As my career progressed so did my workout routine.  I evolved and adapted over time.

I do not feel that there is a specific workout to make your snaps faster. You use your entire body to longsnap so I focused on getting my body as strong as possible overall.

When I was in high school, I did your typical Olympic style lifting. I would bench press, squat, hang clean, power clean and do all of the other auxiliary lifting like curls, shoulder press, etc.  I will have to say, I wasn’t much of a workout warrior then. I enjoyed the basketball court too much.

While there is not one perfect ‘longsnap’ workout, this was one of my favorite auxiliary moves. It was a modified lift using the lat pulldown machine. I would stand facing the hanging bar with my arms outstretched gripping the bar near the center (hands close together and the bar being close to eye level). From there I would pull the bar down to my waist. This mimics the motion of the snap. This was the only longsnapping specific lift that I would do.

I continued the traditional, Olympic style of lifting throughout college as well.

Once my college career started coming to a close, I trained with Chip Smith of Chip Smith Performance. He is well known all over the world for his work with athletes and his NFL Combine training. He introduced me to sports/position specific training with my longsnapping. He would connect me up to bungie cords that were attached to different parts of my body. We started to train hard and get fit with ankle weights as well as attached bungies to my wrist, to work on overspeed snapping and resistance snapping. He would attach bungies to my hips and legs to work on setting after the snap.

I found this type of training to be a big help. As I moved into the pro ranks, this especially helped with being able to block better after the snap. I found that I was getting quicker getting out of my stance after the snap.

I added this to my workouts while I was in the pros. The bungie workout became part of my off season snapping program.

As I got older, my weight room workouts changed. I moved to a completely different style of training.

During the offseason after the Super Bowl in February 2007, I decided my body needed something different. I was 30+ and I was not getting the gains that I wanted from my old workouts. My body started to ache more and my recovery time was getting longer.

I started with a training system called ULTRA FIT/EVO SPORT. My brother in law, Dr. Tommy John, was a trainer with this system  and introduced me to it.

I started to see some gains again and my body felt so much better. I was trying to longsnap in the NFL as long as I could and this change in training helped me reach 16 years.

Figure out what training system works best for you to gain overall strength. This will help you to become the best longsnapper you can be.