You’re an athlete and your season is over. Now what?

The offseason of today is much different than it was before. Back then, taking the time off, so your body and mind could recover was a priority. Now the offseason is more about improving your game so an athlete can build and progress from the previous year.

A proper offseason training regimen can improve many different aspects of your game such as injury prevention, flexibility, strength, conditioning and recovery time.

The demands of a season can take a toll, and the daily grind can wither your body down. But with more of a focused and planned program during the offseason, it’s easier to avoid the injury pitfalls and it will put you in a better position to succeed.

The following is a breakdown of an off-season training program that will have you ready for training camp.

Muscle Activation and Mobility

Muscle activation is the foundation of our system. It’s crucial every muscle is firing correctly. If muscles aren’t firing properly, we can’t progress into the strength and power phase for the simple fact that we would be strengthening a dysfunction. For example, if an athlete can’t perform a simple bodyweight box squat, there is no way they will be able to do a loaded barbell squat properly.

Strength and Power Development

Once we have completed the muscle activation and structural balance phase, the next step is developing strength and power. This action will help the athlete increase lean tissue while dropping body fat, create more explosiveness throughout the whole body, and strengthen the ligaments and tendons.

Depending on the athlete and their sport, we may focus on improving relative strength, which increases the players strength but keeping their mass gain to a minimum. This is key for positional players like point guards in basketball or extreme athletes like boxers and MMA specialists.

NOTE: Super sets, volume training, and pyramid rep schemes can all be implemented in this phase. 

Metabolic Conditioning

Following the strength and power phase is conditioning. This stage targets muscular endurance, cardiovascular and recovery time. It’s best to introduce the conditioning phase last because by this point, your season is around the corner and your body should be optimized to meet the demands of team tryouts and camps.

We incorporate drills focusing on agility, velocity and sport specific movements depending on the position of the player. After this phase we ideally transfer the player on to the court or field where we would introduce workouts mirroring game situations and intensity. For basketball, our players would now begin to run conditioning and shooting drills on the court as this is where we look to exploit the power we have built for the past few months.

As the season progresses our athletes would begin our ”in-season” program which strives to maintain strength, agility and range of motion.

If you stick to a disciplined program during the offseason, your game will elevate to another level, and your body will be more sustainable throughout the season.