Eight Tips for Maximizing Your Program’s Summer

By Product Specialist Team
MaxOne.com

X&O Labs Note: We recently met with the guys at MaxOne to talk best practices for summer. MaxOne is also a sponsor of X&O Labs. These guys are doing some cutting-edge stuff. We looked at the research they have been doing with coaches and realized the results could help our readers. So, we asked them if we could publish it. We really believe in what MaxOne is doing and think it is the future of how coaches will run their programs.

Take a look below at the findings - and take a minute to download the 42 things that the best coaches do in the summer.

Summer is coming. What do those words mean to you? The season most often associated with vacation, time off, and relaxation has a very different significance to those who run football programs. As the temperature rises, so does the urgency to get better for the season ahead.

There is no one single recipe for driving improvement within your program; there are a million different ways to attack it, and it happens one day at a time. If you’re looking for new ideas here are eight of them broken down into three categories:

1. Strength and Conditioning
2. Program Building
3. Communication

If you put just one or two of these to work in the coming months you will set your program up for even more success in the season to come.

Strength and Conditioning

1. Think Creatively About Strength

There are countless strength building tools and resources available to coaches. Outside-the-box options such as CrossFit, Kettlebells, and even yoga can provide outstanding options for customizing your summer workout program.  Bringing fresh ideas and new challenges to your strength program will not only boost the excitement of your athletes, but also keep them engaged and working hard.

John Allen Snyder, Head Football Coach at Indiana Area High School described his diverse and creative approach this way:

“Our program is spearheaded by our OL coach… our district Strength and Conditioning Coordinator…and myself the head coach. We feel the three of us together bring a varied approach to Strength and Conditioning…[One] Powerlifting, [another] HIIT/CrossFit and Flexibility, and myself the football aspect. This allows us to throw everything on a wall and see what sticks. It allows us to create varied programming based on three fundamentally different strength approaches, but we always make sure that there is on-field application for everything we do.

It doesn’t have to be a new fad workout, either. Something as simple as unique warm-ups that are introduced in a different space, or a finisher exercise that generates energy and competition in the weight room can help to increase engagement in your program.