NFL Instagram Workouts Explained: 7 Viral Drills and What They Actually Build

NFL workout clips are built for social media: impossible-looking jumps, unstable pushups, enormous cleans and drills that seem more like a combine challenge than a normal gym session. The problem is that a ten-second Instagram clip rarely shows the boring foundation underneath it.

Elite football training is not a contest to invent the strangest exercise. The best programs combine strength, power, acceleration, deceleration, movement skill, position-specific work and enough durability to survive a violent season. The viral clip is often just the most visually interesting piece.

Here are seven famous NFL Instagram workouts and what they actually train—plus the part a normal lifter or recreational athlete should copy instead of blindly recreating the hardest version.

That distinction matters because social media selects for novelty. A normal set of split squats, sprint starts or rows can be excellent training and still make a boring clip. A 58-inch box jump or pushup performed on unstable equipment gets shared precisely because it looks abnormal. Good programming is almost the reverse: the boring work usually carries most of the load, while the exotic drill appears in a small, specific dose.

1. Saquon Barkley's Nordic Curls: Eccentric Hamstring Strength

Saquon Barkley has repeatedly made lower-body training go viral, and one of his most useful exercises is also one of the least flashy: the Nordic hamstring curl. In a widely shared offseason session, Barkley paired Nordics with paused Bulgarian split squats and an advanced single-leg box-jump variation.

The Nordic curl is built around eccentric knee-flexion strength. You kneel with the ankles fixed, keep the hips extended and resist your body as it falls forward. The hamstrings have to brake the descent under a long lever, which is exactly why the movement gets hard so quickly.

For a football player, strong hamstrings matter during sprinting, braking and rapid changes of direction. But the lesson for a normal lifter is not “do Barkley's full reps immediately.” Most people should start with assisted Nordics, shorter ranges or slow negatives and earn more range over time.

The Bulgarian split squat from the same session is even easier to borrow. It builds unilateral leg strength without requiring the balance, speed and landing skill of Barkley's advanced jump drill.

If you want the football lesson rather than the Instagram challenge, pair one bilateral strength movement with one unilateral movement and one low-volume explosive drill. For example: trap-bar deadlifts, split squats and three-rep box jumps. That gives you force, single-leg control and power without pretending you need an NFL running back's exact exercise menu.

2. Myles Garrett's 58-Inch Box Jump: Explosive Power, Not a Party Trick

Myles Garrett has posted plenty of absurd strength and conditioning clips, but the 58-inch box jump is one of the cleanest demonstrations of what makes elite NFL athleticism different. A huge defensive lineman producing enough force quickly enough to get onto a box that high is the impressive part—not the box itself.

Plyometrics train the ability to produce force rapidly. That matters because football rarely gives an athlete several seconds to build strength. A defender has to explode out of a stance, redirect, accelerate and hit with force almost immediately.

The mistake is treating box height as the goal. A higher box can be reached partly by pulling the knees dramatically toward the chest, so box-jump height is not a pure measurement of vertical jump. Landing quality also matters more than social-media bragging rights.

For most lifters, use a box height you can land on quietly with control. Think 3 to 5 high-quality reps rather than turning plyometrics into cardio. If the knees collapse, the landing gets loud or you have to tuck into a ball to clear the box, lower it.

Also remember that power work is quality-sensitive. The point is to jump hard while fresh, not to accumulate fatigue for its own sake. Long rest periods between explosive sets can feel almost too easy compared with a bodybuilding session, but that is often exactly what lets each rep stay fast.

3. Derrick Henry's Chaos Pushup: Stability on Top of a Strength Base

Derrick Henry has produced some of the most outrageous-looking NFL workout clips online. One famous variation had him performing pushups with his hands supported on a resistance band, his feet on a stability ball and additional load added for good measure.

It looks like a superhuman chest exercise. In reality, the most interesting part is stability. Once both the upper and lower body are placed on unstable surfaces, the trunk and shoulder stabilizers have to work aggressively just to keep the system organized.

That is also why this should not be the first pushup variation you copy. Henry's viral version sits on top of years of normal pressing, pulling and strength work. The smarter progression is basic pushups first, then perhaps a band-supported upper-body variation, and only then more instability if you actually have a reason to use it.

Henry's broader training history reinforces the point. He has also used heavy box squats, trap-bar deadlifts, walking lunges, hill sprints, hurdles and footwork drills. The circus-looking pushup is an accessory. The foundation is still strength and movement.

That is a useful filter for every “unstable” exercise you see online: ask what stable movement the athlete already mastered first. If you cannot perform strong ordinary pushups, rows and presses, instability is mostly adding difficulty before you have built the thing being stabilized. For advanced athletes, it can be a targeted accessory. For beginners, it can simply be a distraction.

4. Jalen Hurts' Four-Minute Plank: Durability Over Gym-Ego Numbers

Jalen Hurts is famous for once squatting 600 pounds, so it is easy to assume his modern training is built around chasing bigger barbell numbers. His offseason work has moved in a different direction.

Trainer Taylor Kelly has described a durability-focused approach that includes a four-minute plank, pushup variations, dumbbell pressing with controlled range and medicine-ball throws. The goal is not to win a powerlifting meet. It is to keep a quarterback strong enough, mobile enough and healthy enough to repeatedly throw, run and absorb contact.

