Football players should now be getting ready for the upcoming season. Most players have been the weight training throughout the winter and spring and should now be getting ready to fine-tune their skills and physical abilities. They should be working on the skills that they will be executing in game play by perfecting their technique and the physical qualities specific to the technique.
Most coaches and players reading this will tell you that this is what they are now doing. However, the concept of specificity is often misunderstood. Because of this the training that is done is often quite different from what is stated. For example, specificity has various criteria by which it is judged.
For most players and coaches this means doing exercises that involve the same muscles or muscle contraction regimes that will be used in game play. When using this criteria it is possible to see some transfer of the training to the skill execution. But its role is relatively minor in comparison to other criteria.
For the greatest transfer of the training to the skill execution needed during the game, it is necessary to do specialized exercises in which the exercise duplicates the technique seen in a portion of, or the full execution of the skill. In other words, you develop strength in the way it is displayed in the skill execution and over the same range of motion as seen in the skill execution. With this type of transfer you can see almost immediate results.
Such specialized exercises are for the most part, still relatively new. Most football training revolves around getting stronger and doing general exercises to get the athlete more fit. To assist football players and especially quarterbacks, I developed a DVD, Specialized Strength and Explosive Exercises for the Quarterback, which shows the specific exercises used for the skill of throwing.
The training is specific to the warm up, lower body, midsection and upper body. Not only are specialized strength exercises presented but also explosive exercises. Many of the exercises were used in the training of Todd Marinovich when he broke the national high school records and some collegiate records for throwing.