Knowledge
In Season Conditioning
One of the issues a coach has to deal with is improving conditioning, strength and flexibility during the season. This year I’m an assistant coach with a boys high school volleyball program. There was a complete coaching turnover, and in my opinion this should have been done years ago judging by the preparedness of the kids. From the incoming freshman up through the varsity players, there was a total lack of attention to strength through the posterior chain, hip flexibility and late game conditioning. In this article I’m going to share with you our in-season conditioning that I implemented to try and rectify this situation.
Flexibility
A leading contributor of knee pain in volleyball players can usually be traced back to inflexible hips. When students sit for hours at a time, the hip flexors will shorten and lead to glute inactivity and what is commonly referred to as tendinitis. Our practices are at the end of the school day, so these shortened muscles need to be lengthened and the glutes need to be turned back on before our practice begins. I will utilize various dynamic movements performed through a full range to help warm up the lower body of the athlete. Here is our typical warmup:
- Jog around the court 2 times.
- Forward lunges
- Side lunges
- Pulling foot up into midline
- Kicking foot out of midline
- Pulling knees to chest
- High kicks
- Single leg RDL into digging motion
- Walks of the outside of foot
These are performed in a walking pace from one sideline to the other and back. After a trip down and back, we switch exercises. From here we move on to our ball handling part of practice.
Strength, Speed and Conditioning
With our kids right now there has been no previous strength training or conditioning. They come in to the program weak and slow from sitting around playing video games all day. I have 2 kids this year that tip the scales at 150 lbs., too bad one is 6’0” and the other is 6’3”. I’m surprised no one has blown away from a strong breeze while outside boarding a bus
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So the question is how do we improve the underlying motor skills to improve the vertical jump? We know these kids are jumping close to 200 times per practice, if not more, and this alone will help. But we want to make sure our kids are building a base from the early part of the season on thru our 16 matches and 3 tournaments. We can’t have practice be so draining on the kids that they cannot recover for the matches, if we do this, then practice in itself will be self defeating. The kids need to be drilled and repetition is the key to the development of skill. I cannot afford to have ‘easy’ practices when building these kids, each hour of practice must be utilized to its fullest.
Here is our post practice conditioning circuit. It focuses on development of stiffness through the ankles, power development in a sport specific aspect, speed and finally glute development/hip flexor lengthening.
Under the net footwork. We have the kids do various footwork drills while under the net. This forces the athlete into a defensive position and works on laterally movement while improving the strength through the foot and ankle. You can be creative with this, we do feet together single and double touches on each side of the line, large laterally strides, and quick feet with 3 touches on each side of the line.
Blocking drill. This is a long drill with the kids working on lateral footwork along the net into a maximum vertical.
Suicides. I believe everyone knows what these are.
Bulgarian Split Squat Isos. I do these for 10-20 second holds until I see form breaking down with the kids. Man are they weak here.
The key is to control volume with the above. During the beginning of the season we will go through each of the above 3 times, and this is at the end of a hard practice. This is every day. We’re trying to push the kids into a hole during the week, and then during the weekends they bounce back. Once our match schedule starts, we will cut the above down to one time through each drill. On Fridays again we will push them and go through 3 times. A key we look for is quality of the work, if the kids aren’t trying hard, they do it again.
Video of both are warmup and conditioning will be posted soon. I’m also looking forward to seeing the improvements of their verticals from the season work. We’ll keep you updated!!!
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