Why qualified, individualized strength training helps football, volleyball, and cross-country athletes stay strong throughout the fall.
By Brady Hill, M.S., CSCS, USAW
Impact Fitness & Sports Performance
Once fall sports begin, strength training is often the first thing removed from an athlete’s schedule.
Football becomes more physical. Volleyball players accumulate hundreds of jumps, landings, and overhead swings. Cross-country runners steadily increase their mileage. Add school, homework, travel, and competitions, and stepping away from the gym can seem like the logical decision.
The problem is that playing a sport and physically preparing the body for that sport are not the same thing.
Athletes do not stop needing strength, power, movement quality, and recovery once their season begins. Those qualities often become more important as practices, games, meets, and repetitive stress begin to add up.
Training With Your Team Matters
Let me make this clear: training with your school team is important.
It creates accountability, builds relationships, and gives athletes an opportunity to work toward a common goal. Athletes should participate in their school program whenever possible.
Outside training should not compete with the school coach or undermine what the team is doing. When handled correctly, it should support both.
The sport coach understands the system, strategy, positions, and expectations of the team. A qualified strength and conditioning coach helps prepare the athlete’s body to meet those expectations.
Those should be complementary roles, not opposing ones.
Qualifications Matter Too
Sport coaches carry a tremendous amount of responsibility. They manage practices, strategy, lineups, film, travel, communication, and the development of an entire team.
Many are doing everything they can with the time, staffing, facilities, and resources available to them.
But coaching a sport and designing an individualized strength and conditioning program are two different jobs.
The National Strength and Conditioning Association recommends that a qualified high-school strength and conditioning professional hold an independently accredited credential, such as the Certified Strength and Conditioning Specialist, or CSCS, along with appropriate education and current CPR, AED, and first-aid credentials. The NSCA describes the CSCS as a credential specifically for professionals who apply scientific knowledge to train athletes and design safe, effective performance programs.
That does not mean a sport coach is unqualified to coach football, volleyball, or cross country. It means strength and conditioning is its own profession, requiring specific education in areas such as:
- Exercise physiology and biomechanics
- Program design and progression
- Strength and power development
- Speed and change-of-direction training
- Training-load management
- Testing and evaluation
- Exercise technique and supervision
- Recovery and basic performance nutrition
Most schools do not have a full-time CSCS overseeing every athlete’s year-round physical development. That is not a shot at the school or the coaching staff. It is simply a staffing reality in many smaller communities.
Even when a school has a good team lifting program, individualization can be difficult.
A football player competing on offense, defense, and special teams should not always train like someone receiving limited snaps.
A middle hitter accumulating a high number of jumps may need different adjustments than a volleyball player with a lower jumping workload.
A cross-country runner completing 35 miles in a week should not receive the same lower-body workload as a runner completing 15.
Outside training gives us the ability to look at the individual athlete, communicate with the family, account for what the school is already doing, and adjust the program without asking the team coach to manage 30 different plans at once.
In-Season Training Is Not More Off-Season Training
A good in-season program should look different from an off-season program.
During the off-season, we have more freedom to build strength, speed, power, muscle, work capacity, and new movement skills. Training sessions may be longer, overall volume may be higher, and athletes usually have more recovery available.
Once the season begins, the objective changes.
We are no longer trying to win every workout. We are trying to help the athlete perform well at practice, compete well, recover, and maintain the physical qualities they worked all summer to develop.
That typically means:
- Less total training volume
- Shorter sessions
- Fewer unnecessary exercises
- Less muscle-damaging work
- Fewer maximal-effort jumps and sprints
- Adjustments based on playing time, mileage, soreness, and competition
- Enough loading to maintain strength without creating excessive fatigue
Research suggests that strength can often be maintained with a reduced training frequency and a smaller overall dose, provided the training stimulus remains meaningful. That is why in-season programming should become more efficient rather than disappearing completely.
Week One Looks Lighter Than Parents Expect
The first week of our in-season program is not the week we push athletes hard.
We use a gradual re-entry week that we often describe as a reverse deload.
A traditional deload comes after a demanding training phase. Volume is reduced to allow the athlete to recover before beginning another progression.
With a reverse deload, we start with a smaller training dose and gradually build over the following weeks.
The principle matters more than the label.
