Off-Season Part 1

Right now is an exciting time with the team and off-season training. For the first couple weeks it was a lot of regeneration work and getting everyone rested up and healed from the season. Now, we have began our Accumulation phase. They really need a lot of work capacity in order to set them up for the Winter program. Some of the things that I have taken into consideration with this block of the program:

Time under Tension (TUT):

This, for hypertrophy reasons, as well as hypertrophy of certain muscle fiber types is very important. The goal is to increase cross section size of slow/oxidative fibers which will increase speeds at AT. This is extremely important to build this capacity in a sport where there are many repeated bouts.

Corrective Work:

In no way is this inclusive to only focus on corrective exercises for specific areas, though we do hammer those, it also includes making sure we correct many imbalances that occur from the sport itself. We focus a lot on the quality of our horizontal pulls as well and getting our main hip stabilizers up to par as well.

Team Building:

One of the main ways I have instilled some quality team building within our workouts is simply how I grouped the athletes. In previous years we had set times and lifting partners. This was alright but not effective if both partners weren't very intrinsically motivated. Now, we have three larger groups (skill, semi-skill, Bigs) and since we have enough equipment they all are performing the same lift at the same time. The results have been great and the decibel level has risen significantly. When your athletes are being held accountable by the team they usually start to make sure they don't embarrass themselves and most of the time lifting with great effort will be the cure or that.

We are rapidly approaching Christmas break and when we get back we have testing. I am exited to see the results and seeing where we have to build off of. But as of now, the most important aspect of the whole program so far has been the team building or the emotional readiness of the team. Psychology can do wonders for the human body in terms of readiness, stimulation, and personal accountability. I will get some videos up soon with some example exercises/template and how we are utilizing them. Besides that GO HAWKS...BCS victory awaits!