Summer training is a critical time for all athletes regardless of their sport. It is possibly the most important season with regards to training especially for high school athletes. Most high school athletes are 3 sport athletes so they go from soccer, to basketball, to baseball, football to track to lacrosse, field hockey to gymnastics to tennis, etc.
So coaches have a problem. Do they just try to get you ready as quickly as possible for your current sport? Do they try and work on the overall development of the athlete? Are they concerned about conditioning levels of the incoming athletes? Are they concerned about the condition of the athletes leaving after their sport season is over? Is there enough time in 3 months for a coach to put together a great periodized training program?
Now there are certain coaches that focus on different aspects of what they feel is important to work on during the season. And most state athletic rules are set up so the coach can not work with their athletes out side of that sports season. This is why summer training is so important. The athletes get to work on and focus on improving all biomotor abilities.
Some consider the summer GPP (general preparatory period) work of there training plan. I wrote a few months ago about periodation (Periodization – structure of a continuous training plan) and structure of a work out plan/program so I am not going to go into this too much.
I am going to break this Summer Training Plan Recommendations Article into sections so I can cover in detail each aspect of speed training. To start off, let’s hit the topic that everyone is mostly concerned about: Training Speed over the summer.
Speed Work
I hear that speed training should not be worked on in the offseason. I still have not heard a good reason for this. Why would you stop speed training when this is the skill that you are trying to improve?
I have seen athlete’s work on their ‘conditioning’ in the off season and not perform any speed work. Then when they show up to camp for pre-season they are expected to sprint and time and time again, injuries occur. Sprinting is high intensity work that involves recruiting specific groups of muscle fibers, improving the efficiency of neuromuscularfiring patterns and is extremely taxing to the central nervous system. To not have your athletes train for this complicated process then all of a sudden you want them to perform at full speed at practice or a game is crazy.
Now, volume, intensity and density of your speed work will change throughout your training program. You should not drop speed training from your program at any part of the year.
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