When athletes move from an off-season program into preseason, nearly everything changes at once. They may be dealing with two-a-days, conditioning tests, longer practices, new movement demands, contact, increased running mileage, or a sudden increase in jumping.
On top of that, the exercises in their new in-season program may be slightly different from what they have been performing.
New exercises and sudden changes in workload can create soreness. Our goal is not to prove how hard we can train an athlete during the same week their sport is already beating them up.
So we pull back.
During that first week, we reduce the number of exercises, sets, repetitions, and sometimes the load. We give athletes enough work to maintain familiarity with the movements without creating soreness that follows them into practice.
Once the athlete has adjusted, we begin building the training dose through weeks two, three, and four.
By then, training may become heavier, but the overall volume remains controlled. Athletes may still lift meaningful weight, but we avoid unnecessary repetitions, missed lifts, grinders, and work that creates more fatigue than benefit.
Week one looking lighter is not us cutting corners.
It is us understanding the entire workload instead of pretending the gym is the only stress the athlete has.
What a Normal In-Season Week Looks Like
Once athletes move through the initial transition, most train with us two or three times each week.
Sessions generally last 30 to 45 minutes, rather than the longer sessions we may use during the off-season.
Athletes do not need more time in the gym during their season. They need the right work, performed at the right time, in the right amount.
The program is built around what the athlete’s sport is already providing—and what it is not.
Football
Football players already receive sprinting, acceleration, change of direction, contact, and conditioning through their practices and games.
They usually do not need us to add large amounts of extra running or intensive plyometrics.
Their in-season program may emphasize:
- Maintaining lower- and upper-body strength
- Hamstring, groin, and trunk strength
- Shoulder and neck support work
- Mobility based on position and soreness
- Low-volume power work when appropriate
- Adjustments based on snaps and contact exposure
The workout after a 40-snap game should not automatically look like the workout after a 90-snap game.
Volleyball
Volleyball players already receive a large amount of jumping, landing, lateral movement, diving, and overhead work.
The answer is not to bring them into the gym and pile on even more jumps.
Their program may emphasize:
- Maintaining lower-body strength and power
- Improving landing control
- Hip, knee, and ankle strength
- Posterior-chain development
- Shoulder and upper-back strength
- Trunk control
- Managing total jumping volume
The goal is to help them maintain their jump and movement quality throughout the season without adding unnecessary stress to the knees, ankles, and shoulders.
Cross Country
Cross-country runners do not need additional conditioning from us. They are already receiving more than enough through practices, workouts, and meets.
Their strength program may emphasize:
- Calf and lower-leg capacity
- Hip and hamstring strength
- Single-leg strength and control
- Foot and ankle function
- Trunk strength and posture
- Maintaining force production under fatigue
- Adjustments based on mileage and upcoming meets
Strength training can support running economy and physical performance in middle- and long-distance runners, but it must be programmed around the running workload rather than placed on top of it without consideration.
What One Session Actually Includes
The exact plan depends on the athlete, but a typical session begins with roughly 10 to 15 minutes of preparation.
That may include:
- Soft-tissue work
- Mobility
- Movement preparation
- Activation exercises
- Breathing or positional work
- Low-level jumping or landing preparation when appropriate
This is often the work athletes skip when left on their own.
Mobility is not the single cause or solution for sports injuries. Injury risk is more complicated than that. Training history, workload, strength, fatigue, previous injuries, sleep, nutrition, mechanics, and simple bad luck can all play a role.
However, when an athlete loses usable range of motion or begins compensating because certain areas are sore or restricted, it can affect how they move. This portion of the session gives us an opportunity to see what has changed and adjust before loading the athlete.
The remaining 20 to 30 minutes are usually focused on strength and power maintenance.
That may include:
- One primary lower-body movement
- One primary upper-body movement
- A single-leg exercise
- A pulling movement
- Trunk or carry work
- Targeted exercises based on the athlete’s sport and current needs
We are not chasing weekly personal records.
We are using efficient movements to maintain strength without demanding more recovery than the athlete can afford.
What You Will Not See Much Of
You will not see us blindly adding conditioning because we believe every workout needs to leave an athlete exhausted.
Cross-country runners do not need more running.
Football players do not need another conditioning test after practice.
Volleyball players do not need another 100 maximal jumps simply because they entered a sports-performance facility.
You also will not see us stack unnecessary high-intensity sprinting or jumping onto an athlete who is already receiving a large amount of it through the sport.
