SEPTEMBER 17, 2015 – day four
AFTER going to the baseball last night, Bill gave us the morning off and said to come in at 10am rather than 8am to get a good sleep.
When we arrived, I jumped on the bike for 10 minutes then Bill spoke to us about the session ahead. Today’s session was mainly about incorporating a lot of the basic movements now into agility and jumping.
Again, the morning was broken up into two parts.
The first part was practicing the new movements and getting into the swing of things.
These drills were very tough to get the hang of as it was all about rhythm, timing and planting the foot down on the heel, rather than the toe.
The challenging part of these exercises was that all my life, when I jump and then land, I land with a bent knee and drop really low. But all of these actions are about landing with stability around the knee and landing in a position that enables you to make a second move and “play the next play”.
Once I got the timing and balance right, it felt really natural when we went into some running exercises.
Bill was impressed with how quickly I adapted.
The second part of the session was a lower body circuit. It incorporated three sets of four exercises that were all about eccentric. Eccentric is about lengthening the muscle when under fatigue.
The first exercise was completing a squat a second for 20 seconds, followed by a 30 second break. Then I would transition into 20 single leg box step-ups with a jump, followed by a 30 second break. Then I completed 20 lunges in 30 seconds, and 10 deep squats into a jump.
After a two-minute break, in between each set, I was done.
It fatigued me so much that I nearly fell over on the last few squat jumps, as the muscles in the legs had so much lactate in them.
Session two
An off legs session, which I was stoked about, considering my legs were dead, turned out to be a surprise. We would be doing a lot of leg works, but in a very distinctive and enjoyable way.
Every movement and action I did from the morning session – with my quick jumps and stiffness through the legs – was incorporated into gymnastics now.
As shown in the video below, I was combining a lot of my moves together so they all flowed and made it football related.
It was really entertaining and tiring, but at the same time, good to have a change up from what I had been doing each day.
At the end of each jump and roll, I would then charge at a bag and tackle it. Boy did it feel good to just hit something and take all my frustration from this year out on one bag!
Go Dees!
