The ONLY Workout Split You'll Ever Need For Football

We're going to give you the only football program that you'll ever need for strength training. And we're going to start right now. Now, this is a program that we've used to develop athletes like Nick Singleton, Jan Johnson, Brandon George, who just signed with the Kansas City Chiefs, and even allconerence D2 linebacker Eden Johnson.

So, when we're doing this workout, I'm going to walk through specific splits that you can use if you're in high school and that you can use if you're more elite, if you're at that collegiate level. We're going to then talk about how to identify when you should be working with different splits, okay? Depending on what time of year it is.

And this is even going to be a workout, okay? So, we're going to put Eden through a workout. And this is a pre-season workout.

So, inside of our strength training app, Peak Strength, we can actually designate preseason, inseason, postseason training. And that's what we're going to be doing here. We're going to go into that preseason split to help you become a freak football player.

Now, Eden's going through his warm-up. He's going to be doing the PVC pipe walks. Uh then he's going to be doing kneeling thoracic extensions.

He's then going to get into some split uh some split lunges like split squats just in place. And then also Eden, if you can, I didn't tell you this off camera, but get into some duck walks as well as part of the warm-up before we get into the actual leg workout. Now, when we think about splits inside of our training system, we like to use periodization and specific splits based off of the level of the individual.

So, we use assessments, okay, specific to sports. In this case, we're talking about football. So, we'll use assessments like single leg squat, bench press, clean, uh vertical jump, broad jump, 40.

These are some really, really big key assessments that we use. Once we take those assessments, we look at athletes and we say, "Okay, are they a level one, a level two, level three, level four? " Level three, level four would be at the college level or professional level.

That's where Eden is right now. If they're a level one or level two, they're in middle school or in high school, okay? And depending upon those assessments, that's how we build out the program.

So, when we do a high schoolbased system, okay, our high schoolers will come in and they're going to do more uh leg strength stuff on day one. Okay? On day two, they're going to do more upper bodybased work.

Day three is going to be more of like an athlete day. Day four, impulse day. Day five, hypertrophy day.

That's actually exactly how Eden was trained in high school when we were developing Nick Singleton, when we were developing him, when we were working with Brandon, developing Cooper Lutz, other division one guys once they get to that level three, the collegiate level. This is where things get a little bit different with the split. So, one of the things that I've learned over the years and in discussing this with Chuck Losi, who's this head strength coach at Penn State, even talking with coach Andrew Nelson, who's also the sports performance guy at Penn State, is we like to set up our more advanced guys with more speed work.

So, now the way the week is set up for someone like Eden is Eden's split will be day one he's doing a clean and then we're getting into some upper body work. Day two, we're doing max velocity work. Day three, now we're doing some form of jumps.

Day four, that's when we're doing acceleration work. And on almost all these days, we will be cleaning almost every single day. Day five, big heavy strength day, like a big squat day.

Okay? So, that's how that week is laid out. There's going to be days off in between.

Some athletes might do uh two days like training on a Sunday and then come in. But the difference here is that all of the periodization is based off the level. Okay?

They and the level is determined by the assessments. That's stuff that we're covering in our new book that's going to be coming out at the end of the year. The second link in the description down below is to join that book, Weight List.

The first link is to get into peak strength. Now, let's get into this first lift in this leg strength workout that Eden's going to be hitting. First exercise that we're going to get into, and Eden's probably rolling his eyes because if he's not doing a one box clean, he's almost always doing a two box clean.

Sometimes he'll go from the floor. So, he's going to hit this for a triple as part of his warm-up, and then we're going to get into the first working set. So, hit this for three.

I'm gonna let Eden do two powers and one full. Currently in the in the program, we've got just a full clean. Um, actually, there we go.

I'll just change this right there. Perfect. Good.

Now, in the in peak strength, it'll say from the floor. I'm going to give him the break. We're going to go off of one box.

Good. Okay. So, the big thing here is that what we like to do and what we've found uh put the greens on Eden.

What we found to have a huge correlation is that we'll clean on Monday. Okay. Day one.

So, for him right now, he'll clean before he benches. Okay. We'll do cleans before we jump.

