In Season – Guest Blog from TrueFitness

In Season-

So the discussion is about the seasons and how we train differently during each season. The goal is always improvement on sports performance but we need to have a different emphasis or focus depending on the season we are in. Last week I went into depth about the pre-season and its focus. During the pre-season we are focused on improving game skills such as agility, quickness, reactivity, etc. We still train with weights for our power and explosiveness but in-gym work is no longer our focus. We have built our base throughout the off-season and now we need to refine our skill during the pre-season. This prepares us to be game ready fro when the in-season comes.

In-Season
The goal and focus of the in-season is maintenance. We must try to maintain our strength, power, agility, quickness and all the other substrates that we worked so hard to improve during the off-season and pres-season. Now is not the time to improve or gain. If we were to work on improving our agility or strength then it would come at the detriment of our game performance. Our body, though a wonderful machine can not take to much stress on it at one time before it starts to break down. If we were to do maximal training while doing full intensity practices and playing in games then our body would constantly be in a state of repair and would never be fresh or game ready. It would always be worn down which would hinder our game performance. Above all else, we can not allow anything to slow down or otherwise affect our game performance. Therefore, all we need to do during the in-season is try to maintain our current levels of power, strength and conditioning while being sure not to over do it. Remember, the body is already being broken down during games and needs to recover from that. We don’t need to tear it down even more. There are always minor injuries that come with playing sport and our goal with training is to increase blood flow to allow for an increase in joint movement and ease of muscle contraction. This will help ease recovery from nagging injuries. The strength training we do since not at maximal intensity will allow us to move comfortably through our complete range of motion and help speed the recovery process.

When training during the in-season time period our focus is on maintaining strength levels and aiding recovery from nagging injuries. So how much intensity do we use and what kind of exercises do we do? In general the intensity of each exercise should be about 70% of what our 1 rep max is. This is a level of intensity that has shown to maintain strength levels without tearing down musculature. Doing this twice a week but never the day before a game will allow the athlete to maintain strength and aid with recovery. The exercises that need to be done should be multi-joint compound closed chain exercises. These are squats, clean and jerk, snatches, standing barbell shoulder press, Lat pulldowns, lunges, etc. These exercises allow us to work a couple joints at a time while always engaging our trunk muscles. We are trying to maximize benefit in minimal time since during the season the athlete has little free time to begin with and the gym training needs to be efficient as possible with time. During this time it is not important that we do “beauty lift”. Beauty lifts are single joint exercise that we do for purely aesthetic reasons and do not help with sports performance. They include but certainly are not limited to concentration curls, dumbbell kickbacks, reverse flys, dumbbell fly, leg curl, seated calf raise and so on. These exercises are done for simple aesthetic reasons of looking better and do not help with sports performance. They will take up valuable time and will not help an athlete be game ready. The purpose of the in-season training is to maintain quickness, power and strength to be able to maintain sports performance even when the nagging injuries of a season start to build up. Maintaining quickness, power and strength through a maintenance protocol training program will help an athlete to get through a season maintaining the highest level of performance possible. If is with game performance in mind that we write the in-season program and maintenance is the focus of that protocol.

Anyone in the San Diego area is welcome to drop in at our studio at 2949 Garnet Ave. 3rd floor, Pacific Beach, CA. We would love to put you through our workout.

Please feel free to call or email Annalise Evans of TrueFitness with any questions: (760) 809 1848 annalise@truefitness.biz and join her fan page on Facebook: TrueFitness Annalise Evans

Article written by Spencer Aiken, CSCS, CEO, TrueFitness