Why is In-Season Training Important?
What is in-season training?
One of the biggest questions parents or athletes ask us is whether or not they should continue training when their season starts. This document was created to provide parents, and athletes, information regarding the benefits of in-season training and why it should be considered just as important as off-season training.
To begin, we will highlight how an athlete’s training year is generally divided up.
Off-Season - the period between competitive seasons. This is when athletes have a reduced sports schedule so they can focus the majority of their time on strength & conditioning activities. This is where a significant improvement in strength, power, speed, and fitness are made. Sport-specific activities should be lower to allow athletes to improve general fitness and other skills, or even play another sport for fun.
Pre-Season - generally 4-6 weeks before the start of the competitive season. This is when a higher frequency of sport-specific training is included. Strength & conditioning activities are still performed frequently, but more sport-specific practice is added to improve sport performance.
In-Season - the period where you are playing games or have competitions, in other words, the time when you want to be at your best. Higher volume of sport-specific practices with a reduced number of strength & conditioning sessions per week.
HOWEVER, during the in-season is when athletes and parents generally drop fitness training altogether (for a number of reasons). Athletes will train really hard several days per week for a couple of months, and then stop cold turkey. The rest of the article is to explain why this isn't the best idea if performing at your best and staying injury-free is important to you.
Why is it important to train during your season?
To make it easier to understand why it is in an athlete's best interest to train throughout the season, we will use the analogy of a bank account. Think of your physical abilities as an ‘athletic’ bank account. The bigger this bank account is, the fitter you are and the more resilient you are to injury. Training is the money you deposit and playing your sport is when you withdraw that money. During the off-season is when you make large deposits, you are expanding the size of your athletic bank account and are filling it up over the course of a few months. When the season begins (i.e., practices and games), you start to make withdrawals and your account starts to deplete.
If you don’t keep your account topped up (i.e. if you stop training during the season), it may get too low, which will result in worse performances and an increased risk of injury. What a waste of an off-season! In-season training allows you to make little deposits periodically to offset the withdrawals you make over the course of a season. It allows you to keep your athletic bank account full so you can draw from it when you need it during the season.
We will now highlight some of the specific benefits of participating in some sort of in-season training:
1. Maintain progress from the off-season
As we discussed, most athletes train really hard during the off-season to get stronger, faster, and more powerful. However, what happens when you take away a training stimulus for more than a couple weeks...those gains you made will slowly disappear. Think of when you go on summer break from school after weeks of studying for your final exams, by the time you go back to school you seemingly have forgotten most of what you learned! Obviously, some of those athletic improvements will be maintained if you are playing lots of sport, but you won’t keep all of it. Things like strength, power, and speed will start to decline after 2 weeks of not training, with a noticeable decrease after 4 weeks. You are essentially detraining slowly throughout the entire season. If strength, power, and speed are important to your sport (i.e., nearly ALL sports) you will want to ensure you do something to keep your off-season progress rolling.
2. Perform at a higher level throughout the season
Similar to the point above, if you are losing some of your strength, speed, and power gains by stopping training you are becoming less athletic. What happens to your sport-performance if you become less athletic...it suffers! Also, when are the most important games or tournaments? Generally, they are at the end of your competitive season. So, if you stopped training at the beginning of the season, you are essentially a worse athlete for the most important part of your year compared to when you left the off-season. Seems backwards, doesn’t it? If you engage in some sort of in-season training program to maintain your strength, speed and power you will be able to perform at a higher level all season, including the end of the season when it matters the most.
3. Better recovery between games and practices
The fitter you are, the less taxing games and practices become which results in less fatigue. You will be less sore, and fresher for the next game. You will also be able to handle more games and more practices. Imagine how much better of a season you would have if you didn’t get super tired or beat up from a practice. This allows you to focus more time on energy on developing your sports skills which will help make you a better athlete.
4. Decrease your risk for injury
Probably one of the most important, yet least understood, reasons for participating in an in-season training program is the effect it can have on injury risk. To start, resistance training has a massive positive effect on reducing injuries. Research shows it can reduce sports related injuries by 1/3 and overuse injuries by 1/2 (Lauersen, 2014), so becoming strong in the off-season and staying strong during the in-season is an important consideration for any athlete. If you stop training long enough that your strength begins to decrease, you may be opening yourself up to aches, pains or a full blown injury.
Some of the most common instances causing injury are during high-speed/high-force scenarios, like sprinting or a sharp change of direction. If your muscles and tendons are not prepared for these types of movements, a pull or tear is very likely. Being periodically exposed to these types of stimuli during an in-training program will ensure your body is well prepared to handle it during the season. This is why a large body of research shows that when athletes engage in small amounts of high-speed running and strength training during the season, their injury rates significantly decline. Similarly, your coordination and movement patterns will decline without training as well, which may have an effect on injury risk (e.g., poor running or change of direction mechanics).
Maintaining your strength, speed and coordination will also allow you to handle the wear and tear of a season. Research shows that the fitter an athlete is long term, the better able they can handle spikes in training (e.g, an extra game or practice during the week). If you slowly become less athletic over the course of a season, not only will your performance suffer, but you are much more likely to suffer some sort of injury.