More more speed work. So, we'll go off of two boxes. Impulse has to be higher because it's a shorter range of motion.

Uh, and then we'll clean before acceleration as well. We I have allowed them to not have a clean on their leg day. Um, even though today is their their leg strength day.

Now, high school kids, we will clean also three days a week. The correlation that we see is that the more the clean goes up, especially to around 130 to 150 kilos, the more that clean goes up, the more we see uh one, the front squat will go up and the more we see the front squat at 1. 8 times body weight, that's when we start to see 34 to 38 in verts even even on the heavier guys uh because it's a relative number.

So we see that we see the broad jump goes up big and we also then know that typically with a big clean the start the first step of a 40 is going to be dialed in and that first the 10 yard is going to be dialed in. It's going to be a big it's that's also going to have a good correlation uh to their to their acceleration in the 40 as well which also carries over to the field. Okay.

So we see that uh when we focus on this first one, two, three steps, cleans have a big factor there. So we like to think through what can improve, you know, the box that they're playing in out on the field. What what can improve those assessments and then we can sort of work backwards and troubleshoot where some problem issues might come up.

So Eden, give me one power, one full gear. And when Eden was in high school, we would clean, >> dude. We might have cleaned every single session.

>> Yeah. when I first got here. For sure.

Good. Good. Then put on a take the green off.

Put on a big yellow. Now the the one thing with Eden came I think you were going into 10th grade if I remember. >> Okay.

Going into junior year. The main goal is like we look at everything like a race. How quickly can we get a kid to first a 225 clean, then how quickly can we get them to around a 125 clean, which is 275, and then how quickly can we get them to 300 plus?

And obviously, if we have somebody who's a bigger guy, we want them to 300 plus as fast as possible. So, we clean constantly because we see such a great correlation between them. That's why we have such good lifts.

You know, you see Nick back in high school, Nick cleaned 160 kilos, uh, which is 352. We saw Javin Williams could clean 145 kilos. He was a fivestar as well.

That's 320. Brandon George could clean 345. Cooper Lutz could clean 340.

These are guys that were power five uh, guys. Brandon just signed with the Chiefs. So, it's a race.

It's really a race. So, right now, we got a good group of eighth graders that are going into eighth grade, and those kids are all right around 100 kilo clean. So if by the end of 8th grade we can get them closer to like 250 260.

That'd be ideal. George Parkinson just got an offer from Ohio State. Uh he can clean 140 kilos and he weighs about 105 uh kilos.

So he's a 230lb guy that that can clean over 300 lb. He's 15. And the big factor with him is we know acceleration is really where he struggles right now because he's bigger and he's younger.

But his top end speed is really good. So the the the race is to get him to a 405 squat for 5 to 10 reps and then that that clean to keep growing to 350 plus. So that's that's sort sort of how we look at the clean and then the next lift.

So we'll go one power one full here. Good. Good.

Okay. So, we got another set here. The one thing I want to point out, too, like Eden's technique is solid, right?

He's not a weightlifter technique-wise, but he has good movement. And I think that's a big factor. A lot of people will be hesitant with cleans.

They're like, "Oh, the technique. " You just got to be proficient, okay? And if you're proficient, it's going to carry over.

It's going to transfer really well. And I think that if you learn how to move heavy weight fast, now you learn how to coordinate faster. So your your neural firing happens at a higher speed.

You recruit better. Okay? So you become more coordinated and then it carries over to the other lifts to other movements as well.

If he's able to engage and and move, you know, it's early in the morning right now. He's a little fatigued. He's able to move 220 fast, right?

And we can build this up consistently over time. Now when he gets on the field, he knows he doesn't care about what the D the what the O lineman looks like. in front of him if he's blitzing.

He doesn't care what the running back looks like if he's in coverage because he knows he can have that speed. He has good vision on the field, right? So, the skilled part is taken care of out on the field with his his skill coaches.

The strength and the physiological aspect has to be taken care of here. That's where the speed work, that's where the jumps, and that's where the the big lifts come into play. We're going on a two-minute rest.

So, we have a rest timer inside peak strength. And now, uh right here, you can see this is how like the set should feel. The rest timer just uh expired because I was rambling too much.

