In-Season Training
As I always say, I love the forum at www.strengthcoach.com. The posts and threads seem to provide a wealth of article ideas. A recent post on in-season training made me aware that, in spite of writing 3 articles in the past year dealing with in-season training, I still had left some ground uncovered.
Consecutive Days?
On question that came up centered on training on consecutive days. I have always recommended two day in-season programs. One reader took this to mean that it would be OK to train two days but to use consecutive days and do an upper-lower split. This in my mind defeats the purpose. Let me clear things up, in-season training should consist of two non-consecutive total body workouts.
Doing a split routine is actually like training once, not twice.
Sets and Reps
Sets and reps is easy. I like to undulate my reps every three weeks and, I like to keep sets low. Three sets of an exercise would be very high volume for us in-season. Most often we do 1–2 sets. We rarely go beyond 10 reps in-season. We also rarely do less than three reps.
For power exercises we simply alternate between 3 sets of 3 and 3 sets of 5.
For strength exercises we will use 3×3, 2×5, or 2×10.
Most assistance type exercises will be done for 2 sets of 10 all through the in-season period.
Ladders, Plyos, Agilities etc.
Another question that comes up frequently is “what about ladder work, agility, plyos?” The in-season program is a strength program. If we lift post practice we don’t do any pre-workout, preparatory things. We come off the ice, we pick up pour sheets and we begin lifting. If we lift prior to practice we follow our “normal” pre-practice routine of foam rolling, static stretching and dynamic warm-ups. However we rarely do any speed, agility or quickness exercises in-season. I’m not sure if others do but, my goal is to use the time allotted to work on strength.
Michael Boyle is one of the foremost experts in the fields of Strength and Conditioning, Functional Training and general fitness. He currently spends his time lecturing, teaching, training and writing. In 1996 Michael co founded Mike Boyle Strength and Conditioning for one purpose: to provide performance enhancement training for athletes of all levels.
