Strength Training During the Season
It’s April, Pre-Season for all winter sports have or are coming towards an end and we are transitioning into the season starting. So what does that mean to your strength and power training?
I know what you're thinking, I used to think the exact same thing.
The season has started. I’m sore enough from just playing games and training, I don’t want to add to this soreness by continuing to hit the gym and work on my strength and power. Anyway, I had a great pre-season. I put the work in and I’ve already seen great results, it’s time to just focus on playing.
Well I’m sorry to say but this is the wrong mentality to have.
You may start the season really well but eventually it will drop off. You won’t be as powerful, your strength levels will start to drop off and you may even pick up a couple little niggles.
This is all because of the simple training principle “Use it or lose it”.
What this means is that if you don’t use a specific physical quality for a certain period of time you will lose what you’ve built up. It doesn’t matter how good of a pre-season you’ve had, if you don’t provide your the correct stimulus it drops away.
Each physical quality needs to be stimulated within a certain time frame in order for the body to maintain its current levels.
Top end speed needs to be hit roughly every 5 days.
Power needs to be stimulated roughly every 10 days.
Strength needs to be stimulated roughly every 2 weeks.
Looking at the above timelines it is evident that if we don’t continue to hit the gym and work on our strength and power our performance will decrease significantly after the first month of the season. So imagine what it will look like by the end of the season? And how can you really be at your best come finals? The answer is, you can’t.
So we now know that we need to continue our strength and power training during the season but how do we do it and not get extremely sore and fatigued after our session?
To keep both soreness and fatigue down we need to focus on concentric contractions (this means we produce force while the muscle is contracting) and decrease our range of motion. What does this look like though? Instead of completing a full ROM front squat we can substitute a front squat to a bench where our thighs hit parallel. Due to being a decreased ROM we will be able to lift more weight, which will allow us to stimulate our strength but it will also keep fatigue and soreness down.
But what about flexibility and mobility? We can’t forget about this during the season. I am always going on about strength through range being the best way to improve both of these qualities but during the season we aren’t doing this with high loads. So we need to focus on hitting full ROM with lighter loads or moving through different exercises. Personally, I look at programming these movements in my warm-ups (e.g. Counter-Balance heel elevated pause squats to give us some great hip mobility) or even do a recovery day (1-2 days post game) where we focus on mobility specific movements.
So the question is, will you be continuing your strength and power training during the season??
PS- one key word here is CONTINUING. If you didn’t do this work in the pre-season then good luck keeping up with everyone else, but if you do start during the season what are you trying to maintain? The pre-season is when you do the work, the season is when you maintain these levels and dominate your sport!!
