Orakpo does jogs before games to get his body warmed up for the football game. Keeping your muscles warm is crucial to prevent muscle injury.

NFL linebacker Brian Orakpo is nothing short of a beast. Orakpo makes sure that he focuses his workouts on building a combination of incredible explosiveness that allows him to be powerfully strong, yet super fast. At 6’3 and 263 lbs., he is one of the strongest linebackers in football. His workout routine is quite impressive and the sheer numbers that he puts up in the gym are quite frankly on another planet.

Orakpo’s 40 yard dash time is a blistering 4.63 seconds, which is blazing fast for someone his size and to rep out 225 pounds on the bench press for 31 times is something unheard of. Orakpo has a vertical leap of 42″ (39 1/2″ in the draft, but now has boosted it up a few inches since he came into the NFL), which is actually better than Dr. J’s (41″) and Kobe Bryant’s (38″) if you can believe it, despite the extra 50 pounds he carries. Orakpo is that physically gifted.

He arrived at Texas in college as a frail 210 pounder and is now a chiseled 263 pounder with only 8 percent body fat. He has incredible speed, power, and explosiveness and he throws around 100 pound kettlebells and 180 pound dumbbells like their rag dolls. Orakpo can bench press 515 pounds, power clean 380 pounds, and squat 600 plus.

This is a great tricep workout to strengthen the muscle. Make sure you have a spotter so that you can safely lift and put down the weight.

Orakpo is not only a gym rat, but a football specimen. “Brian Orakpo is as good of an athlete as I’ve ever coached,” his college coach Mack Brown said to ESPN. “He has an unbelievable combination of power, speed and explosiveness. But what he does with that athletic ability is even more impressive. He’s as hard of a worker as we’ve had in our program, practices and plays with great intensity and is a terrific young man off the field.”

However, Orakpo’s not just about strength, he plays with speed and technique to complement his power. He can be elusive and get to the quarterback in a mulitude of ways.

He didn’t get there overnight though. He put in hours and hours in the gym to get to where he was. On his site BrianOrakpo.com, he discussed some of his training methods:

“You feel the weight of a 45 pound vest bearing down on you as you exert maximum effort until you are out of breath. You don’t stop your sprint until you reach the top of the hill. It feels hell, but you still have nine more left. This is my favorite workout and it helped me produce a monstrous rookie season in 2009 with the Washington Redskins. I finished with 11 sacks, a Redskins rookie record and the most of any rookie in the league. At the end of the season, I finished fourth among all rookies for the Associated Press Defensive Rookie of the Year award. I also earned a spot on the NFC Pro Bowl team. This year I plan to do better. Every Monday, I complete the grueling set of sprints and plyometrics up a hill near my home in Leesburg, VA. It consists of 10 sprints, five side laterals to the left, five side laterals to the right, five backward pedals, five forward lunges and five backward lunges. I finish the workout with five more sprints.” Orakpo pushes himself to his uttermost limits, which translates well on the football field, making him a dominating force to opposing offenses.

Source

http://www.brianorakpo.com/blog.htm?cat_id=AF6C4955-103F-4428-8FCE-5E3BBEB7672F&cachecommand=bypass&pageindex=3

http://sports.espn.go.com/ncf/columns/story?columnist=feldman_bruce&id=3420212