That is deliberate.
When total workload becomes too high, fatigue can show up through declining power, slower reactions, poor movement quality, soreness, irritability, or reduced readiness to compete. Calling every version of this “CNS overload” oversimplifies what is happening, but the underlying point is still important: more high-intensity work is not automatically better.
A qualified coach must understand when to train, when to modify, and when to pull back.
Why It Feels Lighter—On Purpose
This is the part that sometimes surprises parents.
In-season training may look easier than off-season training.
That does not mean it is less important.
The athlete is already receiving stress from practices, games, meets, school, travel, and reduced sleep. Our job is to provide enough stimulus to maintain what they have built without competing with their sport for recovery.
Some sessions may be heavier but very low in volume.
Other sessions may be lighter because the athlete played a major role the night before.
One week may contain more lower-body work. Another may shift toward upper body, mobility, and recovery because the athlete is sore or has several competitions close together.
The program should change because the athlete’s week changed.
That is what individualization actually looks like.
The Goal Is to Be Strong in the Final Weeks, Not Just Week One
Most athletes begin the fall using the strength, speed, power, and conditioning they developed during the summer.
For a few weeks, everything may feel fine.
The football player still feels explosive.
The volleyball player is still jumping high.
The cross-country runner still feels strong through the early meets.
That does not necessarily mean those qualities are being maintained. It may mean the athlete is still benefiting from the work completed before the season.
The real test comes later.
Can the football player still accelerate, absorb contact, and produce force during the fourth quarter?
Can the volleyball player still jump, land, and move with control late in the season?
Can the runner maintain posture, force production, and efficient mechanics when mileage and fatigue have accumulated?
That is the purpose of in-season training.
It is not about adding more work.
It is about using qualified coaching to provide the smallest effective dose—enough to maintain strength, support recovery, and help the athlete continue performing when the season becomes the hardest.
Your athlete worked all summer to build those qualities.
The season is not the time to leave them to chance.
To learn what an in-season program would look like for your athlete’s sport, playing schedule, and current workload, schedule a conversation with the staff at Impact Fitness & Sports Performance.
Research Referenced
- Bosquet, L., Berryman, N., Dupuy, O., Mekary, S., Arvisais, D., Bherer, L., and Mujika, I. (2013). Effect of training cessation on muscular performance: A meta-analysis. Scandinavian Journal of Medicine & Science in Sports, 23(3), e140–e149.
- Girard, O., Mendez-Villanueva, A., and Bishop, D. (2011). Repeated-sprint ability—Part I: Factors contributing to fatigue. Sports Medicine, 41(8), 673–694.
- Lesinski, M., Prieske, O., and Granacher, U. (2016). Effects and dose-response relationships of resistance training on physical performance in youth athletes: A systematic review and meta-analysis. British Journal of Sports Medicine, 50(13), 781–795.
- Llanos-Lagos, C., Ramirez-Campillo, R., Moran, J., and Sáez de Villarreal, E. (2024). Effect of strength-training programs on middle- and long-distance runners’ economy at different running speeds: A systematic review with meta-analysis. Sports Medicine, 54(4), 895–932.
- National Strength and Conditioning Association Secondary School Coaches Working Group. (2017). Why your high school needs a qualified strength and conditioning professional. NSCA Coach, 4(1).
- Osses-Rivera, A., Yáñez-Sepúlveda, R., Jannas-Vela, S., Vigh-Larsen, J. F., and Monsalves-Álvarez, M. (2024). Effects of strength training on repeated-sprint ability in team-sport players: A systematic review. PeerJ, 12, e17756.
- Spiering, B. A., Mujika, I., Sharp, M. A., and Foulis, S. A. (2021). Maintaining physical performance: The minimal dose of exercise needed to preserve endurance and strength over time. Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, 35(5), 1449–1458.
- Suchomel, T. J., Nimphius, S., and Stone, M. H. (2016). The importance of muscular strength in athletic performance. Sports Medicine, 46(10), 1419–1449.
Keep Your Athlete Training Through the Season
Every athlete’s schedule, playing time, workload, soreness, and training history are different. The first step is learning more about your athlete and determining what type of in-season plan can support their performance without adding unnecessary fatigue.
Schedule a free No-Sweat Intro with our staff to learn what an individualized in-season plan could look like for your athlete.
