Off-Season

Off-season usually marks the end of intensive sport specific training and match play for majority of community and sub-elite athletes. A common approach to this time-period is to have 2-3 months completely off from training, and possibly maintain some form of a gym program if you are inclined to resistance train already.

However, like any resistance or conditioning program, there is the notion of use it or lose it.

Not to say you will lose every single bit of conditioning or strength gained, but there will be obvious adverse change once you step back on the pitch or step foot in the gym after a period without any training.

Every hard-working athlete deserves time off from an exhaustive season. However, there are some strategies to adopt that can help you keep as much of your conditioning and strength as possible and make the start to your pre-season less of a shock to the system.

1. Give Yourself Time

Now this may go against what we just spoke about but, hear me out. If you’re absolutely wrecked at the end of season and you can’t even look at a footy field without feeling fatigue your body is telling you something. Give yourself a 2-3 week period to rest and recuperate. This will not only allow your body a chance to recover but will have a huge impact on your perception and motivation for training.

Missing this step can sometimes mean you are performing off-season workouts and conditioning at 60-75% effort. This can sometimes just add to your systemic fatigue and decrease your motivation levels without gaining much in the way of adaptation.

So give yourself a short stint without any or very little training to gain rid yourself of systemic fatigue and get that desire and motivation back for training.

2. Address Your Niggles

Before thinking about hill sprints, benching triple figures or squatting 2 x your bodyweight seek help or guidance on your in-season injuries you have been nursing and trying to ignore. This, again, is your body telling you it isn’t coping with what you’re giving it.

Because we are about to ramp up training and pre-season is around the corner, carrying niggles into these periods will only prevent you from maximising training output. The effect of this over a 2-3 month period is: less adaptations from training, risk of the injury worsening and more time sitting on the pine or watching from the grandstand.

So use this time wisely to get your injuries managed. If you have questions about how to care for past injuries or are nursing a new injury and aren’t sure how to best care for it, give us a call so we can support you in your recovery. Our team of physiotherapists are here to support you in any way we can.

3. Start Small

You’ve got time on your side starting this early. The last thing you want to do is start right now guns blazing, accumulate significant amounts of fatigue and barely be able to get through pre-season.

Focus on a few aspects you want to improve. You might have noticed your conditioning wasn’t up to standard last season, start there. You might have noticed you’d like to have stronger quads, start here.

A really great place to start is to start or re-commence your resistance program in the gym gently. Focusing on a few key lifts and not to failure. The other low hanging fruit is your volume running or conditioning. Work on getting your general aerobic fitness up without putting significant load through your limbs with high-speed, sprint or agility work. You can always start small and infrequent and build yourself up by 10% or so each week.

4. Skills

Use this time to improve that jump shot, develop your passing skills or master that serve. These skills are developed with repetition so starting early, even before pre-season, will allow you to maximise your skill acquisition. Furthermore, staying familiar with your sport will remind you why you’re already working on your body before pre-season.

5. Master Your Recovery / Nutrition

One of the biggest keys to performance is how you fuel your body and how you recover. I’m not talking about foam rollers, massage guns, massages and ice baths necessarily. These can have their place but are completely irrelevant when they’re performed without these few steps.

Sleep. It’s is the most important recovery tool we have. Also the most inexpensive. If you’re not sleeping 7-8 hours regularly per night don’t look any further on things to change or implement. Without a quality sleep schedule, everything else is impacted. Performance decreases, fatigue increases, strength decreases, muscle size decreases, time to recover increase, fat increases and so on. I cannot stress enough the importance of nailing this step before anything else.

Fuel your body. Training rigorously uses large amounts of energy and places large stressors on your muscles and tissue. You need to replace the energy lost to ensure following sessions are fuelled appropriately and your muscles have recovered from the previous session. Ensure you are eating sufficient levels of carbohydrates, protein and fat. There are plenty of free resources available on the internet that delve into this topic further. However, if you can leave reading this with understanding your food intake is more important than ice baths and massage guns we are ¾ of the way there.

Hydrate. Last step is to drink water, lots. Most people understand this step but I need to stress it again. You lose significant amounts of water playing sport and training, this always needs to be replaced. We also need water to function properly and to be able to participate in these sports to our best ability.

Pre-season is right around the corner and we want you to feel supported in nailing your off-season as well as kicking goals in your next season! As always if you have any questions or think it might be time to book in with one of our physiotherapists give us a call at 0753781571 or send us an enquiry here!