5. Enter next off-season at a higher level
Another overlooked benefit of in-season training is that you will be able to enter the next block of off-season training at a higher physical level. This means you will be able to train harder and faster sooner than if you didn’t train all season and had to take the first several weeks to get back to where you were last off-season. Imagine how much better of an athlete you would be, you will be able to build a bigger athletic back account every off-season rather than starting from scratch because you depleted it so much over the season. After several years of doing this, you would blow past your competition who doesn’t take in-season training seriously.
Now on the contrary, there are those athletes that don’t do anything during the off-season, realize they aren’t in shape, and then only start training during the pre-season or in-season. This isn’t good either, as during these times you have more practices and games, so you don’t have the time or recovery resources to really develop a good fitness base. You need both off-season and in-season training to perform at your best. Off-season training to develop your athleticism to a high level, and in-season training to keep it at a high level.
What does a good in-season program look like?
Now that we’ve established that in-season training is a really good thing to participate in...what do?
The key with a proper in-season program is that it complements the sport schedule. It should help keep the athlete strong, fast and powerful without compromising recovery. Compared to the off-season, the in-season plan will generally consist of fewer days and less training volume, however the intensity of those sessions will be just as high or even higher to allow for ongoing performance improvements. It should still include resistance training, jumping, throwing and sprinting. A good program will also include some lower intensity days to help with recovery, so things like dynamic mobility circuits or easy cardio.
Our general recommendations are that at a minimum, athletes should engage in 1 day of resistance based training (even a bodyweight circuit will do) and 1 day of high quality speed training per week. However, 2 days of each would be ideal and even more if the athlete can handle it (why would we purposely do less?). We also generally recommend doing the resistance and speed work on the same day as to cut down on the number of days you are training to allow more time for your sport. Once these minimums are met, other elements like jumping, agility and endurance sessions could (and should) be added.
Myths regarding in-season training?
Over the years we have heard many incorrect statements or beliefs about in-season training. The next section is to address some of the more common myths.
1. My sport will develop and maintain my fitness
While we agree that your sport will help develop and maintain some fitness qualities, it would be ill advised to only rely on it. Playing your sport won’t maximize fitness adaptations like strength, speed and explosive power. That's the point of training, to develop and maximize qualities that you wouldn’t normally get from sport to help enhance sport performance. In-season training is meant to fill in the gaps that your sport doesn’t address. Time and time again we see that the fittest athletes come game day are the ones who trained hard all off-season and continue that work throughout the in-season.
2. I don’t want (my child) to get too tired/burnt out by adding 1 hour of in-season training per week
With a properly implemented in-season program, it is very rare that an athlete cannot handle it from a recovery standpoint. Especially if they trained all off-season to a point where they are quite physically fit. However, if your child is getting too tired from 1 day of in-season training (remember it should be low volume anyways) then we should first look at the other components affecting their recovery. More than likely there will be issues with nutrition, hydration, sleep, and life/school stress, not to mention the hours spent on video games and social media, which will all compromise recovery. We would look at these areas first before dropping in-season training, because the benefits are so great.
Another way to look at it, is if someone cannot handle 1 extra hour of training per week, that is even more of a reason to keep doing it. The athlete clearly isn’t fit enough and they need more training to improve their fitness levels which will go a long way at improving their recovery. The fitter you are, the better your recovery is.
3. Won’t in-season training be too much? I don’t want (my child) to get injured
Similar to the previous point, a properly implemented in-season program shouldn’t be too much for an athlete to handle. It also won’t expose an athlete to injury, as we previously discussed how resistance training and in-season training can drastically decrease an athletes risk of injury. If not getting hurt is important to you, continuing in-season training should be high on your list.
4. It probably won’t make that much of a difference
Sometimes people think it won’t make that much of a difference to their performance. On the contrary, research consistently shows athletes are stronger, faster, more agile, more explosive, and fitter when they include in-season training. Would being stronger, faster and more powerful make you better at your sport...very likely. Even being 5% better in terms of your overall athleticism will help all aspects of your sport. It could mean the difference between getting open for a pass or beating an opponent by one or two steps, all extremely valuable in a tight game. We often see teams and players that implement in-season training are able to push the pace in the dying minutes of a game, where those that don’t have a noticeable drop off in performance when fatigue sets in. In-season training gives you this edge.
5. Lifting weights in-season will make you slow
This is a common belief, however it is misplaced otherwise there wouldn’t be dozens of studies showing athletes who lift in-season don’t get slower and even get faster. The ability to generate high levels of muscular force is a major contributor to power and speed. Maintaining your strength will allow you to express high amounts of power and speed in your sport. If you get weaker in-season you will also get slower and less explosive. Now, you should be including jumping and sprinting into your in-season program for even greater benefits, and we don’t recommend bodybuilding style programming in-season, but low-volume resistance training that emphasizes overall strength should most definitely be included. Particularly for contact sports like football, rugby and hockey, being strong throughout the season is especially valuable. Besides the performance benefits, the fact that resistance training reduces injury risk should be reason enough to do it throughout the year.
We hope this brief overview of the benefits of in-season training proved useful, and that you consider engaging in some sport of strength & conditioning year round. We would encourage you to discuss how this would fit into your own season (or your child's season) with a credible and trusted performance coach for maximum benefit.
Summary
In-season training helps maintain your progress from the off-season by keeping your athletic bank account topped up.
A properly implemented in-season program will maintain/improve performance while also decreasing your risk for sports-related injuries.
At minimum, do 1 resistance training and 1 speed session per week in-season, though more is better if you can handle it.