Herm Hundley-Sports Performance

Let’s Talk…In-Season Strength Training

We know the benefits of off-season and pre-season strength & conditioning programs in regards to sport performance and injury prevention. But often times in-season strength & conditioning programs get overlooked which could be hurting our overall performance. We begin to see signs of detraining in athletes in as few as 5 days with more significant declines in performance occurring at 30 days. In higher level and elite athletes these decreased performance characteristics can be seen even sooner than in their younger, less trained counterparts.

Detraining is the loss of physiological adaptations to physical training, meaning it’s a loss of the gains you made through hard work in the off-season and pre-season. This can be a result of injury or opting to sit on the couch and eat chips instead of training, but too often it can be the result of poor planning by coaches and athletes during the season.

In-season our focus often shifts to skill development and activities on the velocity side of the force velocity curve. This leaves athletes with suboptimal training of strength and power, leading to detraining as the season progresses. When detraining occurs in these areas it will often affect overall performance on the field and can take months to regain.

The best way to combat in-season detraining is to prevent it altogether by including strength and power training during the season as well. Here are a few tips to get the most out of your in-season strength programming:

Training schedules MUST be flexible

Sessions should last about an hour 1-3x per week.

Perform compound, multi-joint movements with emphasis on power. Push, Pull, Hinge, Squat, Carry, and Crawl.

Vary volume and intensity using velocity to guide loads

Keep exercises consistent and refrain from exercises that create a lot of soreness

Include mobility and injury prevention exercises

To help you maintain your gains and prevent detraining this summer, register for our summer group classes today: OhioHealth Athletic Performance Group Strength Classes

Let’s Talk….Strength vs Speed

Understanding the force-velocity curve is important to understand their inverse relationship and plan your programming. The easiest way to explain the FV curve is to think about throwing a rock. If you have a 100-pound rock it going to require a lot of force to throw it, and chances are it isn’t going to move very fast or go very far. Now swap that rock out for a 5 oz baseball and exert the same effort into throwing it. Because the baseball requires less force to move, it will have a much higher velocity and will travel much farther with that same effort.

Considering the FV curve, there is a speed-strength continuum that we can use when planning a training program.

- Absolute strength
- Speed-Strength
- Peak Power
- Speed-Strength
- Absolute speed

The goal of training is to make athletes more explosive, creating a shift in the force-velocity curve to the right, meaning they produce more force at greater velocity across the board. To do so, we need to train across all areas of the continuum either concurrently or within a block periodization model (each has its benefits and depends on the athlete’s needs).

But, if your athlete has a specific goal or is already unbalanced, meaning they are very fast but not very strong (ore vice versa), we can lean more heavily on the area of the curve where they are weak. By helping a fast athlete get stronger or a strong athlete move faster, we can improve power output and make them more explosive all-around.