A coach argues that banded resistance training for offensive linemen creates bad mechanics, pulling players backward and away from proper positioning. He demonstrates the problem with an athlete named Taylor, then shows how a weighted vest preserves correct movement while adding load. Bands belong in the weight room, not in pass-set drills.
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Today we're going to talk about a training technique that we've seen become more and more popular on social media, and that is the banded pass set or the resisted pass set. Now, the whole goal of this, or the idea behind this training technique, is to add resistance to the pass set, making it more difficult as the player moves through his progression to ultimately make it easier when there's no resistance. And it sounds great on paper. The idea, it makes, it makes sense when you just look at it from the surface. When you dive deeper into the mechanics behind the pass set and how it has changed when you add resistance, you see that it causes some movement errors or some improper movement that we, we are ingraining into our athletes that will ultimately hurt them when we get to P2P. So this has been used with sprinting as well, and by adding resistance, whether it is from parachutes or sleds, And research has shown, and it's, it's been, it's become general knowledge now that elite runners actually have their motor programming altered when they are using weighted sleds for a long period of time and actually make themselves slower because it breaks down the movement patterns that they have from their max effort speed compared to their acceleration speed. So how does that relate to offensive line play? Well, let's check it out. Taylor is going to take a pass set here with some resistance, and we're going to talk about some of the changes that we see in this pass set when we add more and more resistance. So Taylor, why don't you take 2 or 3 sets? All right, we'll pause it right here. As you can see, Taylor is leaning backwards right now. He is in an upright position. He is relying on inertia to carry himself backwards. Rather than driving and catching. If I let go of this band right now, which I'm not going to do to save Taylor, he'd fall right over. When we're adding resistance, we're changing the mechanics of the movement. We, we, we can challenge the movement through resistance, but it has to be proper resistance. Adding a band, pulling our torso horizontally is going to change the demands of our muscles, the demands of our body as we move through space. So we're going to come back and discuss how to more effectively implement weighted resistance into pass sets. Welcome back. So we took off the silly bands from Taylor, put on a weight vest, and we're going to talk to you how to— about how to more effectively implement added resistance into our pass set. And yes, bands have a place in training. They have a place in the weight room. They also have a place in skill acquisition when it comes to our iso holds and our more of our posture building techniques. But when it comes to actually taking pass sets, let's try to avoid using bands. They might look cool, but ultimately, what are we ingraining into our athletes? Are we ingraining some cool social media clips to promote what, what you're doing, or are you trying to get some better huddle clips for your highlight film? So we threw the weight vest on to Taylor. We're going to talk about how this kind of changes the, the nature of the resistance that we're adding. So before we saw with the band, it's pulling away from your body. It is pulling you in a direction opposite of gravity. That alone is a red flag when it comes to movement, especially a pass set when we're moving backwards in a fixed position. Adding the weight vest just adds more gravitational load to Taylor. So the distribution of weight on him is going to be relatively similar to what it would be when he's actually performing a pass set. You could say this is just like adding shoulder pads onto him. So we add a light load. We have him set up in his stance. Why don't you go take a pass set? Face towards me. You can see now he'll take a set and he doesn't have to excessively lean backwards. He doesn't have to fight that horizontal resistance going against him. And ultimately, he's adding more resistance to his moving pass set. And one more point about the bands. Some people argue that using bands in training a pass set improves your readiness for P2P. But when you really think about what is going on in the pressure to pressure phase, we are not being pulled away from our midline of a body. The defender is actually pushing us. So if we really wanted to train P2P, Why not just throw, throw in some sets on an X-Bag? It doesn't have to look super complex. It doesn't have to involve bands pulling you, which it's each and every way. Just focus on simplicity, focus on quality of movement, and you'll see vast amounts of improvement over time. Thank you.
