How to Get off the Football Quickly

Video Transcript

"Hi, this is Sean Hobson, for Expert Village. One of the most important things about being a good running back is that good first step. You want to explode out on your first step so you can get the advantage and you can hit the holes when they first open up. So, the way we're going teach these guys to explode out the quickest is, once you get in your two point stance with your feet shoulder width apart and you have good balance, we're going to use a cross over step. Some coaches will teach this differently. This isn't the only way to do it. Some people are faster taking their first step to the left and exploding out. The one I like the best because you can cover more ground is to step over depending on which way you're going. If you're going to your left, step over with the right and you'll explode off the back foot as you come out of there. That's a good way to get going and you'll also cover more ground that way. Obviously, if you're going off to the right, then you cross over with your left foot and explode off and push off with the back foot. So, you can do it either way you want to. You can either step to the right or explode right or you can do the cross over step. We're going to demonstrate what this looks like with the cross over step. We're going to go to the left first (video demo). You can see he turned quickly, he got his first foot out there and he exploded off the second foot. One thing we want to talk about is that you want to stay really low. When you come out of there, you should come out really low going into your stance because you're going to be taking the hand off in your stomach and exploding through the hole. You should never come up high and run up like a high running back. So, this time we're going to explode off to the right (video demo). You see how everything was down low and he's got a good first step and now he's going to take the hand off and be successful as a running back."