In-Season Training: Maintenance vs Development

The Off-Season phase of training is now moving behind us with the season starting very shortly. We are excited to see how the gains you’ve made during the long off-season can be translated to the field during competition.

We understand that once March hits, your brain turns into “In-Season” or “baseball” mode until August. However, there is an In-Season training phase for a reason. Stopping training altogether will NOT benefit your body.

More likely than not, you’re actually hurting it. Here’s an analogy.

Imagine a sports car getting serviced. You spend all of this time putting the newest tires on, most upgraded engine in, high-efficient fueling in, and then you get it ready for the road. This “road” is your season.

Eventually, at some point, you’re going to need to get your car checked again to make sure everything is near 100%.

If you go the entire season without training, you’re going to slowly lose the athletic qualities that you spent all of this time developing even though you’re spending a lot of time on the diamond.

Athletic SKILLS will stay competent throughout the season for obvious reasons, but it’s important to maintain or further develop athletic QUALITIES.

To fully understand why we need to train during the season, let’s talk about training residuals, common misconceptions, and continuing your athletic development

Training Residuals

When training for sport, we are trying to develop specific athletic qualities: anaerobic and aerobic energy systems, strength, power, speed, force reduction, and visuomotor skills (to name a few).

These athletic qualities have “residual” training effects.