It seems we've entered an age where every summer we hear about a football player who has been hospitalized or died from heat exhaustion. Why has dealing with the heat become such an issue? Thirty, forty, and fifty years ago, football players practiced all day in the heat with little to no water and yet they didn’t die. I have to believe it's our way of life.

Back in the day, kids spent their summer outside either playing or working. Today, kids only go outside when they have to. They don’t play pickup games in the yard or ride their bikes to a different neighborhood to go play with friends. Once again, why has dealing with the heat become such an issue? Our bodies are accustomed to being inside with the air conditioning cranked. Now, we ask our bodies to adjust to extreme heat and they don’t know how to respond. This is how I prepare my football players for summer practice in the south during the month of August.

My plan for summer workouts is to get my athletes outside has much as possible. They aren't going to go outside on their own, so it's my job to make sure they're accustomed to the heat. Our summer routine follows a five-day work schedule. Mondays and Fridays are spent in the weight room. Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays are spent outside. In the weight room, our team has been following the 5/3/1 program for almost two years now. We have seen great successes with it. On Mondays, we deadlift and military press with supplemental lifts and upper body conditioning (I’ll describe this later). On Fridays, we squat and bench and perform supplemental lifts and upper body conditioning.

On Tuesdays through Thursdays, we're outside the entire time, usually about two hours. Tuesdays and Thursdays are our conditioning days. We run and run a lot. I'm at a small school. Therefore, we have to play both ways and special teams. So I make sure we're in shape and ready to play the first game. We run short, medium, and long sprints on both days. To make sure my athletes are giving their full effort, I put them on the clock for every sprint. If you don’t make the time, the sprint doesn’t count. This has worked to our advantage because the first game of the past two seasons have come down to the fourth quarter, and we have won both games because we are in better shape than the other team.

Now it’s time for the real heat acclimation. Wednesdays are our outside work day. On Wednesdays, we do a mix of resistance training and conditioning. I see how badly the athletes want to play football in a two-hour period. I have roughly 55 players on the roster. My goal for Wednesdays is lots of work with short rest. Therefore, I set up 6–8 stations for them to rotate around and spend 40–55 minutes of total work.

Work stations:

  • Tire flips
  • Prowler sprints
  • Sled dragging: Depending on how their legs feel and how much work we're doing, we will sprint with the sled or perform hand over hand pulls with the sled.
  • Medicine balls: We usually perform throws.
  • Sandbags: We perform shouldering, burpees plus front squats plus presses, and one-arm rows. Once again, if the legs need a break, we focus more on upper body movements.
  • Kettlebells: I use complexes. We work for 30 seconds and rest for 30 seconds. The work to rest ratio changes.
  • Sledge hammer: We do strikes on a tire for 100 total reps, progressing to 150 by the end of the summer.
  • Water station: I like to throw this in just to break up the numbers and give them a little rest time.

In the past, we have finished the day with hill sprints. This year we've moved into a new school and no longer have a hill close by that we can run up.

Upper body conditioning

On Mondays and Fridays, we finish our workouts with a barbell complex and battling fire hoses (not ropes). I use fire hoses for two reasons—the coupling at the end of the hose weighs a couple pounds which adds to the difficulty and they were free! We use the hoses right outside the weight room, so we're back working in the heat. It keeps the numbers down in the weight room with the bar complexes. The two groups rotate after completing each routine.

I feel like this routine has helped our GPP for camp as well as weed out the ones who don’t really want to be there. Fortunately, we haven't had any heat related issues during football practice, and I truly believe it's because of how we work through the summer. Like I said, kids today aren't going outside. We have to get them outside to prepare their bodies for what is to come.