It is a question we have all asked ourselves at some point. Unfortunately, for most of us, the one key ingredient to fulfilling the dream of becoming a professional NFL player has been sadly missing – talent.
If you have that core ingredient and can set your sights on playing in the big leagues instead of daydreaming about NFL spreads and Fantasy Football, what does the path to professional football look like?
Read on to find out…
Strength and Conditioning is Talent
In truth talent is too broad to describe the essential skills and training requirements that an aspiring professional NFL player must meet. The ball and what you do with it is just one aspect of a football players repertoire.
Strength, speed, and agility are all key attributes that every NFL player must excel in, regardless of their position. Offensive linemen, for example, typically need to weigh between 300 and 320 pounds while maintaining elite-level mobility.
Unsurprisingly, strict adherence to a strength and conditioning program is necessary to marry these two opposing skills – colossal strength and feline agility. Compound movements focusing on explosive power development, such as squats, deadlifts, and power cleans, are all key exercises for an aspiring NFL player.
To promote mobility and cardiovascular performance, players must also couple traditional fitness exercises, such as stamina-building long runs and heart-racing sprints, with more advanced techniques, such as resistance sprints and plyometric exercises.
However, doing all these exercises will not be enough to turn you into NFL material. To become that, you’ll need to be in the top 1% of people who can do this training and be genetically gifted so that your body responds correctly to that training.
As a personal example, I have been training for over a decade, incorporating strength and cardiovascular exercise into my weekly routines. I perform well in races and excel in all of my strength metrics, but I weigh 190lbs, and if I were to try to train like an NFL athlete, it would kill me!
(NFL athletes’ strength outputs are beyond the vast majority of us mere mortals.)
Mentality is Talent
Plenty of people in the country have the natural fitness talent and biological markers to complete NFL training and footballing talent. However, only a few of those people could become professional football players.
That’s because a vast amount of what makes a professional comes from what’s in between their ears—their mentality. First, they must stick to a routine and embrace the suck on a daily basis.
Secondly, in responding to the numerous and frequent setbacks involved in elite-level sports injury, poor performance, being dropped, etc.
Thirdly, they become obsessed with their study of the game. Fans and professional athletes watch sports in a completely different way. While most of us embrace the ebb and flow of the game, professionals read a game and see it as a code to be cracked.
That’s because sport is their livelihood, and they are not only physically supreme and incredibly talented but also world-leading experts on their sport of choice.
Luck is a Talent
The final ingredient that goes into making an elite-level athlete is luck. It could be argued that being born with specific physical attributes is luck. Or that being born in a particular area is luck – a boy with all the physical attributes to be the next Tom Brady, who is born and grows up in Northampton in the UK, is unlikely to ever turn out in the NFL, for example.
Beyond that, though, aspiring NFL professionals need luck throughout their careers.
They need to be lucky to avoid injury. They may need to be lucky to get their big break in a team through a teammate’s injury, or fortunate to have a development scout in attendance during the standout performance of their burgeoning careers.
Luck can also manifest itself by seeing a player join a youth team at just the perfect time, when the head coach and their teammates appear to have been handpicked by God to bring out the very best in them and their individual talents.
In Summary
The skills required to become a professional NFL player are many and varied. First, any aspiring pro has to be born with a number of physical attributes that make it possible to play the demanding sport.
Then they have to put these physical and biological advantages to good use through dedication and mental toughness. Even after doing all of that, success is not guaranteed as the difference between making it and missing out often comes down to luck.
