Should Athletes Strength Train During Their Sports Season?
When the sports season begins, strength training is often one of the first things removed from an athlete’s schedule.
The reasoning sounds logical. Practices are longer, games are more frequent, and athletes need time to recover. Parents and coaches may also worry that lifting will leave an athlete sore, slow, or tired before competition.
The problem is not usually strength training itself. The problem is continuing to train as though the athlete is still in the off-season.
During the off-season, an athlete may have more time and energy available to develop strength, power, speed, and physical capacity. Once competition begins, practices and games become the priority. Strength training should support those demands rather than compete with them.
That usually means reducing the volume, selecting exercises more intentionally, and adjusting the program as the athlete’s schedule and physical status change.
The objective is simple: provide enough of a training stimulus to help the athlete maintain the qualities their sport requires without creating unnecessary fatigue.
Practice Does Not Maintain Every Physical Quality
Sport practice develops technical skills, tactical awareness, and familiarity with the demands of competition. A soccer player practices passing, positioning, accelerating, and changing direction. A volleyball player practices serving, blocking, and repeatedly jumping. A baseball player throws, hits, fields, and runs.
Those activities are essential, but they do not always provide enough exposure to maintain every physical quality the athlete developed during the off-season.
Strength is the ability to produce force. Power is the ability to express that force quickly. Tissue capacity reflects how well muscles, tendons, and other structures tolerate repeated demands. These qualities contribute to an athlete’s ability to sprint, jump, throw, absorb contact, change direction, and repeat those actions throughout a long season.
When strength and power training disappear entirely, the athlete may gradually lose some of the physical foundation supporting those skills.
The National Strength and Conditioning Association emphasizes the importance of in-season strength training for maintaining physical capabilities and sport performance. The answer, however, is not to keep piling workouts on top of practices and games. The training dose has to change.
In-Season Training Should Prime the Athlete, Not Drain Them
A productive in-season workout does not need to last an hour or leave the athlete exhausted.
In many cases, a focused session can be completed in approximately 20 to 30 minutes. It may include:
A brief movement preparation
A low-volume speed or power exercise
One primary strength movement
One or two supportive exercises
Targeted work based on the athlete’s individual needs
The repetitions should look fast, controlled, and purposeful. Rest periods should be long enough to preserve movement quality. When speed, technique, or output begins to decline, adding more work may create fatigue without providing a better training effect.
This is the difference between training to stimulate performance and training simply to accumulate work.
During the off-season, an athlete may complete more sets, repetitions, and exercises to develop new physical qualities. During the season, the same athlete may use fewer working sets while maintaining meaningful intensity and intent.
Volume is often the first variable to reduce. Automatically making every exercise light and easy may remove the stimulus needed to maintain strength or power.
How Often Should an Athlete Strength Train During the Season?
There is no universal number that fits every athlete, sport, or week.
For many athletes, one or two focused strength sessions per week can be a reasonable starting point. Others may benefit from distributing the work across several shorter “micro-dose” sessions.
A systematic review and meta-analysis involving well-trained participants found no clear difference in maximal-strength development among different training frequencies over six to twelve weeks when the overall training stimulus was considered. The authors suggested that in-season strength work can be distributed across shorter sessions to accommodate competition schedules. Read the review
Frequency is only one part of the equation. A 25-minute session performed twice per week can create less fatigue than one long session containing the same—or greater—amount of work.
The appropriate schedule depends on:
The number and intensity of practices
The frequency of games or competitions
The athlete’s playing time
Their age and training experience
Their current soreness and fatigue
Their injury history
The physical demands of their sport and position
Sleep, nutrition, school, travel, and other sources of stress
A middle-school athlete who is learning foundational strength exercises may need a different program than an experienced college athlete. A starter playing nearly every minute may require a different dose than a reserve athlete who receives limited competition exposure.
The calendar identifies what is scheduled. It does not tell us exactly how much stress each athlete has experienced.
Where Should Strength Training Fit Around Games?
The best schedule starts with the competition calendar.
Training should be organized so the athlete can complete high-quality work while still being prepared for practices and games. A demanding lower-body session placed immediately before an important competition is unlikely to accomplish that.
When possible, higher-intensity activities can be grouped on the same day. For example, speed, power, strength training, and a demanding practice may be placed together, followed by a lower-intensity recovery day. This can create a clearer rhythm between demanding days and recovery days instead of exposing the athlete to moderate fatigue every day of the week.
Power and speed exercises are generally best performed while the athlete is fresh. Performing jumps, sprints, or explosive lifts after a long, exhausting practice may reduce the quality and purpose of the work.
A simple week with a Friday game might include a more meaningful strength session early in the week and a shorter primer closer to competition. During a week with several competitions, the athlete may need fewer sets and fewer accessory exercises while maintaining a small exposure to speed, power, and strength.
The schedule should be built around the athlete’s actual demands rather than copied from a generic weekly template.
Will Lifting Make an Athlete Sore Before a Game?
It can—but excessive soreness is not an unavoidable part of strength training.
Soreness is more likely when an athlete performs unfamiliar exercises, completes excessive volume, trains to failure, or suddenly returns to lifting after stopping for several weeks.
