With high school football coming to an end, many high performance football training dungeons and gyms are prepping for off-season training. Many things go through our heads here at our place—designing our speed camps for our young athletes going into high school, prepping our professionals for combine testing at the CFL draft, and of course, keeping the big guys down to only three whoppers with heavy mayo a week.
All successful coaches who work in an industrial warehouse type gym must figure out how to maximize space without compromising training principals. I’m sure we’d all love to get our hands on a new piece of equipment to shake things up—and laugh at the expense of the UPS guy who has to make the delivery. However, because we’re covered in three feet of snow for half of the year, maximizing our footprint as well as conditioning have always been a challenge.
With this article, we hope to shed light on a forgotten exercise that we’ve had great success with in our Xplode football program. I first saw this exercise in Charles Poliquin and Art McDermott’s book, Applied Strongman for Sport. In our gym, this exercise has been dubbed the “poor man’s Jammer.” I believe it has superior carryover to the gridiron, more so than the commercially made machine.
By simply using band tension, the log jammer is easily adjusted to fit the height of any athlete, so we don’t waste set up time when changing from a six foot, seven inch offensive lineman to a five foot, ten inch cornerback. The log jammer also uses band tension to accommodate resistance, so a player can begin very explosively, learn to accelerate through the movement, and lockout strong
As you can see in the pictures, on the Elite FTS Collegiate Power Rack you can wrap the high tension bands around the chin up bar and run the log through the other end. The other band, which serves as horizontal tension, can easily be hooked around the plate storage pegs. This band can vary depending on the athlete’s capabilities.
You can use the log jammer for conditioning similar to the way coaches use different bag hitting drills to condition their players. We’ve experienced results by doing cluster training with the log jammer. This allows us to rotate multiple athletes through at one time while also conditioning them into game shape.
We have our athletes perform five explosive repetitions and rest for 10–15 seconds. Then they perform five repetitions. This is repeated until 25 total repetitions are done. This is one cluster. The next athlete quickly jumps in and gets his set started. By working at this pace, we’ve worked 6–8 athletes in a single group without compromising rest periods.
The ground based jammer is a great piece if you have the space in your facility for something that makes a large footprint and serves only one purpose. For some other gyms where space and money may be an issue, the log jammer is a great alternative when trying to maximize your floor space and get a lot of quality work done that will transfer from the gym to the gridiron.
Chris McDole and Dave Beakley own and operate McDole Performance Systems in Winnipeg, Canada, where they specialize in working with various athletes ranging from youth to professionals in multiple sports including the CFL, NHL, and UFC. For more information, visit www.mcdoleperformance.com.
Elite Fitness Systems strives to be a recognized leader in the strength training industry by providing the highest quality strength training products and services while providing the highest level of customer service in the industry. For the best training equipment, information, and accessories, visit us at www.EliteFTS.com.