Training camp bar raised every year

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 01/06/2010 (5919 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Funny how when football training camp commences on the field it almost always kicks off on a Sunday, the same day when later that night a similar unveiling of new bodies and chassis is paraded up and down Portage during the city phenomenon called cruise night.

In both cases, most everyone shows up ready to display what they have been working on during their downtime. You always get some models that are just for show, other types that are sleepers and deceptively quick, some that are held together by duct tape and some vintage vehicles that represent an era when things were built in a different way.

For the last few years he was here, you used to be able to count on Barrin Simpson like clockwork to explain how, now that training camp has arrived, the hard part of the year — the off-season — is over, and only the fun and easy part — playing football — remains to be done.

While I share slightly less enthusiasm about how much fun training camp is, I do agree the regular season of football can be considered a significant reprieve and a much-needed celebration from the regimen of what many players follow in the off-season.

This year marked my sixth consecutive winter of training under the tutelage of Jeff Fisher at Elite Performance Centres, and just like the countdown he keeps on the community wipe-board indicating how many days are left before I leave his gym for six months, I, too, am almost as happy to be stepping away from all of the preparation that has gone on and to try out the newly rebuilt engine on the field.

If you look to the origins of training camp in football, you would find the initial purposes of this period of intense football practice are different from the purposes today. Training camp used to be the three-week period in the CFL and six-week period in the NFL where players would come to get into shape and start exercising all those wasted and dormant muscles they really hadn’t used since early in the winter.

The goals today are vastly different. First of all, training camp is no longer for players to get into shape, it’s to reboot your football IQ. It is expected that you arrive ready to play, and depending upon your position, in very close proximity to your ideal playing weight. These days, camp is simply there to indoctrinate you into new schemes and systems and to reprogram your body with all the position-specific movements your position requires. So what you did in terms of preparation in the off-season largely influences how successful you will be in the season, which is why where you choose to train from December through May is so critical.

Since this was my sixth off-season at Elite you might figure Jeff Fisher simply dusts off the same old defensive tackle program specs I used the year before and presses repeat, but that’s simply not the case. Football evolves every season along with the athletes playing it. Every year, people are figuring out how to play bigger, stronger, smarter and faster and if you’re not involved in an off-season program that is continually progressive and raising the bar, you will be left behind no matter how determined you are as an individual.

When players show up for camp and step onto the field on Sunday, not only are they showcasing their skills in football but also all the work and programs they have suffered and toiled through the last four to six months.

So after a long off-season, a fresh coat of wax, some bodywork, new airbags and a few new parts, the time is finally here to take the protective covers off of the players that are now tuned and tinkered to the specifications of their drivers, and hopefully show and impress on Maroons Road just like they do so regularly on Portage on Sunday evenings.

Doug Brown, always a hard-hitting defensive lineman and frequently a hard-hitting columnist, appears Tuesdays in the Free Press.