Consistent exposure is one reason strength training should not disappear when the season starts. An athlete who continues completing manageable doses is often better prepared to tolerate training than one who repeatedly stops and restarts.
To reduce unnecessary soreness during the season:
Use exercises the athlete already knows
Avoid sudden increases in sets or repetitions
Limit excessive eccentric volume close to competition
Preserve good technique
Avoid repeatedly training to failure
Allow appropriate recovery between demanding sessions
Adjust the workout when the athlete’s practice or game workload increases
The goal is not to prove how much work the athlete can survive. The goal is to provide the smallest effective dose that helps maintain performance.
Different Athletes Need Different Programs
An in-season program should reflect what the athlete does and what their current situation requires.
A running or field athlete may benefit from brief acceleration or speed exposure, a primary lower-body strength movement, and targeted hamstring, calf, or adductor work.
A jumping athlete may need a small number of high-quality jumps, lower-body strength, landing control, and exercises that maintain tendon capacity.
An overhead athlete may use medicine-ball throws or another explosive primer followed by total-body strength and targeted shoulder and trunk work.
Even athletes on the same team may need different doses. One may need to maintain strength. Another may need additional power exposure. An athlete returning from an injury may require progressive loading that looks different from the team’s general program. A reserve player may need more training volume because competition is not providing the same physical exposure as it is for a starter.
Good programming adapts to the athlete—not just the sport listed on the schedule.
How Soreness, Fatigue, and Performance Should Change the Plan
An athlete will not feel perfect every day during a competitive season. Some fatigue and soreness are expected. The presence of fatigue does not automatically mean all training should be canceled.
Instead, consider the complete picture:
Is the athlete moving normally?
Is soreness typical and improving, or unusual and worsening?
Has performance changed?
How demanding were the previous practices or games?
How much competition is coming in the next several days?
Is the athlete sleeping and recovering adequately?
Are symptoms affecting confidence or technique?
A heavy competition week may call for fewer sets, repetitions, or accessory exercises. An athlete who played fewer minutes than expected may need a slightly greater training dose. Pain or a meaningful decline in performance may require changing the exercise, modifying the session, or evaluating the athlete more closely.
Adaptation does not mean making a random decision based on whether the athlete says they feel “good” or “tired.” It means combining the athlete’s feedback with their schedule, movement, symptoms, training history, and performance.
Can Testing Help Guide In-Season Decisions?
Objective testing can add useful information, particularly when an athlete has an established baseline.
At Ignite, a countermovement jump on the VALD ForceDecks can provide a quick, low-fatigue snapshot of how an athlete is expressing lower-body power. Depending on the purpose of testing, we may examine jump height, contraction time, RSI-mod, force and impulse, jumping strategy, and each leg’s contribution to the movement.
The value is not in labeling the athlete based on one jump.
A lower score does not automatically mean the athlete is fatigued, injured, or unprepared to compete. Effort, testing conditions, soreness, sleep, recent training, and normal day-to-day variability can all affect performance.
The value comes from comparing consistent testing over time and interpreting meaningful changes alongside the athlete’s symptoms, schedule, and sport performance. Testing may help us recognize when the athlete is maintaining their output, changing how they produce it, or demonstrating a pattern that deserves a closer look.
Technology should inform the decision. It should not replace communication, coaching, or clinical judgment.
What Should an In-Season Workout Include?
A simple in-season session might include:
Movement preparation: Three to five minutes of mobility, skips, or low-level hops.
Speed or power primer: Two or three sets of two or three jumps, throws, or short accelerations performed with high intent.
Primary strength exercise: Two or three sets of three to five repetitions of a squat, trap-bar deadlift, split squat, press, or another appropriate movement.
Supportive strength: One or two exercises targeting a push, pull, unilateral movement, or posterior-chain need.
Athlete-specific capacity: One or two brief sets for the calves, hamstrings, adductors, shoulders, trunk, or another relevant area.
This is a framework, not a universal prescription. Exercise selection, resistance, repetitions, and scheduling should match the athlete’s age, experience, health, sport, and current workload.
Strength Training Should Support the Season
The start of a season does not mean strength training should stop. It means the program should become more intentional.
Practice develops the athlete’s sport. In-season physical preparation helps preserve the strength, speed, power, and capacity needed to perform that sport.
That does not require exhausting workouts. It requires consistent, high-quality exposure placed appropriately within the athlete’s week.
Keep the intent high. Control the volume. Monitor how the athlete responds. Adjust the program as practices, competitions, playing time, soreness, and performance change.
The best in-season program supports the sport—it does not compete with it.
Ignite Performance Physical Therapy provides individualized sports-performance testing, strength and conditioning, injury rehabilitation, and return-to-sport programming for athletes in Dripping Springs, Southwest Austin, and Westlake.
If you want to establish a performance baseline or develop an in-season plan for an individual athlete, team, or club, contact Ignite Performance Physical Therapy.
This article provides general education and is not a substitute for individualized medical or performance programming.
—
Ignite Performance Physical Therapy
Ignite Your Recovery. Elevate Your Performance.