It's that time of year again. Football season is coming to an end and turkey day is just around the corner. For me this means its time to start thinking about the football off-season. Before I get into how I approach putting together a template, I must say its very important to work with a staff that is open minded. I absolutely positively have the best boss in the world...Ben Pollard. Ben has given me a great deal of freedom to speak openly about what I think we should do or not do. He doesn't always implement what I say, hey he's the Head Guy, but its just great that my voice is heard.
I think the biggest mistake coaches make in planning an off-season is that they plan out every detail of a 8-10 week cycle. Every foot contact, rep, set, warm-up ect is already in place and they leave themselves no room for change. To me this is a huge mistake...this is what inexperienced coaches do, or coaches that are stuck in the dark ages with Western Periodization. There just isn't enough time in a modern off-season to have "hypertrophy" phases...this is why the conjugate method is perfect for the off season. Let's attack multiple qualities at the same time, but give emphasis to certain ones depending on the time of the year.
The Needs Analysis
By now we've seen our teams enough to know what needs to be attacked during the off-season. For some its a lack of speed, others max strength and others maybe work capacity. Whatever that need is I usually center the initial stages of the off-season around that. Of course, we need to improve our work capacity...but stealing from Chad Dennis on this one, if you increase max strength, reactive strength, starting strength, maximum muscle contraction velocity AND work capacity...won't you have a higher threshold of work capacity.
So here's your assignment. Sit down for a good hour and go position by position and right down IN DETAIL what glaring deficiencies that position has. Put your analysis down and come back to it about a week from now and add/take away. Once you've got that we'll start building a template.
If anyone has any comments on this process, please feel free to post...Train Hard!!! -Erik Korem-
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