But we go here and then we can log this set and then we go here again. So we'll we'll start to go up if he crushes this. We won't go up too heavy.

Um because it he is let's probably seven or eight weeks out from the season. So let's do this again. Eden.

Good. Good. Okay.

Put on put on a little red. Now, one other thing that I love is when we get closer to to in season. So, this is preseason training, okay?

Inside peak strength. First link in the description. You're a football player, you're an athlete, click on that, go over to peakstrength.

app, the Google Play Store, the Apple iOS store, download peak strength. Start in your specific sport. Start building towards becoming an absolute freaking savage.

One of the things that I love here is that on the first three sets is 2 minutes. It's 2 minutes rest. Two minutes rest.

You start to feel good. you start to feel twitchy. Well, now the last four sets, they're on the minute.

And what that means is that you're just you're decreasing that rest period and you're going to get into a more timing based feel. And especially in preeason training, okay, we want him it's not right now is not about like this max strength that we want. We should have done that back from January all the way up till about the end of May, middle of May, you know, now we're in the early starting periods of June.

So the main focus now is his repetitive work. Okay, this is one thing Chuck Losi has brought this up to me. He's like the guys that we get from Penn State that that come from garage strength, he always is like they're durable.

They can have high level of repetitive output. Okay? So you don't want a one-off that then collapses in a game.

You want someone who can just keep just continuously put out a large amount of force for four quarters. And so when we do the on the-minute work, it it's resembling what you're going to have inside of a game where it's like, okay, we have, you know, let's say 4 to 7 seconds of a burst. Then you're going to have about a minute recovery and then you got to do that again, you know, and then you'll get off the field and you'll have a longer recovery period after that.

So that's where this on the minute stuff does come in uh to actually play. So Eden's going to hit this. This is our last set here.

This will be like this is 105 kilos. So, in in peak strength, I have it set to the to pounds 230, but you can also set it to metric. He's hitting 231.

Just overachieving a little bit. Come on now. Good.

Good. Okay. So, we'll put the boxes back.

We're going to go to the next exercise. Now, the next movement, and I just showed you here inside Peak Strength, we had front squats currently in his system that we're doing this summer in our program, our custom program, is that he's doing single leg squats on Fridays. So, we're going to actually replace it, which is a a really cool feature in Peak Strength is you can replace it with another exercise that's similar.

So, we'll we have in here if you go front squat, right? Uh, you can actually go in and be like, "All right, well, I want to see what other exercises DNE thinks are comparable to a front squat. " I went in, I replaced it with unbroken single leg squats.

So, we're going to do unbroken single leg squats next. We're going to set that up uh using the garage strength single leg roller. And then we're going to put the boxes back and we're going to be able to start to hit really target that posterior chain uh to work through this this leg strength workout.

You guys could be doing this right now, okay? You don't even need to have peak strength. You could literally just be writing down the workout.

You could be at the gym, watch it on TV, take notes the whole way through, okay? Write down the workout, go to the gym later, even if if you're watching on TV right now, and then that's going to be what you execute as that leg strength day. And if you're in high school, make sure that's day one for the week.

Eden's going to hit this first one. He's got to go unbroken. So, boom, boom, boom, boom, fast.

When we say unbroken, we want to see good control. Good. Okay.

We want to see good speed from the pad. Drve up and good hip flexion. You can see here his chest is slightly forward.

He's holding a good position there. Good reactive ability. Honestly, the unbroken single leg squat is really, really good for just firing the crap out of the glutes and the hamstrings.

Now, uh that was an easy set. Okay, so we're actually just doing this by itself. Give me I'm going to put on 185.

Uh, so let's get a let's get a green on there, which is actually 198. But dude, some of these things in here are so fun for me to play around with. Uh, just because it's weird to think that this is like something that I've always wanted.

I feel like a child in the sense that I always wanted something like this, like a strength training app that was my brain that I could just use and have weird attributes that I would want because I'm still a child. Uh, and now that it's in here, it's pretty neat. Good.

Eat it. Good. Now, one thing I I'll even bring this up.

