Should You Train In-Season?

The number one question I receive this time of year is "should you train during the season?" The answer is absolutely YES, you should.

We will dive into the reasons why, and some of the accommodations that are made in-season. However, let me start by saying this: Consistency wins. I have been coaching athletes for over 14 years. In that time I have worked with a handful of players from middle school all the way until they reached the professional level. I have worked with even more athletes from middle school until they reached a high level of collegiate athletics. Every single one of them, shared a very important attribute. They were CONSISTENT. They trained just about every week, for 5-6+ years. Generally speaking, these were the types of athletes who didn’t even need to read this post. They wanted to take every opportunity they had to improve, stay healthy, and continually work on their physical preparedness. It’s no surprise that they continued to move up to higher and higher levels of competition. Where they were at any given point in time was not where they saw themselves going. High School, was always a stepping stone to college. College a stepping stone to professional sport. With that mindset, there was no off season, there was simply another day to get better.

Let’s start by breaking down the numbers:

The coming season, if we cover Spring and Summer, can span up to six months (April through September). Let's use a freshman in highschool for the sake of example. If two players begin training during the off season leading into their freshman year this leaves 4 years of possible development. Let's say during the off-season both players train 3x/ week for a possible 72 training sessions completed during that time. Come the season, one player decides to make it a priority to train 2x per week, while the other stops training completely. The player who keeps training will complete another 48 sessions. If we span that out over four years, the athlete who trains in season will train 192 more sessions than the other player.

Without even touching on the benefits of continuing training, it should go without saying that the athlete who has 192 more chances to improve on physical qualities will have a massive advantage over the athlete who does not make the time to train April - September.

Furthermore, the science of training would point out that the true nature of what we do in the gym has to do with making adaptive systems more robust. Adaptable systems can move in either direction (positive, neutral, negative) depending on the consistency of the stress applied to them. An easy example is your skin. Your skin is an adaptable system. When we expose skin to sunlight, changes in the pigment help us adapt to tolerate more sun exposure, that's why we get a tan. If we apply too much of the stimulus, in this case sun, we get a sunburn. If we apply too little, we don't tan at all.

If we spend all summer building a suntan, and then don't expose our skin to the sun for six months what happens? We return to where we started at the beginning of the summer. Now, certain qualities improved in the gym do not dissipate as quickly as the tone of your skin. However, they do act in a very similar way. When the consistency of the stress applied in the gym ceases to exist the body will see no reason to hold on to what’s it’s created in training.

This is well documented in the science of training. You can see the table below which illustrates how quickly certain qualities are lost if not exposed to via training:

Photo Credit: Issurin

Keeping this in mind, we can see that the player who chooses not to train in season will not only miss out on 48 chances to keep improving that year, but in reality they will also lose some of the adaptations they made during the 72 off season training sessions.

If we were climbing a staircase to our potential, both athletes may have moved up 6 steps during the off season. One athlete will spend the next six months moving up a few more stairs, while the other actually moves back down a few steps. In four years one will reach the top of the staircase, the other will likely not.

These adaptations are not limited to newly acquired muscle tissue. They also include all the work put in to move more efficiently. What we do in training doesn’t just last forever. It’s like brushing your teeth. You go to bed with a clean set of chompers, but you’re still going to eat the next day. We leave training in a better place to handle the compressive nature of life, and sport. The next day you’re still going to manage gravity, and you’re going to also increase the volume of compressive forces placed on the body via sport. Skip brushing your teeth for 3-6 months, and see what happens.

Now to answer a few more common questions. "Is training in season safe, and will it negatively impact my performance on the field?" That's a fair question. After all, we can't just keep adding to the system, too much sun as we said will cause a sunburn. Therefore, training in season must be handled differently than training out of season. This leads right into the last coupling of questions I often receive: "how is training in season different, and how often should I train?"

Let me see if I can answer all of these together. Given that players are now adding practices and games to their already full academic schedule (at least in the spring) we have to balance stress accordingly. Stress whether it be voluntary in the case of practice, games, and training or whether it be involuntary in the case of academic / athletic pressure, both cause similar responses from the body. Therefore we have to negate this by making the following changes to training:

1. Reduce frequency (how often you train). Younger athletes who have only been training 1-2x per week can actually continue at this frequency even with the added demands of the in season schedule. We purposefully keep their frequency lower than it could be because players new to training can make great progress on hitting the minimal effective dose of training. The changes we make to HOW we train (covered next) will be enough to offset any possible negative repercussions of training in season.

More advanced players who have been training 3-4x per week should reduce frequency down to 2-3x per week. This reduction in volume of training will help off-set the stress of added practices and games. We can work with players to develop a schedule that makes sense within their practice / game schedule.

2. Reduce training volume. In addition to changing how often we train, we also can change HOW we train. By using shorter sessions we can have productive exposures that will still progress players but cause less accumulated fatigue. Younger players will progress in season at a similar rate (making it even more important that they continue), more advanced players will progress at slightly slower rate in season because they need a larger stimulus (or stress) to cause major adaptations (the system gets desensitized over time). However, given our stair example, more advanced players STILL need to train in season or they will have less effective off seasons.

Lastly, by minimizing volume, and exposures to novel stimulus (new things), we can minimize soreness from training. It is relatively unclear if muscular soreness actually decreases performance. Likely, the soreness changes the psychological environment and this causes a possible decrease in performance more so than any actual physical implications. Some players report soreness having no effect on how they play, others say it can. In either case soreness will not make playing unsafe, and we will train in such a way that minimizes soreness.

3. Training in season gives us a chance to positively offset the demands of playing. By this I mean that training in season actually helps keep players HEALTHY and on the field. Most injuries are from overuse, and the lack of variability. Baseball is a very repetitive game. Lots of swings and throws done similarly and done on the same side. By training in season we can keep up with activities that off set the unfavorable strategies associated with the game. Furthermore, we can utilize training activities that deliver some balance in terms of how tissues are behaving in a sporting context. When we train in season correctly, we actually are less likely to get hurt in season.

While this was a long post, I hope it helps clear the air on in season training. Now, what's the next step?

For those of you that have been training, I HIGHLY encourage you to continue. COMMUNICATE with your coaches about what you need from us to make in season training realistic. Do you need 2 days you can do at school / home and one day in the gym? Do you need to switch from 3-4x per week to 2-3x per week? Do you need to execute most of your training outside the gym, and therefore need to switch to a distance based program? We can work with you, to make it work.

For those who did not train with us the past couple of months who may want to pick up in season, please feel free to reach out and we can help get you started.

You can email us directly with any questions: thestrengthhousegym@gmail.com

Thanks for an awesome Fall / Winter. I hope everyone has a great Spring / Summer season. We look forward to seeing you at the gym!