How to structure your individual period

ou have 15 minutes every day to improve your D-Line. What you do in these 15 minutes separates mediocre D-Lines from the great ones.

Today I'll be showing you how to use these 15 minutes to establish the fundamentals, work important skills and grow your D-Line.

The Structure

For any individual there is a simple yet extremely effective template any coach or player can use to improve their D-Line.

The template goes like this...

Get off

The most important skill any D-Line can develop is get off. A great get off helps you generate power quickly off the ball and challenges the mechanics of the O-Line (as seen below).

So, for the first five minutes of indy, have your D-Line practice getting off from an attack react, read attack and jet stance.

To do this, line up four D-Linemen and have them get off when the ball moves from a react attack, attack react and jet stance with right hand and then left hand on the ground.

Recognition

D-Line is all about having the correct response to a stimulus. Whether your opponent is scooping, double teaming or pass setting your D-Line will need to have precision reactions to defeat each of these blocks.

So to build up your D-Line's ability to recognize and react I highly suggest reserving 5 minutes in indy every day to execute the 2 on 1 drill.

By using the 2 on 1 drill you can construct any look your D-Line will see and build up their ability to quickly recognize and react to any block.

General skill work

So once you've practiced the core fundamentals of get off and recognition, the final 5 minutes of your individual should include general skill work where you practice a run or pass skill.

But how do you decide what drill to do during this time? That's where you can use the Pell Method. In the Pell method you need to answer 4 questions to determine what drill you use during general skill work.

1. What's the scheme?
2. What's the skill you need your D-Lineman to learn to be successful in the scheme?
3. What drill will help you to practice this skill?
4. How much time should you spend on this drill?

Note: The time you spend repping this drill will be based on two factors

1. How well or poorly your player is executing the skill (if poor execution rep until improvement, if good execution polish)
2. The opponent you are facing (don't practice pass rush drills if your opponent runs 95% of the time)

So let's say that your team, who runs a 4-3 defense, has been struggling against doubles and is facing an opponent who runs a ton of power. In this scenario you would use the Pell Method as seen bellow.

1. Scheme? 4-3
2. Skill? 3-tech defeating double
3. Drill? Double splits
4. Time? Rep skill throughout week in indy until improvement

So for this week at practice I would spend the last 5 minutes of my indy time every day practicing double splits or some other double drill with my interior D-Lineman.

A final word

If you find that your players are taking longer than you'd like to learn certain skills, remember what Zig Ziglar, the famous self-development author, once said...

"Repetition is the mother of learning, the father of action, which makes it the architect of accomplishment."

Well that's it for today.

Hope you enjoyed it!

See you again next week.

And whenever you are ready, there are 2 ways I can help you:

1. Learn how to turn your D-Line into a block destruction machine here (1,100+ students)
2. Learn how to develop top tier pass rushers and a lethal pass rush attack here (1,000+ students)