If you’ve worked all off-season to gain weight, build strength, and improve movement deficiencies to be at peak performance when your season starts, you don’t want to lose your progress by stopping your training.
Why does it matter to keep training as your season picks up?
Athletes must maintain what they’ve built.
1. Athletes can start to experience detraining after 2 weeks without resistance training.
What is detraining?
Detraining is the loss of training-induced adaptations.
This can encompass a wide variety of different systems in the body, including but not limited to, the cardiovascular system, metabolic system, and muscular system.
After cessation of training, athletes in various studies have been found to experience decreases in their “conditioning”. This is a general way of saying that their body is not performing at as high of a rate as it could be or was performing at.
Heart rate, stroke volume, and cardiac output will all start to decrease causing the athlete to operate at a lower intensity and limit the amount of time the athlete can perform at a high threshold.
From a metabolic standpoint, an athlete’s body changes the way it stores the different molecules used to create energy for the muscles during training and performance.
The body’s sensitivity to different substrates changes, which would result in a change in the body’s ability to use the “fuel” stored, where the “fuel” for the muscles is stored in the body, thus decreasing the ability for the muscle to perform at the same desired levels.
In the muscular system, enzymes that facilitate ATP production experience a significant decrease after the cessation of training. This means that the body becomes less efficient at turning the building block of energy into energy.
Within two weeks, the cross-sectional area of fast-twitch muscle fibers can start to decrease. This is a direct correlation to athlete performance.
In various studies, it was shown that an athlete’s ability to create power decreases the longer they go without training.
What does this mean?
This means that an athlete’s body functions at a higher level than most humans.
To keep these athletes operating at this high level, it is most necessary to keep them properly trained and properly nourished for proper baseball development.
Parents and athletes spend hard-earned money in an effort to receive the proper training and quality coaching to increase their performance level during the off-season. It is necessary to continue to train because, without doing so, the level of performance will start to decrease as the season goes on.
Athletes bodies become more and more fatigued without resistance training there to maintain strength.
How to prevent this?
This can easily be prevented by getting on an in-season training program so the athlete’s strength and performance level is maintained.
This maintenance of strength will directly correlate with consistent performance on the field.
2. Athletes that stop training are putting themselves at a greater risk for injury.
When the strength needed through the range of motion for competition decreases, two things will happen… the performance will decline, and the risk of injury will increase.
There is a decrease in muscular strength when the pressure application translates from primarily the muscles to the joints and ligaments.
When there is added stress on these weaker structures of the body then the risks for injury go up.
From a different perspective, if the demands on the body from sport stay the same but the strength of the body is lower, the body is far more likely to breakdown from these same stresses as the body’s baseline baseball development decreases.
3. Starting generic strength programs that don’t meet their unique body’s needs.
What program works best?
Areas to look at when deciding where to do your strength program are your body’s biases, weaknesses, strengths, needs, movement patterns, recovery, and time of year.
All of these factors affect how you should train, plus others that aren’t listed, based on your individual body.
Understanding each athlete’s individual needs is our focus here at PUSH Performance. Different athletes have different needs.
We don’t treat every high school pitcher that walks into our gym the same because they have different body orientations.
Training intensity and frequency also needs to change as the amount of time playing their sport increases to keep the athlete prepared and ready to play through the season.
What if financial is a factor?
If finance is a factor, we offer several different training packages based on how many times per week the athlete would be coming into our gym to train. We also offer remote training which is an affordable and convenient option to help athletes continue training with us and continue to better themselves.
Training via remote offers you the ability to do your strength program from a local gym, school gym, or at home with certain equipment, while communicating directly via text, call, and Zoom with our coaches here at PUSH Performance.
Additionally, our remote athletes have a 1-on-1 session once a week for all questions, updates, and more.