By: Sean Wells
Football Conditioning, Part 2: Strength, Speed, and the Questions Parents Actually Ask
The first article on football conditioning generated a wave of follow-up questions from parents and athletes. Good questions deserve direct answers, so here’s Part 2.
Does Hard Conditioning Build Mental Toughness? Does Football Conditioning improve mental toughness?
No. This is the most common assumption we hear, and it’s backwards.
Running an athlete into the ground doesn’t build mental toughness. It builds fatigue, injury risk, and in a lot of cases, resentment toward training. Confidence comes from seeing real progress, not from surviving a punishing workout with no measurable purpose.
We broke this down fully in Mental Toughness and Sports Performance. The short version: athletes build genuine toughness through consistent training, clear standards, and visible improvement in their numbers. Beat-down workouts don’t create that. They just create sore, discouraged athletes.
How We Track Football Athletes’ Speed and Power
We currently track over 100 athletes at OC Sports Performance, and the process is simple by design.
We log flying 10-yard and flying 20-yard sprint times, standing broad jump, and vertical jump for every athlete. Staff, athletes, and parents all see the same numbers. Nobody has to guess whether training is working.
We also push athletes to track their own numbers. An athlete who writes down his own sprint time becomes a participant in his training instead of a passenger. That single habit changes how seriously a 14-year-old takes a Wednesday afternoon workout in the heat.
Strength Training and Conditioning Aren’t Separate Programs
Coaches love to talk about strength training and conditioning like they’re two unrelated boxes to check. They’re not. One directly drives the other.
If an athlete squats hard on Monday and wakes up brutally sore on Tuesday, his sprint times on Wednesday will suffer. We see this pattern play out inside our own gym constantly. A poorly sequenced strength program will quietly sabotage a conditioning program, and a poorly sequenced conditioning program will do the same to strength gains. Program both together, or don’t bother separating them on paper.
Our Take on Power Cleans and Power Snatches
We don’t use them anymore, and we won’t apologize for that.
OC ran a barbell club for several years and had real success with Olympic weightlifting. The lifts work. The problem is time. Teaching a clean well takes weeks of coaching, and most youth athletes never own the technique well enough to load it heavily.
We replaced Olympic lifting with jumps, bounds, and other plyometric work. These movements teach faster, load safely sooner, and give us a cleaner number to track (jump height, jump distance) instead of a technical lift that hides whether the athlete actually improved or just got better at faking the catch position.
Strength’s Role in Sprint Speed
For a beginner athlete, one who hasn’t strength trained in a structured program, getting stronger is the fastest way to get faster. Period.
Strength improves an athlete’s rate of force development. A higher strength-to-weight ratio means more force into the ground per stride, and more force into the ground means more speed. This is the single highest-leverage move for a novice athlete, full stop.
That relationship changes at higher levels. Once an athlete is already strong and already fast, simply adding more strength stops moving the needle on its own. At that point, speed work, technique, and power expression take over as the primary driver. This is exactly why we track and retest constantly in Sports Performance Gains: the plan changes as the athlete develops, and the numbers tell us when that shift needs to happen.
How We Test Medicine Ball Throws and Upper Body Power
Three tests, used consistently, give us everything we need:
Paused bench press. No bounce, a full stop at the chest, controlled and repeatable.
Plyometric push-up on a jump mat. We measure how high the hands lift off the mat. Simple, and brutally honest about upper body power output.
Max-distance medicine ball throw. Back against the wall, same ball weight every test, distance measured and logged.
None of these three is the “best” test in isolation. Consistency is what makes any test valuable. Test it the same way every time, retest on a schedule, and the numbers will tell the real story.
Why We Program Aerobic Base Work for Football Players
Athletes need general physical preparedness, and low-intensity aerobic work builds that foundation without beating up the body.
Carrying kettlebells, dragging a sled, carrying a sandbag, pushing a sled, or anything similar at a conversational pace, with minimal eccentric loading, builds work capacity while keeping recovery cost low. This kind of training speeds up recovery between max-effort bursts, which is exactly what a football player needs. A player sprints or blocks at full effort for three to five seconds, then does it again thirty seconds later. Faster recovery between those bursts is the whole game.
Why Most Programs Ignore Energy Systems Entirely
Good question, and honestly, we don’t fully know the answer. The research on energy systems and how they apply to football conditioning is more accessible today than it’s ever been.
Some of it comes down to coaches avoiding new approaches. Some of it comes down to a closed mind and an unwillingness to experiment. Some of it comes down to fear: test a new system, get worse results for a season, and it feels like a wasted year.
We’ve tested and retested inside our own gym for years. We keep what works and throw out what doesn’t. That process only works if you’re willing to try something new, especially when the research already backs your position.
Football Conditioning Part 2
I want to thank everyone who sent me an email/text/dm concerning football conditioning part 1. I appreciate the questions and feedback and hope I addressed the questions here in football conditioning part 2.
Ready to Build a Smarter Program?
Strength, conditioning, mental toughness, and tracking all point back to the same principle: measure everything, and let the numbers drive the decisions.
Book a free intro with OC Sports Performance, and let’s build a program around your athlete’s actual numbers, not guesswork.