There's there's two aspects. Okay. One, when Eden would be in season, I would say that this is a a movement that he could hit literally just staying right around 200 lb and he'll feel good.

he'll get good stimulation to the to the fibers and it won't cause a ton of fatigue. It will help transfer over to speed work. Now, the reason being that I believe it transfers so well to speed work is cuz we have a more stable hip.

If you see when when he was doing like his little hiccup thing there, uh putting the back foot up, one, it's earlier in the morning, so he's got to wake up his nervous system. Two, uh he had a little bit of a hiccup on the first rep. He sort of hops out just a hair.

Okay, those are lessons of his basically his body's learning the best position to be in uh relative to the to the pad when he's hitting that. Also, use the single leg roller. This is available at karstrength.

com. You got a pad right there. We beat the hell out of these.

Like literally every single day, probably 85% of sessions, we're using these with two to three athletes, which is why this one's just destroyed. Beat the hell. And this is, you know, probably two plus years old.

You've heard or watched some of our speed stuff. We've talked about Dr uh Ken Clark. He focuses a lot on the hip and max speed.

Uh, and one of the things with Eden as a football player, his slowest part of his sprint is actually the back half of his 40. So, we need to increase his max velocity, we need to raise his max velocity, okay? And and when that max speed is improved, in turn, his acceleration will improve.

How does this relate to Dr Ken Clark? Is that a lot of that is related to the hip, okay? how the hip is stable and the more stable the hip becomes, the more stable the trunk becomes, the more force you'll put into the ground without losing, you know, without having noise, okay?

Without h without losing or dissipating that energy. So, that's where a lot of this stuff comes into play. Uh, you learn how to fire the glutes and that's going to transfer over to some pretty good speed.

Let's go uh put on little reds. We'll do two more sets here, okay? And then we're going to get into the next part of the the workout.

So, I want to see how these two sets roll. This one again, when it's unbroken, it's all about moving that weight fast and just just getting good rhythm, good timing. That's a plug right there.

The the the app will do everything for you. All you have to do is show up. Show up and do the work.

That's it. You know, Eden's thinking about what I just said in the in the video. He's like, I'm not going to do that this time.

Yo, that's funny. Good. Come on now.

Come on. Good. Was getting slightly ever so slightly off balance on that left leg.

Uh let's go one more with the big yellow one. Now we got the rest timer in here. The rest timer on something like single leg squats is going to be a little longer typically.

Uh and the reason being is when we do unilateral work, so we're going let's say right leg, then we go left leg. you're under tension longer just based off the fact that you are doing two legs, meaning one leg at a time. Now, that tension over a longer period of time requires your body to recover a little bit more because we want to focus on good quality of movement.

So, in this case, we got about 2 minutes and 30 seconds that we use for the rest timer inside Peak Strength. So, it's sort of just telling you and that's exactly what Eden was just saying. Literally everything in Peak Strength, it does it for you.

You just have to show up and actually do the work. And you've got to do that for two, three, four, five years. And that's when you become an absolute freaking dog.

So a recommended strength standard for for football players, okay, the the big carryover that we see of the single leg squat is one vertical is very high. The uh so in our last testing of football guys, if they single leg squat over 300 lbs, and in most cases, this was 1 point around 1. 4 4 to 1.

5 times body weight. Okay, it was it was 92% of the time they had a 30 and 1/2 in vertical. So meaning if you could get over 300 lb, you should have a 30 plus inch vertical.

Like that's just going to happen. Okay. So in Eden's case, uh Eden probably weighs I don't know, let's say he weighs 190 to 200 somewhere in that R realm right now.

If he hits a 140 for a set of four reps, he's probably going to have a 30 plus inch vertical just based off of those numbers, which is I think he would probably smash like uh if we pushed him really heavy, he would probably get up to like a 330 for a triple um on single leg squat. So that's where we see the carryover there. We also will see the carryover with the 10 and the 20.

Okay, so the 10 and the 20 also we'll see with that first step. Uh, and we'll see with with the first with with your acceleration. Again, it goes back to to the ability to to to create a lot of stability in the hip and to put a lot of force into the ground.

Four good ones. Let's go. Come on.

Good. Come on. Up.

