American Football Absolute Strengths

Physical and mental strength plays a major role in a football player’s life. Football is a twelve month process, which consists of off- season (six months), in -season (five months), and the Transition (one month). During off-season the football player’s main goal is gaining strength, size, and much power, in-season they continue to practice and work on maintaining the gains in strength during the off-season, and the transition is when they rest and recuperate their body from the physical exercise. Football players are constantly bumped and knocked down during practices

Football and track and field involve repetitive bouts of quick acceleration for short and long periods, sudden changes in direction of maximum force may contribute to the high rate of hamstring strain commonly found amongst these sports. (Ropiak & Bosco, 2012). Regardless of all the aforementioned studies, there is not one exact cause of injury during high speed, kicking sports (Lees, Asai, Andersen, Nunome, & Sterzing,

Besides hand length, some other factors could also affect the strength of hand grip. Thus this experiment is done to investigate if athletes’ strong upper limb muscles also contribute to their high grip strength. The difference in the maximum right hand grip strength between college athletes and non-athletes were compared. The null hypothesis is that the maximum right hand grip strength is the same for college athletes and non-athletes. The alternative hypothesis is that the maximum right hand grip strength is different between college athletes and non-athletes.

There is a serious debate in the track and field community as to whether there is more benefit, namely increased distances, to be gained in the throwing events from improvements in technique versus improvements in strength. While this debate focuses primarily on the shot put and discus events, the events studied in this research, it is equally true for all the throwing events. As a significant part of the throwing community, the United States is thought of as a nation that focuses too much on strength, at the expense of technique.

Muscular endurance is being able to work a muscle or muscle group for a long period of time at less than maximum effort, (Amezdrox, G. Dickens, S, Hosford, G. and Davis, D. 2012). Muscular endurance was tested by completing a sit up and push up test. My rating for the sit up test were super and for the push up test my rating was excellent, (see appendix 1). These tests were chosen instead of others because if you have a strong core whilst playing touch football, it is seen that you can perform better and this is what these tests work on, (Touch Football Australia, 2013).

This article is about the typical time when sports scientists have been struggling with the employing the training load. It is generally recognized that well organized training program is important for best performance in athletes. Now days, it has been very hard to measure the training loads in athlete teams due to the difficulty in determining the numerous types of pressure faced during training and competition.

The kinematic factors that affect field athletes vary per sport. Every athlete in every sport require a different set of speed skills to maximize their performance. For “American” style football players every position requires a different skill set. Line men require more instant explosive speed to get off the line while receivers require a more stamina based speed. In other sports such as soccer the requirement is more endurance based as opposed to flat out speed. So by comparison speed is more important to a football player that a soccer player in the sense that explosive speed requires more from the muscular system in the initial 2 to 3 seconds that a soccer player does. Football player, for the most part, require a shorter stride length

Within the United States of America, football is emerging as one of the nation’s favorite pastimes. There are many facets of football that make football so exciting; which includes the remarkable speed and size of the athletes. In an article titled “In a Rose Bowl, a Chance to Study Size vs. Speed,” by Pete Thamel, Thamel (2010) describes football as a fascinating matchup of physics. With the ratios of speed to

Lu, Chien, Chang, and Hsu had two primary purposes for their study. These purposes were to determine if an examiner’s strength have an affect on the validity of knee manual muscle testing (MMT) strength measurements using a hand-held dynamometer (HHD), and whether increasing the forces applied by an examiner using a resistance-enhanced dynamometer (RED) would positively affect measurement validity.

The aim of this research is to compare each of these stretches, dynamic, static, and no stretching and to examine the effect these different warm-up routines have on performance in the vertical jump test. In a recent study with female collegiate athletes (ages 19 and above), all athletes were tested for a total of three weeks and each had to fulfill three procedures with one session per week along with one week in-between sessions. There were no specific order in the stretching as each were tested with a “five-minute light jog as a warm-up, followed by 8 minutes of one of the stretching protocols” (Dalrymple, Davis, Dwyer & Moir, 2010, p.149). Following the warm-ups, athletes were given five attempts of the countermovement vertical jump test along with one minute rest periods. All jumps were recorded and according to the calculations of the jumps, “there were no significant differences between the static stretching, dynamic stretching and no stretching” (Dalrymple, Davis, Dwyer & Moir, 2010, p.149).

Buhrle and Schnidtbleicher, (1977, cited in Hoff, 2005), observed that a significant relationship between an individual’s one repetition max, acceleration and speed exists. They found this to be reinforced by results of various jump tests. Acceleration and speed ability are important in a game of football, with sprinting taking place for 1-11% of the total distance covered in a typical match (Hoff, 2005). It was reported by Bangsbo et al., (2006) that sprint speeds have the potential to reach peak speeds of 32km km-h-1 with the average sprint distance being ~

Peak propulsive power (PP) has been identified as a determinant of athletic performance and training to develop peak power has become common practice in professional and amateur sport (Cronin & Sleivert, 2005; Haff & Nimphius, 2012; Hansen, Cronin, Pickering & Douglas, 2011; Kawamori & Haff, 2004). A countermovement jump (CMJ) has been established as an valid and reliable measure of PP (Markovic, Dizdar, Jukic & Cardinale, 2004; Sheppard Cormack, Taylor, McGuigan, & Newton 2008). Performance of CMJs on land under progressive loading produces a power curve displaying peak power and the decline of PP as the load increases (Haff & Nimphius, 2012; Kawamori & Haff, 2004; Sheppard et al., 2008; Stone et al, 2003). As the popularity of an aquatic environment increases as a training and rehabilitative tool, the purpose

Hand grip strength is often used as a predictor of whole body strength. Hand grip strength is a general term used by strength athletes, referring to the muscular strength and force that they can generate with their hands. The strength of a hand grip is the result of forceful flexion of all finger joints, thumbs, and wrists with the maximum voluntary force that the subject is able to exert under normal biokinetic conditions. Hand grip strength is a physiological variable that is affected by a number of factors including age, gender and body size among others (Koley et al., 2009). Handgrip strength is a general indicator of muscle strength and linked with premature mortality (Cheung et al., 2013). Reliable and valid evaluation of hand strength

These two athletes are trained differently due to the different physical demands of their sports. Soccer players have to train more footwork and leg muscles than basketball players. Basketball players need to focus more on vertical jump than soccer players. The significance of number of sets, reps, rest intervals, weights used, and frequency of training, should be discussed to help establish a line of thinking as to why and how the programs were designed.

Dennis Roscoe (2009) states that power training is an exercise that requires maximum force exertion. The reason power training is controversial is because of an issue Faigenbaum (2010) highlights in his research –‘Power training among young athletes’. Power training can cause huge stress on tendons and ligaments, which can have serious negative repercussions later in an athlete’s career. In modern sport there has been a huge push towards power training and weight training which has resulted in more and more young athletes taking part. Although there are potential issues with power and strength training, one way to improve explosive speed is to increase the overall functional strength throughout the entire body. This is because Zatsiorsky, V. (1995) explains improving overall strength levels will allow athletes to produce greater amounts of force while at the same time decreasing the time spent in contact with the ground. Being able to fully utilise the strength gains obtained through training in a powerful motion is imperative to improving explosive