In Season Programming
As high school and collegiate sports seasons start to ramp up, the question of in season training often arises. Should we be training in season? Should we completely take time off and just play our sport? If we are training, what should we be working on, and how much and how often?
In simple terms, yes we should be training in season. Now, what should we be focusing on? In season training is all about maintaining what was built in the off season with maybe a little improvement. If an athlete lifts weights all off season and gets strong then doesn’t lift for an entire sport season, they will lose a significant amount of their strength and spend the entire next off season trying to get back to their baseline. In an effort to prevent this, it is recommended that some training be done in season.
A few rules for in season training. First, training should never compromise performance. If you are too sore or fatigued from training, that you cannot practice at 100%, you are training too much and need to back down. In season training is all about very pointed, high quality training.
So what should we be working on? Typically I recommend focusing on training maximum strength and maximum speed. The ideal thing about both of these goals is that they require fairly low volumes to train, leaving plenty in the gas tank.
An example would be two training sessions per week. After doing a high quality warm up, the athlete would run 3 timed 10 yard sprints with a 5 to 10 yard roll in. These should be done as absolutely fast as possible. By only sprinting 10 yards, we significantly reduce the injury risk while being able to maintain or improve maximum speed. This would then be followed by a lifting session. I would select only compound lifts that hit important patterns like squat, hinge, press and pull. I would do 3 sets of 5 and then after 4 weeks move to 3 sets of 3. This keeps the weight heavy but the volume low so the athlete will not be sore but overall strength will be maintained. And most importantly this whole training session will take maybe 45 minutes. What you don’t see in this program are things like curls or tricep push downs or any “muscle building” exercises. During a season is the worst time to be focusing on putting muscle on. Building muscle takes high volume and lots of recovery, athletes don’t have time for that. Save your muscle building for the off season.
This is a very basic outline that can be adjusted to hit each individual athlete's specific needs. What this outline does well is hit each of the two targets with no excess work. In season training should be done and is all about very specific work.