Good. Okay. So, Eden's got a set of seven on each at 100 kilos.

Okay. And the one thing with this is Eden's played in the the D2 semifinals uh at Mines. Uh he plays for one of the best D2 football teams in the entire country, Kutztown.

Last year they had a buy in the first round of the playoffs. He's all conference. He's an absolute monster.

And if you think about Come on. Come on. Good.

Putting weight on your back, squatting on one freaking leg, good speed. The hard part here is it's a lot mental, right? And a lot of the physical development come on good is mental.

But when you're someone like Eden who was playing, you know, red shirt as a freshman, playing getting lots of playing time last year, dominating at as a sophomore now going in when you're used to doing like a single leg squat. I'm not saying that this is why he's so good, but it helps. It's just an added edge.

And if you can find every little thing that will give you an edge, that will give you an advantage, and those advantages create opportunity out on the field, that's the big factor here. Okay? So that's why every single thing and doing a set of seven is brutal.

It's brutal. It's hard. You sit there, you're like going into it like this is going to be really freaking hard for me to do.

But every single day when you have that thought, that thought slowly goes away and now you're not on the field going this dude's going to rock me. Instead, you know you're going to dude up. There's going to be a lot of bleeps in this one.

Okay, so he's hitting nine here. Basically like a stiff leg. uh trying to lengthen the crap out of his hammies, okay, and lower back.

Some decent weight, nothing crazy. This is going to help him. Then we're going to do we're pairing this with Nordics, so he'll rest about 30 seconds.

When we do the Nordics, he's only got four reps, so I want him to be pretty quality, trying to minimize the hip flexion. Now, it is challenging. It is a hard lift.

It is a hard movement, so Eden better do it as well as he possibly can or he'll get made fun of. >> Yeah. Yeah.

So, this is a also an exercise that like if you've got somebody, you know, and even if you want to do the first two or three going just down slow and then assist on the way back up. I think that's a fine way to make good progression is like good eccentric and then you can cheat on the way back up and then once maybe by the last one he hits it with a full uh Nordic. So give me four reps.

Hopefully his calves don't cramp. So you see there too like the hips came back. So the the goal would be by his second third set we can minimize and think like his his shoulders here are what are leading him back up.

And that's where it's really freaking hard because that's tied into the lower back and the glutes and the hamstrings and hamstrings. Glutes are responsible for hip extension. Now when when a lot of people that was four that's good if we could think about sprinting right you the more you extend here if you can't extend you're not going to be fast and that's the thing a lot of people there's a lot of research on Nordics um and and and around the health of the biceps forous right and they'll say well it's just for knee flexion it's just for knee flexion but if we are holding and we're able to keep that extended more that will transfer to high-speed sprinting.

Okay? So, it isn't just about knee flexion with the with the Nordic. And when we're pairing these together, he's coming back up.

He's extending. So, we want to think about that and how all the lifts in the gym will carry over to what he's doing when he's projecting in in a period of acceleration. You know, think about him out on the football field.

He has to uh project really well from the hip to be able to accelerate quickly. So, that's where all these things sort of piece together. um when we're thinking through and building out that program for the entire year and for the entire session really, we want to think through the big lifts that carry over.

Okay, so we sort of look at the assessments as we've got our assessments that carry over to the best the you know over to the field. Okay, so we know certain lifts, certain speed uh exercises, they're either used in football testing or they're used in football testing because they have a good carryover. There's there's really two reasons there.

So we want to train semi towards those tests more so towards the field. But then the next thing is we we mine down a little bit deeper and we say okay what accessories can we use to build the main lifts. So then we want to think through okay we use these accessories to build the main lifts or the to build the main movements.

The movements could be a brow a you know a vertical or a shuttle or a 10. And then the next step when we're laying out programming, especially at the elite level with someone like Eden, is okay, does he need this to push one of those other key metrics, one of those key assessments, or does he need this for himself because he might have issues in his own movement pattern uh based off of his own quality, off of his own movement quality, off of his own, you know, genetics or or maybe injuries in the past, things like that. So, we've got to really think through all of those different aspects when we're laying out the the entire program.

