarter into the workout.
"Rather than starting them off explosively and then increasing the distances and making them go slower and slower, we do it just the opposite. The other way is not wrong per se. We might have done that the other way three weeks ago, but now we're fatiguing them early and asking them to show us the speed after they're tired. It's preparing the body to give great effort and speed and power and exertion when they are not fully rested, but when they are depleted, when their glycogen stores are low."
Lichter made the drill even tougher and more challenging that that description conveys. About 30 players participated at once, all spread across the field. Lichter would bark a 'set' command for them all to get into a three-point stance. On 'hut', the players would sprint. If one player in the line jumped ahead of the 'hut' displaying a lack of discipline despite his fatigue, the entire group paid a price. The entire group had to rerun the last rep preceding the jump. It happened several times, much to the chagrin of the non-offending players.
"That's also a mental toughness thing," said Lichter.
"We focus on discipline. If they jumped, they were penalized, they went back a rep."
"If they didn't touch the line, they were penalized, because if you're tired, you start to loose the mental edge of focusing on assignment, on the play, on reading and recognizing, on not drawing penalties in the fourth quarter. If you don't think on a fourth-and-one at the end of a game a team is going to go on a quick count or a hard count to see if they can make you jump and make you make a mental mistake you're crazy. It happens all the time. It's how you get beat."
Football. It's clearly the focus.
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