ok so my football season is over and im gonna use the westside plan of ME squat days DE squat days ME bench days DE Bench days
my question is how can i add football lifts like poewr cleans and that stuff into this plan
thanks for the help
In place of either your lower body ME day (close to your max on cleans) or DE day (with 70-80% of your max).
You can incorporate them however you feel, as an assitance exercise, max effort if you are comfortable with them or not at all. Louie Simmons has discussed why the box squat is superior to the power clean though. its just a football lift because Its popular, not necessarily for its effectiveness in my opinion
The power clean is far more effective for football players than speed box squats. The reasons are too numerous to list here, but the main one is having to react to the force of the bar landing on your shoulders. I’d swap the cleans out for the speed squat/DL work. Keep in mind they’re pretty taxing on the traps as well, just keep an eye on how often you’re working them.
-Dan
[quote]buffalokilla wrote:
The power clean is far more effective for football players than speed box squats. The reasons are too numerous to list here, but the main one is having to react to the force of the bar landing on your shoulders.
I’d swap the cleans out for the speed squat/DL work. Keep in mind they’re pretty taxing on the traps as well, just keep an eye on how often you’re working them.
-Dan[/quote]
Ok you definitely need to extrapolate(sp?) that argument.
[quote]Xen Nova wrote:
Ok you definitely need to extrapolate(sp?) that argument.[/quote]
Just taking a break from work right now so I’ll try to be concise… because that always works out…
Anyway - some reasons:
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RFD of the power clean is much closer to driving off the line than speed box squats.
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Coordination demands of the power clean are much more complex. This is a good thing-football players need to be able to handle complex motor patterns and adapt to unconventional circumstances.
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Catching the bar on the shoulders is a great aspect of the clean. An athlete isn’t just dealing with a bar on his back - the force he’s dealing with is actively pushing against him and there’s a moment of impact, if you will, when contact is made. You need to be able to absorb this force. Box squats don’t develop this.
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Cleans are more explosive and demonstrate/develop more power.
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Deactivating the hip flexors in a leg-dominant movement in order to break the kinetic chain is idiotic for an athlete. Not only is it unnecessary, but if the athlete gets in the habit, it becomes dangerous and injury could quickly result.
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Bands and chains don’t develop power as well as the Westside folks think. (there are a few papers/studies being written as yet unpublished that discuss this)They don’t make up for the difference WRT cleans, and they alter the force production curve detrimentally. The athlete learns to produce force quickly in an improper manner due to a different learned pattern of excitation.
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The grip component. Athletes need a strong grip, and cleans add to that as an economy of training time improvement.
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Triple extension. You don’t get up on your calves in a speed squat, but you do on the field. That needs to be included when developing/learning how to display power or, again, the movement pattern will be screwed royally.
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Set-up time. It’s a pain in the ass to set up bands and chains and takes a lot of time; if you have it, great. But for most it causes the workout to go beyond optimal length. It’s a lot easier to just load some plates on a bar and clean it.
That’s all I can think of for right now. Gotta get back to work…
-Dan