Author: Sam Cumbo

Don’t be the guy taking your off-season mass building workouts into the season.  Now is the time to dominate the field. 

Give your bodybuilding workouts a break and ensure your body is ready to compete.

Whether you are a high school athlete, collegiate, or a pro, your in-season training should look different than your off-season.  

Here’s why:

• You want to be at your best each game

This is a no-brainer, but most people don’t understand the effects that a training session can have on your performance.  A heavy lift the day prior to pitching can create fatigue of your central nervous system.  This fatigue doesn’t always show up with muscle soreness, so a lot of people are unfortunately blind sided when their velo just isn’t there on that day or they feel groggy.

This same CNS fatigue will also affect your speed and power for everything else you do.  Don’t let your Monday lift affect your Tuesday start!  That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t lift heavy in-season.  It means you should be smart about when you do lift heavy and what accessory movements you do around your heavy lifts.

• Your lifting frequency has changed

Most athletes drop from 3-6 lifts per week in the off-season to 2-3 lifts per week in season.  This allows them to focus their energy on the field while preserving their range of motion, power, and strength.

This also means that your training program should reflect that.  The volume in your lifts should change, certain exercises should be prioritized and others unprioritized (think chin up negatives as they cause a ton of muscle damage to your lat, which is key to throwing!), and since you are training less days the overall volume that you are hitting is going to be less, meaning that muscle building will be at a significant disadvantage.  The good news is you can make progress in your strength, power, and movement capabilities with low volume!

• The season is not the time to focus on building muscle

In-season the goals for your training should be to: stay healthy and build strength and power.  Muscle may be gained as a result of this, but your efforts should not be purely on gaining muscle.  If you are doing it right, your fall, winter, and early Spring is the time to focus on muscle gain if you need the size.

Training to mitigate loss of your movement capabilities is paramount to your ability to stay healthy and continue to play at a high level throughout the entire season.