Article about uniqueness of "All Mental-No Pads" approach to start of NFL training camp confuses me
http://sports.yahoo.com/nfl/news?slug=ap-raiders-cablescamp&prov=ap&type=lgns
It confuses me because this is almost exactly what my teams in middle and high school did except we also had heavy doses of physical conditioning, which this article doesn't mention. I've never actually watched the start of any other teams' training camp, but until now I've never run across any evidence that the "all mental, no pads" at the beginning approach WASN'T in wide use in all of American football, be it youth, high school, college or pro.
I attended a small high school so we never cut anyone, which is one of the main purposes of NFL training camp. And there were laws that regulated when and how often we could have official team practices during the year, an issue the NFL doesn't have to deal with as much and means their players are much more mentally and physically prepared at the start of training camp than my teams were. But still my coaches explained the value of repeated no-contact drills as way to mentally prepare for full-contact drills and also to reduce the chances of injuries and I took it as a given that this was a wide-spread principle.
I realize that rookies probably do alot of no-contact stuff in their earlier mini-camp and returning players shouldn't need it as much, but still rushing right into full contact seems kind of counter-productive to me. My team got a new head coach at end of my freshman season and he could only take a week off his current job to coach that year's Spring Training for us, so he chose to do full contact the whole week as a way to cram as much training into our limited time as possible. But during that week we concentrated on fundamentals and only ran a limited numbers of plays and didn't have any kind of scrim at the end because we didn't have time for anything else. And despite all the neck exercises we did in the weight room during the off season, we all still had incredibly sore necks after the first day of practice because it takes awhile for your body to get used to wearing a heavy football helmet and exercising and hitting other people with it on. Is this not a problem for all those teams that go full contact on the first day?
So either I was mistaken or things have changed alot in the last 25-odd years or the reporter doesn't know what he's talking about when he says the Oakland Raider drills are "like nothing they’ve been through before as football players." Surely some of the players have done something similar in one of their previous levels of football, correct? Does anyone else have knowledge of this issue?
It confuses me because this is almost exactly what my teams in middle and high school did except we also had heavy doses of physical conditioning, which this article doesn't mention. I've never actually watched the start of any other teams' training camp, but until now I've never run across any evidence that the "all mental, no pads" at the beginning approach WASN'T in wide use in all of American football, be it youth, high school, college or pro.
I attended a small high school so we never cut anyone, which is one of the main purposes of NFL training camp. And there were laws that regulated when and how often we could have official team practices during the year, an issue the NFL doesn't have to deal with as much and means their players are much more mentally and physically prepared at the start of training camp than my teams were. But still my coaches explained the value of repeated no-contact drills as way to mentally prepare for full-contact drills and also to reduce the chances of injuries and I took it as a given that this was a wide-spread principle.
I realize that rookies probably do alot of no-contact stuff in their earlier mini-camp and returning players shouldn't need it as much, but still rushing right into full contact seems kind of counter-productive to me. My team got a new head coach at end of my freshman season and he could only take a week off his current job to coach that year's Spring Training for us, so he chose to do full contact the whole week as a way to cram as much training into our limited time as possible. But during that week we concentrated on fundamentals and only ran a limited numbers of plays and didn't have any kind of scrim at the end because we didn't have time for anything else. And despite all the neck exercises we did in the weight room during the off season, we all still had incredibly sore necks after the first day of practice because it takes awhile for your body to get used to wearing a heavy football helmet and exercising and hitting other people with it on. Is this not a problem for all those teams that go full contact on the first day?
So either I was mistaken or things have changed alot in the last 25-odd years or the reporter doesn't know what he's talking about when he says the Oakland Raider drills are "like nothing they’ve been through before as football players." Surely some of the players have done something similar in one of their previous levels of football, correct? Does anyone else have knowledge of this issue?