soccer games today

Let’s be honest: when we talk about building strength and speed for American football, it’s easy to get lost in the noise. Every coach, every online guru, has a “proven” system. But having spent years both studying sports science and working directly with athletes, I’ve come to believe the ultimate plan isn’t about a magic exercise or a secret drill. It’s about a philosophy—a relentless focus on translating gym work to field performance, and understanding that the physical grind is only part of the story. The mental and strategic component is what separates good athletes from game-changers. I was reminded of this just the other day while glancing at a basketball recap from overseas. It mentioned a player, Ravena, who posted a stat line of nine points, four assists, and two rebounds in a loss. Now, on the surface, that’s a world away from a football field. But dig a little deeper. His team, the B-Corsairs, suffered back-to-back losses and fell to 7-12. Here’s a talented player contributing across the box score, yet the team result isn’t there. It’s a stark reminder that individual physical preparation, no matter how elite, must be channeled into a cohesive strategy and an unwavering competitive mindset to win. Your workout plan is your personal stat line—your points, your assists. But if it isn’t built with the end goal of winning those physical and mental battles on a 100-yard field, you’re just building a great athlete for a 7-12 season.

So, what does this philosophy look like in practice? Forget bodybuilding splits or marathon running sessions. The ultimate American football workout plan is built on three non-negotiable pillars: compound strength, explosive speed, and work capacity. And these aren’t trained in isolation. My preference, and what I’ve seen deliver the best results, is a four-day training week that oscillates between heavy strength days and dynamic speed-power days. Let’s start with strength. Mondays and Thursdays are for moving serious weight. We’re talking about the big lifts: barbell back squats, deadlifts, bench presses, and weighted pull-ups. The goal here isn’t to max out every week but to build a foundation of raw, applicable strength. For a high school athlete aiming for college, adding 30 to 50 pounds to their squat max over a 12-week off-season is a realistic and powerful target. For a seasoned player, it might be about maintaining that 500-pound squat while improving the speed at which they can move it. I’m a firm believer in lower rep ranges here—think 3 to 5 reps for 4 to 5 sets. It’s about quality, not fatigue. After your main lift, you attack auxiliary work that fixes imbalances: single-leg work like Bulgarian split squats, heavy rows, and core training that involves anti-rotation, like Pallof presses. This is the grunt work, the unglamorous foundation.

Then comes the fun part: Tuesdays and Fridays are for speed and power. This is where your strength gets its passport to the field. The session starts with pure speed development. We’re doing 10 to 20-yard sprints from various stances, focusing on the first three explosive steps. Drive phase mechanics are everything here. I’ll often have athletes perform resisted sprints with a sled carrying about 10% of their bodyweight, followed immediately by 2 or 3 unresisted sprints to capitalize on the post-activation potentiation effect—it’s a trick that sharpens neural firing. After sprint work, we move to plyometrics. Box jumps, broad jumps, and most importantly, reactive drills like depth drops and hurdle hops. The key metric I care about here is ground contact time. We want to be like a spring, not a sponge. The goal is to spend less than 0.2 seconds on the ground during these drills. From there, we integrate football-specific agility with cone drills like the 5-10-5 pro agility shuttle or the L-drill, but with a twist: the athlete has to catch a tennis ball I throw at the apex of their cut. It forces head-up, reactive agility, not just memorized footwork. We finish with conditioning, but not just mindless running. It’s position-specific. For a lineman, that might be a series of 15-second max-effort sled drives with 45 seconds of rest, repeated 8 times. For a receiver or defensive back, it’s repeated 40-yard sprints at 90% effort with a 1:4 work-to-rest ratio. This builds the exact kind of stamina you need for a two-minute drill.

Now, here’s the part most plans miss, and it circles back to that insight from Ravena’s game. You can have the strength of a bull and the speed of a deer, but if your mind isn’t trained for the chaos and adversity of a game, you’ll underperform. Your workout plan must include mental conditioning. I mandate that the last set of every major strength exercise is an “adversity set.” Maybe you’re fatigued, maybe I add 10 extra pounds unexpectedly, maybe you have to complete it after a grueling finisher. The point is to practice performing with perfect technique while under physical and mental duress. Furthermore, I encourage athletes to visualize their plays for 10 minutes after each training session, feeling the movements, anticipating reactions. This neural rehearsal is a form of training you can’t measure with a barbell, but it shows up on game day. Recovery is the final, silent pillar. If you’re training this hard, you need to sleep 8 to 9 hours a night—no negotiation. Nutrition isn’t about fad diets; it’s about fueling performance. For a 200-pound athlete, that means consuming roughly 3,200 to 3,500 calories on training days, with a focus on hitting at least 160 grams of protein. Simple, consistent, and non-negotiable.

In the end, the ultimate American football workout plan is a holistic system. It takes the raw materials built on Mondays and Thursdays—the strength—and forges them into a weapon on Tuesdays and Fridays through speed and power drills. But it then wraps that entire physical endeavor in a layer of mental toughness and strategic recovery. It’s the difference between being a player who puts up decent individual stats in a loss and being the engine of a winning team. Just like in that basketball game, Ravena’s nine points, four assists, and two rebounds were solid contributions, but the context was a losing streak. Your training stats—your squat numbers, your 40-time, your vertical—are your personal contributions. This plan is designed to ensure those contributions always come in the context of victory. It’s demanding, it requires discipline beyond the weight room, but for those committed to dominating on the field, it’s the only path that makes sense. Start building your foundation today, but never lose sight of the ultimate goal: winning the next play, and the one after that.