Blocking for the backs

The principles we teach:

1. Sprint to your block
2. Get between the defender and the path of the ball carrier
3. Get close enough to the defender to step on his toes
4. Fire up into the defender with your hands together, hit him in the numbers, preferably the bottom of the numbers, roll your rump as you strike him.
5. As you hit raise him up and drive with short choppy steps.

Drills we do:

1. We practice the hand strike by having the players strike a shield on command and immeidately recoil. One repetition of this drill is about 4-5 quick strikes.
2. We then have then block the dummies starting from a distance of 5 yards away, emphasizing strike and driving to the whistle.
3. We have a "blocking races" drill we run where we step 2 backs in the standard TB and FB positions behind where the guards would be. We then place cones where on each side where the end of the line would normally be and then have 2 parents or coaches hold shields directly over where the OT's would be about 3 yards off the LOS (Our standard LB position for our 6-2 defense). On our normal cadence the two players explode out of their stance go around the cone simulating the end of the LOS on their side and block the shield. We recognize the winner as the person who hits his shield first, as long as he executes a proper block, stiking low with his hands in and finishing by driving to the whistle. Some times we will do this tournament style until we have an ultimate winner. You can vary the locations of the shields to simulate kick out blocks on DE's or CB's. You will be amazed at how making this competitive will get the kids to sprint to their blocks.
4. We run a drill we call "Backfield Oklahoma", where we have one blocker, one runner, and one defender. The boundaries for this drill are typcially 2 yard lines 5 yards apart. The blocker is in his normal 2 point backfield stance and the defender is in a 2 point LB stance. We place them about 5-7 yards apart so the block happens in space.
5. When we rep plays with our backs, we always use a line strip or cones to simulate where the offensive line is and use parents and coaches holding shields to simulate the 6 defenders we are likely to block with our backs (DE's, LB's and CB's) We emphasize the same blocking principles mentioned above, especially speed to the block and driving to the whistle. We typcially try to rep all of our plays twice (12 total) with both first and second string backfield groups in a 15-20 minute time period (rotating groups quickly every play).