2020-2021 High School Sports Schedule caused a travesty in the Strength & Conditioning world, locally. Most High school athletes play more than one sport and a ton of them even play 3 sports. Unfortunately, all of those sports were 6 week blocks of one season leading into another totaling to 18-20 weeks combined, of straight competition/sport. Add in summer lacrosse/baseball players and it totals up to potentially 28 weeks straight!

Most players (never being in this situation) stopped training and decided to recently come back to training. When they did come back, they realized how much their strength/athletic ability has truly suffered from not training during their season, consistently. If you truly believe that strength is your foundation of athletic qualities, it obviously makes sense. At RAF, our theories/programming in sports performance is heavily based around strength, for that reason. A loss in strength can directly lead to a loss in speed and power output.

Our bodies systems are always adapting to internal and external forces. That means it’s always adapting it’s performance, based off of those forces. It’s really a cool thing because we have the ability to affect our bodies performance, by the actions we take or don’t take. However, it’s not cool when the adaption leads to a decrease in performance. A popular term thrown around during the season is to “maintain” your strength. Honestly, maintaining strength would be amazing, but the actions taken by most to maintain is sadly wrong. Like I mentioned before, our bodies systems are constantly adapting, so actually “maintaining” is not possible. You can bet, your body will either increase or decrease it’s ability. How dramatic the increase/ decrease is… all depends on what YOU do during your season and all year long!

How Do You Train During a Season?!

It’s really simple and actually very similar exercise wise. The things that will change is your number of workouts a week, maybe your body splits, and/or your volume. We love to take body weight into the equation. Overall body weight is a great indicator of your strength/performance during the season. If your body has been training for a peak performance and was at “x” amount heading into the season. Why would “x” minus 5/10 pounds be good for your overall performance? Typically, if your body weight and muscle mass stay around the same number over a season of 8-12 weeks, your strength is generally around where it was. If your strength is still there, your overall best potential athletic ability is still there. Make sure to keep an eye on your weight and check in weekly to see where you’re at, so you can stay near!

We believe in still attacking workouts in the following fashion…

• Great Warm Up (As we always do, not shorter or longer)

• CNS Prep Work (sprints, slams, jumps, dynamic presses)

• Compound movements in 55-90% range (Main lifts, % depending on Week)

• Less volume with accessory movements (Really the main change)

• Recover (Eat, Drink, SLEEP)

The 3 main changes are…

• We will never touch the 91%+ range in main lifts

• Not as much overall volume in our sessions

• No conditioning

The in-depth changes we will make, for example, are less eccentric work than normal, less ISO work, less plyometrics (not ballistics), etc. Think about things that make you SORE and try to do less of that. This is also a good reminder that being sweaty and sore, does not mean anything when you’re training for strength. Overall, its simple fixes and small changes to keep you feeling “fresh”. The main goal of the workouts is to walk out of the gym feeling better than when you walked in. That should be your goal all the time, but you never want that “I’m completely exhausted and gassed” feeling, which is useful at times.

Recovery

Recovery is obviously crucial during your season, but what does “recovery” mean?

I think the problem is recovery means ice baths, massage gun, cryotherapy, recovery sleeves, etc. (To the high school population). Not that those aren’t useful tools for recovery, but they are just “tools”. The base and most important part of your recovery, is simply sleep. How many hours a night can you get during your season? Especially at the high school level (the majority we work with), sleep is neglected. There are so many distractions and not enough time, but it must be done! Make it your goal to sleep 8-10 hours a night as a high school kid and I promise you’ll see strength increasing, if you normally are 7 or less. Along with sleep is nutrition and hydration. I know it sounds cliché, but obviously being hydrated is going to aid in recovery and help your body perform optimally. To keep it simple, try consuming around 70-75% of your body weight, in water (in ounces). Nutrition does not mean “eating healthy”, or whatever that means? To keep the nutrition part simple, just make sure you’re getting your ballpark calorie count in, to maintain weight. To figure this out, take your body weight x 15 x 110-120%. For example, if you’re 200 pounds… 200 x 15 = 3,000… 3,000 x 1.10 = 3,300. Try to eat around 3,300 or more calories per day. If you want to take it a step further, try to have about 40-50% of those carbs, 25-30% protein and 25-30% fat.

Main Recovery Needs

SLEEP 8-10 hours, 75% of your body weight in water (ounces) and eat your body weight x15 x110% in calories. After you accomplish those 3, then the massage guns, the ice baths, sleeves, etc. are all okay to do. However, those main 3 have to be in place most importantly!

I hope This Makes Sense…

I truly hope this opens some eyes and rethinks your training process if you’re and athlete, coach and/ or parent. Don’t work so hard to build up a strong, explosive athlete, only to diminish the athlete over the course of a season, without proper training. Not only will it decrease the athlete’s ability, but it will increase the chance of injury in a long season. Remember, it doesn’t take much and shouldn’t take much, but consistent training must be done to consistently progress in the weight room and as an athlete!

Questions?

Please feel free to message me…

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