The four-minute plank is not necessary for everyone, and holding a plank longer is not automatically better forever. What is useful is the idea of building a trunk that can maintain position while the shoulders and hips are working.

For a normal athlete, a better starting point might be 3 sets of 30 to 60 seconds with excellent position, followed by scapular pushups or controlled shoulder-tap planks. Once posture breaks down, the set has stopped training the quality you wanted.

Hurts is a good reminder that an impressive old max does not need to remain the center of an athlete's program. Training should change as the sport, body and career change.

Quarterback training also has a different risk-reward calculation from general strength training. The shoulder has to throw repeatedly, the trunk has to transfer force while moving, and availability on game day matters more than winning a bench-press argument. That is why controlled dumbbell pressing, scapular work and medicine-ball throws can make more sense than constantly testing maximal lifts.

5. Patrick Mahomes' Medicine-Ball Work: Absorb Force, Then Redirect It

Patrick Mahomes' training is a useful counterexample to the idea that athletic workouts should look like bodybuilding with more jumping. His longtime trainer Bobby Stroupe has emphasized pattern stability, force absorption and force transmission.

In practice, that has included medicine-ball catches and slams, cable push-pulls, get-up sprints, lateral sled work, trap-bar deadlifts and multidirectional jumping. Those drills are designed around the way a quarterback actually has to create and redirect force.

A medicine ball can be especially useful because it allows intent that a normal weight cannot. You can throw it, catch it, accelerate it and release it. That makes it a natural tool for rotational and explosive work.

For a gym athlete, the simplest version is a rotational wall throw or scoop toss performed for low reps with high speed. Do not turn explosive medicine-ball work into a 30-rep conditioning set. Once the throw slows dramatically, the power stimulus is disappearing.

Mahomes' training also shows why “core” does not have to mean lying on the floor doing crunches. Cable push-pulls, rotational throws and get-up sprints force the trunk to connect the hips and shoulders while the body is producing or receiving force. That is much closer to the job the midsection performs during sport.

6. Christian McCaffrey's Force-Velocity Training: Strength and Speed Belong Together

Christian McCaffrey's offseason training may be the clearest example of a complete athletic system rather than one viral exercise. His longtime trainer has described training across the force-velocity curve: heavy strength work at one end, plyometrics in the middle and high-speed sprinting at the other.

That can include heavy deadlifts and sled work, single-leg strength, hops, sprint drills, gymnastics-style movement and even falling and rolling practice. The details can look unusual in isolation, but the theme is coherent: build a body that can produce force quickly, control it and move in multiple directions.

This is the principle most recreational athletes should steal. Do not force one exercise to do every job. Heavy lifting can build force. Jumps and throws can build explosive expression. Sprinting develops speed. Mobility and control work help you access those qualities in better positions.

You also do not need an NFL schedule. Two strength sessions, one short sprint or jump exposure and one conditioning session can already create a more athletic week than simply adding random “functional” drills to a bodybuilding program.

The order matters too. Speed and jumps generally belong early, when coordination and intent are high. Heavy strength can follow. Conditioning usually comes later or on a separate day. Mixing everything into one giant fatigue circuit may look athletic, but it can make every quality too tired to be trained particularly well.

7. Nick Chubb's 405-Pound Power Clean: Weight-Room Strength With Speed

Nick Chubb has a long history of outrageous weight-room numbers. He squatted 600 pounds while still at Georgia, and later viral videos showed him power-cleaning 405 pounds for reps back at his old high school.

The power clean makes sense for football because it requires force to be produced quickly. Unlike a slow grindy deadlift, the bar has to accelerate enough for the athlete to receive it at the shoulders. That is why Olympic-lift variations have long been used in strength-and-conditioning programs.

But this is the section where copying the pro can go wrong fastest. A 405-pound clean is not a beginner goal, and the exercise has a real skill component. If you cannot rack a light bar smoothly, adding weight does not make it more “athletic.”

For most people, learn the movement with coaching and low loads or use simpler power exercises—jumps, medicine-ball throws, kettlebell swings or trap-bar jumps—if they fit your experience better.

Chubb's clip is impressive because he possesses a rare combination of strength and speed. The useful takeaway is to train that combination progressively, not to recreate the number.

If Olympic lifts are not part of your background, you can still train rate of force development with simpler options. A jump shrug, kettlebell swing, medicine-ball throw or loaded jump can give you an explosive intent with a smaller technical learning curve. The best exercise is the one that trains the quality you need while staying inside your skill level.

What Normal Lifters Should Actually Copy From NFL Training

The common thread in these viral workouts is not instability, giant box jumps or freakish barbell numbers. It is that every drill has a job.

A simple athlete-style week could look like this:

Keep the explosive work fresh. Rest between efforts. Do the heavy strength work with exercises you can actually execute. Build instability only after you own stable versions. And treat social-media workouts as examples of a larger system, not complete programs.

That last point is the biggest lesson. Elite NFL players are not elite because they discovered one secret Instagram exercise. They have years of training, coaching, sport practice and physical development behind the clip. The viral drill is usually the cherry on top.

So when a workout goes viral, steal the training principle before you steal the exercise. Barkley shows eccentric hamstring strength and unilateral control. Garrett shows explosive force. Henry shows advanced stability. Hurts shows durability. Mahomes shows force transfer. McCaffrey shows a full strength-speed spectrum. Chubb shows strength expressed quickly. Those ideas scale down far better than the headline numbers do.

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