Don’t Lose Your Strength When You Need it Most
I’ve been a strength and conditioning coach for going on 12 years now so I’ve had the opportunity to take part in the offseason training of all kinds of athletes in all kinds of sports at every level imaginable. One thing rings true for every sport, and at every level: everyone’s dialed in to get stronger and better in the offseason and like clockwork they’ll fall off as the season nears and gyms become a ghost town during the season. While the focus of these athletes’ energy needs to shift towards their sport during the season, we need to remember why we put all that hard work in in the first place which is to be better on the field of play. Why do all that work to lose it when you need it most? We’re going to go over the importance of these adaptations and give you some strategies you can use to help maintain and even increase your strength/performance throughout your season.
Strength Adaptations
Without doubt the biggest focus of your offseason training needs to be laying the groundwork for all other adaptations which will come from increasing your base level of strength and movement quality. Strength is going to have a positive effect on every other adaptation you’re after from power to speed and even conditioning and flexibility/mobility. The importance of strength can’t be overestimated and we need to make sure that’s goal number one!
Side note: if you have a coach or trainer who seems really focused on your conditioning throughout your offseason or even in-season training, find a new one. Conditioning adaptations are one of the quickest and easiest (with some hard work) to obtain and your efforts are better focused on increasing strength and muscle mass with a gradual shift towards a level of conditioning as you get closer to your season. During the season you’re getting plenty of sport specific conditioning on the field of play, you don’t need any more, trust me.
Strength is an adaptation that once attained has a shelf life of about 30 days. What that means is that we can typically keep these adaptations for about a month without any real strength specific training stimulus. You might be thinking to yourself that at one point or another you’ve taken a month (or even less) off from the gym and gone back in and weren’t even sniffing the weights you used to do with ease and while that can be true, it’s not necessarily from a loss in strength. Strength in the gym is a combination of many adaptations from work capacity, to movement competency, to strength endurance to absolute strength. Lose one of these adaptations and it’ll have a ripple effect on the rest leading to lower numbers in the gym. With too much time away from the weight room you’ll lose speed, power, strength, mobility, and work capacity just to name a few. In this scenario of you taking time off, you more than likely didn’t lose the strength, you lost movement quality and probably some strength endurance/work capacity and speed of movement. Work capacity and speed of movement are two fickle adaptations that won’t stick around very long if they aren’t trained. This means that these adaptations need to be addressed at least once a week in the gym in order to carry us through the season and finish as strong or even stronger than we started.
How Should Your In-season Training Look?
While focusing our efforts on strength gains in the offseason is job number one, what should happen during the season? We can’t put the same effort into the gym that we did throughout the offseason because now we’ve got practice and games. You won’t have the same amount of time or even energy to focus on strength training and that’s ok, but what we need to make sure of is that we don’t go backwards when we need this strength the most. While max effort training, AMRAPS, training to failure, etc aren’t necessarily an option during the season we can still keep our focus on strength and here’s some tips on how to do that:
Pick an upper push and lower push and pull movement for your main lift and try to stay as close to that movement as possible throughout the season. For example a box squat, bench press, trap bar deadlift, barbell RDL, etc. You can make small changes with these movements throughout the season such as grip width, stance width, pull height, etc but try not to stray too far from this movement itself. Keeping these movement patterns the same will ensure you’re well adapted and won’t end up overly sore. We’ll still have plenty of variety in our training as our secondary/accessory work will rotate in both movement patterns and volumes.
Get your calculated one rep max for your main lifts. You should be able to enter the season with same max as your offseason training but if you don’t have one you can work up to a 3 or 5 rep max and calculate it out here. This will allow for us to have a base for the rest of our programming and ensure we’re not over or under training. You’re not always going to be able to lift at a specific percentage however this information will give you an idea of where we need to be training.
Your readiness is going to change on a day to day and even hour to hour basis. Having this 1RM will let us know how to train, and if we’re under recovering. For example if you’re program has you training at 75% for sets of 3 and you’re struggling to get through it (75% is roughly a 10 rep max), we know your volume is more than likely too high and we need to scale back, or you’re not eating or sleeping enough. In any of those scenarios you’re probably under recovered. Conversely, if it’s no longer even challenging for a couple of weeks we know we need to get back to the drawing board and increase the load.
Learn Prilepin’s Chart which is pictured above. This chart will be your map for your main lift training percentages. It will allow you to train at sub maximal levels and still work towards maintaining and gaining strength throughout the season. This will allow us to stay fresh and be recovered enough for games and practices.
The first column is the percentage of your 1RM for your main lift. The second column is the amount of reps you’ll perform in each set. The third column is the optimal number of total reps for the movement in a given session. And the final column is the range of total number of reps for the main lift in a given session.
Throughout the season it’s best to try to stay in the 60-85% range. You can save the 90%+ work for the offseason.
Pick two days in the week that you can get under the weights, while allowing recovery both before and after games. You’re not always going to be at 100%, but we want to be as close to 100% as humanly possible. These days can rotate throughout season but we need to make sure that we’re maintaining at least two days per week in the gym. You’ll still be getting a training effect from practice and games, so it’s not necessary to spend nearly as much time in the weight room as we did in the offseason.
Set up your training sessions as lower pull/upper push and lower push/upper pull. This split is going to allow you to hit a training stimulus for both the lower and upper extremity at least twice per week so we’re never going longer than 4 or 5 days without a stimulus for both the upper and lower extremity. If you were to separate them into an upper/lower split, there would be times you would end up with 7+ days in between lifts for those body parts. You’d also be hitting a lot more volume on those days and end up overly sore and longer recovery times. This split will allow you to maximize your training and recovery capabilities.
Pick secondary/accessory work that does NOT mimic your movement on the field of play. For example if you’re a hockey player stay away from lateral movements as your entire sport is based in the coronal/frontal plane. Focusing on those movements in the gym and under a load can lead to overuse injuries. While it’s good to try to increase strength and power in that plane during the offseason, you’re getting enough of that on the ice during your season. Focus on what you’re not getting on the field of play in the weight room.
We’re going to keep the volume higher in the upper extremity and a little bit lower in the lower extremity. Outside of rowing and sledge hockey, most sports are going to give you a ton of volume in the lower extremity so we need to focus our time and energy on getting from the weight room what we’re not getting from the field of play. If you happen to be an athlete who gets a ton of upper body volume in your sport, reverse it!
Focus a good portion of your accessory movement efforts on single limb training for the lower extremity. Not everything has to be unilateral, but we want to try to get the bulk of our volume in this fashion. Most sports cause us to be dominant on one side of our body from either the position we play, to what hand or foot is your dominant one. Unilateral training will make sure we don’t accelerate this bilateral deficit.
Lower Extremity - 5 exercises x 2-3 sets x 6-8 reps
Upper Extremity Pushing - 3-4 exercises x 2-3 sets x 6-12 reps
Upper Extremity Pulling - 4-5 exercises x 2-3 sets x 8-15 reps
Stay on top of your jumps! Incorporating low volume jumps within your warm up is a great way to work on speed of movement and even strength (at lower training ages) while leaving something in the tank for your training sessions.
There’s a ton of ways to ensure you’re keeping strength gained in the offseason, the above tips are just a few easy to use ways to help you accomplish it. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking you can coast through the season without putting some time in the weight room. Don’t work your butt off all summer only to see your strength dwindle when you really need it on the field of play. Keeping strength levels up won’t only keep you performing at your best, but it will keep you on the field and out of the training room.
