Football
Football workout plan: Build strength, speed and agility
Unlock your full potential on the field with a football workout plan that elevates your strength, speed, agility, and more.
Professional football players shape their workout plans based on the muscles most important to what they do on the field. For example, quarterbacks need arm strength to throw effective passes. For wide receivers like Jeremiah Smith, agility drills are key to be quick and nimble.
Jeremiah Smith runs a route during training in Columbus, Ohio
© Nick Brown / Red Bull Content Pool
Although a well-rounded football workout plan will include exercises and stretches for strength, speed, agility, endurance, conditioning, and recovery, it should be adapted to the position an athlete plays. Read on for a comprehensive football workout plan that can be adjusted for top-notch on-field performance in any position.
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Key components of a football workout plan
Strength and power training
Football strength and power is a full-body affair with full-body results. Some coaches encourage weight lifting since footballers with larger, more flexible muscles, tendons, and ligaments can move more weight. Naturally, an athlete who can move more weight will be an all-star tackler — and they’ll be heavier, making them great at blocking.
Great tacklers also need to leap forward forcefully to reach their targets, so a football explosive power workout is necessary too. If anything, football is overall an explosive sport since most plays max out at just 20 seconds. That’s why the best athletes have mastered the art of exerting immense power and strength, then resting, then doing it all over again.
Another reason for strength and power exercises: When football players apply more force to the ground while running, they’ll go faster.
Speed and agility drills
A player’s jaw-dropping ability to quickly pivot in a new direction comes from football agility drills. These exercises are also part (not all) of how these athletes master speed. Common speed exercises in a workout plan for football players include cone drills, ladder drills, shuttle runs, and short but fast sprints.
Endurance and conditioning
Where strength training builds muscle, conditioning focuses on maintaining a fast heart rate. Since footballers spend hours on the field and constantly switch between short bursts of rapid movement and complete rest, conditioning is paramount to great performance. So too is endurance, which is the term for doing something intense for as long as possible. If conditioning is how athletes go back and forth from action to rest, endurance is how they get through the whole game.
Jeremiah Smith trains in Columbus, Ohio
© Nick Brown / Red Bull Content Pool
High-intensity interval training (HIIT) sprints are often a part of football athlete training since they develop endurance. Wide receivers like Jeremiah Smith might do cone drills with sprint intervals for stamina, whereas linemen might instead opt for sled pushes when focusing on stamina.
Mobility and flexibility exercises
Across sports, mobility and flexibility exercises — namely, stretches — are widely associated with injury prevention. Within football, regularly stretching the hip flexor and hip adductor muscles is especially important. Frequent stretching increases flexibility, enabling footballers to play low, move powerfully, and quickly change direction. (“Playing low” means properly bending at the hips and rotating at the ankles for agility and leverage.)
Dynamic stretching is ideal for football players, and yoga poses can help too. Additionally, for some athletes, foam rolling stretches can help relieve pain, so mobility and flexibility exercises may be associated with injury recovery, not just prevention.
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Sample weekly football workout plan
Below is an example of a sample weekly football workout plan. Modify it based on positions and what might work best for you.
Day 1: strength and power (upper body)
1. Bench press (4 sets x 4 to 6 reps)
2. Dumbbell rows (3 sets x 6 to 8 reps)
3. Seated overhead press (3 sets x 6 reps)
4. Tricep dips (3 sets x 8 reps)
Day 2: speed and agility drills
1. Agility ladder drills (3 sets x 1 rep per side)
2. 5-cone drills (3 sets x 1 rep)
3. 6-cone drills (3 sets x 1 rep)
4. 4-cone drill (3 sets x 1 rep)
Day 3: strength and power (lower body)
1. Squats (4 sets x 4 to 8 reps)
2. Lunges (4 sets x 4 to 8 reps)
3. Deadlifts (4 sets x 4 to 6 reps)
4. Box jumps (5 sets x 3 reps)
Day 4: conditioning and endurance
1. Interval sprints (6 to 10 sprints x 20 to 30 seconds each)
2. High-intensity sprints (3 short-distance sets, one long-distance set)
3. Cycling (30 seconds of intense cycling, 90 seconds of gentle cycling)
Day 5: mobility and recovery
Jeremiah Smith
© Maggie Zerbe
1. Dynamic lunge with rotation (1 set x 5 reps per side)
2. Duck walks (1 set x 5 reps per side)
3. Back stretch (3 sets x 1 rep)
4. Hip flexor stretch (1 set x 5 reps per side)
5. Foam roller glute stretch (1 set x 5 reps per side)
6. Child’s pose (1 set x 3 reps)
03
Position-specific workout considerations
Jeremiah Smith
© Nick Brown
The best football players modify the above workout plan based on the position they play. They might repeat a certain day more than once or add different exercises to some days. Below are some considerations for certain football positions.
04
Tips for maximizing workout results
Football superstars always keep the following tips in mind to make the most of pre-season training and on-season workouts.
Maximize your game with the right football workout plan
With a balanced football workout plan, football players achieve so much more than just great balance. They maximize their strength, agility, endurance, and condition — but not right away. They keep at it, personalizing their workout plan based on their fitness level and the position they play. After enough time, they see results — and as they keep going, they see even more.