Good. And even you see that he has a hip shift. But the big thing here is he's doing a good job controlling on the eccentric.

That's what I really want out of these is like, can he control that as well as possible? Okay. And it's a it's an interesting movement.

Let's do one more set here. It's an interesting movement where I almost like to think about you you want to show off like I I know this sounds sort of weird but you you want to show off like a chicken shows off their chest, right? Uh they puff their chest out, a rooster.

So I want that to happen on the way down to force hip extension. And then you want to think about almost like through the head through the traps is how you're leading back up to to try to to try to keep that extended as much as possible from the pivot point which is at the at the knee. Okay.

So that's sort of like a weird that's like a visual that I have that no one else on the planet might have. So that might be totally worthless to you if you're watching it right now, but it was helpful for me. >> One more of each and then we're going to do one ab exercise.

Good. It's actually interesting, too, just looking at Eden's calves. I was thinking this yesterday when Jaden was running, seeing the calves fire relative to the hamstrings.

You could put those back, Eden, and we'll do the the core the ab exercise over there. Seeing the calves fire when he's doing the hamstring movements, um, is one thing. And then when you're watching the ankle and the calf fire when someone's doing like a pogo hop or pogo jump, something like that, which which we do a lot of on an athlete day, what they do on Wednesday or Thursday when they're doing their acceleration work.

Um it it's interesting to see the different types of calves. Uh Edens are a little bit more gastrobased, which is why he can produce a lot more power. Uh when you have someone who's more sobbased, that's somebody like you would see like a 400 runner, 100 meter runner, they'll have a higher top end usually, but maybe not be as as good at acceleration.

And that's just a one that's one thing I think of note to keep in mind, too, when you're writing someone's training program. Okay, we'll go give me a give me a five and we're going to go like past the plate where the plate will be on your shins. You do a V up and then you bring it into your hands.

Oh god, I don't want to do this cuz I'm old and Okay, so he's going to go like this. Okay, so he tries to go here. Grab >> he still can do it.

>> Yo, you got to see if you have 25. So we'll go we'll go like Yeah. Right there.

One, two, three, four. You got to keep hammering these. So, I'm not like I would rather him do heavy front squats, heavy cleans, than to isolate the abs.

But, I do think there's benefit to doing this. I I will say that, especially when it's linked in with the hips. When it's linked in with the hips, I do think uh there there's big benefit there.

I've been playing around lately too with the reverse Thomas stretch which is interesting. See if you give me like I have no idea how many this is. It's like five.

>> Okay. >> Yeah. Okay.

Good. So, we'll rest about a minute and then we'll hit this again. Then he'll be done with that.

So, that's the other thing. If nothing else, you want an ab exercise that you can do in five minutes and just get slaughtered and you'll feel it tomorrow. This is this is perfect.

It's past the plate. It's like one of the main stays inside peak strength. Uh, and I I do think especially if you're someone who has to post up on somebody here as you come off the edge or or even um you know jumping up for a ball and if you're a defender, right, and you have to jump up for the ball when you land to be stable.

I do think there's some benefit to doing direct ab exercises, but I think the bigger benefit is more so from a single leg or from a clean because you you tend to compress a little bit and you stay a little bit more upright then. So, you're using more of the hips and more of the posterior chain along with the trunk, along with the abs. Uh, but I I still think there's some benefit.

But I also think it's it's important when an athlete a lot of athletes want to just feel their abs a little bit. You know, they just want that mental that mental aspect of it, the edge of of feeling. All right, I don't feel soft in the in my abs.

And that's okay. Okay, Eden. I guess later today I got to make Jaden and Jason then do cleans.

They got >> Yeah. You might as well just do the whole workout that you just did. >> The whole How many is that?

>> Three. Four. >> Okay, perfect.

So, this is a whole peak strength workout. You guys can use this today. Click the first link in the description.

You can head over to peakstrength. app, the Google Play Store, or the Apple iOS store. If you want more workouts like this that are football related, click on this card right here.

Because remember, freaks, if you want to become a champion, you've always got to cultivate your power. Peace. You're cramping.

Yo, you cramping on there, y'all. He's going to be putting his seat belt on. Cramping.