As coaches and athletes transition back into structured, scheduled activity and prepare for competition we know how important it is to gradually ramp up volume and intensity.

In the majority of cases in the collegiate setting, it’s been up to 6 months that we haven’t had our athletes on campus training with us. That’s a long time where volumes and training loads are un-accounted for.

The athletes that I primarily work with trained throughout this time and were in a good place once we were able to begin training as a team again. I knew this as we performed a capped fitness assessment prior to beginning our progression.

That was extremely beneficial to start the re-acclimation process back to full activity.

The concept that I want to share is how we shouldn’t just think about gradually ramping up volumes and intensities but also consider how we periodize the effort and attitudes we bring on a daily basis as we prepare for competition.

Competing is a skill and takes a great amount of energy, focus and will on a daily basis.

It’s not something that many of our athletes were able to do in the confines of their homes during quarantine.

Sure we can ask them to compete against themselves or their teammates via zoom and group threads but it’s not the same when you are lined up against someone in a practice or the weight room.

The first 2 weeks we started our ramp up progression we focused primarily on re-establishing work capacity (still an ongoing goal throughout our progression), establishing movement quality and building connective tissue strength.

We wanted to re-introduce sport specific skills in a non-competitive environment that allows our athletes to have some success and get them used to training again with the covid restrictions we have in place.

We understood that DOMS, residual physical and mental fatigue would be an issue during these initial 2 weeks. On certain occasions, I would have to reduce volume for the betterment of continually training throughout the week.

We did not want to miss training session during this time. If that meant we had to do less work, or reduce volume, we would.

After getting through the first two weeks, our next goal over the next 3 weeks is to build our mental edge, build our competitive spirit, and our collective will as volumes and intensities increase.

The ability to perform and compete requires the ability to tolerate higher work loads and as we build our chronic work load, we must be able to push through fatigue.

We will need to push through mental and physical fatigue, not pain!

A competitive athletic season is not for the faint of heart.

It requires a high mental and physical work capacity to handle the many stressors that will occur.

Many of these stressors have not been experienced in a long time and we need to be able to build up our athletes tolerance to physical work.

A typical week during the season requires 14-16 hours of physical activity.

This doesn’t include film, or any other mental prep work.

Being able to transition from a starting point of 4 hours of physical activity in week 1 to ultimately get to the 14-16 hours is going to require periods of time when some mental strength must be challenged to ultimately build up the ability to tolerate those work loads.

These transitions in work load must also factor in the mental effort required to transition as physical workloads increase.

These mental efforts and the attitude required must be considered and factored into these periodization and transition plans that are being implemented all around the country at this time.

I advise all coaches to consider how you are periodizing your efforts and building a competitive environment into your training so we can truly prepare our athletes for the rigors of a competitive season in the midst of a global pandemic.

We have experienced so many challenges during this time and have had to consider a different training model than we are accustomed to.

If you aren’t considering how you are integrating efforts and building competition into your training progressions, you may not be preparing your athletes as well as you could.