In-Season Performance Principles

In season, the job of the weight room changes. It stops being about chasing new PRs or stacking on training volume, and starts being about protecting the performance an athlete has already built while games, practices, and swings pile up around them week after week. That calls for a different approach than an off-season block, and these are the principles we lean on to get it right.

The field is already asking a lot of the body. Practices, games, excess conditioning, and swing volume are all forms of training stress, whether an athlete thinks of them that way or not, and none of it pauses to make room for a heavy lift. The weight room isn't a separate bucket that fills up on its own schedule, it's drawing from the same recovery capacity as everything else an athlete is doing that week. So every decision we make in season comes back to one question: how much stimulus is enough to hold onto strength and power, without eating into the recovery an athlete needs to actually perform on the field.

Keep High Days High

Match high-intensity lifting with high-intent skill days. The goal is to consolidate stress throughout the week, making sure recovery days stay recovery days. By grouping high-intensity activities together, you allow for more complete recovery periods, enhancing overall performance and reducing the risk of overtraining.

This is really a scheduling problem more than a lifting problem. If an athlete's hardest lift falls on their easiest field day, they've just created a moderate-stress day out of what should have been a true recovery day, and they've done it without gaining anything extra from the lift itself. Stacking the hard days together instead means the body gets one clearly defined stimulus, followed by a window where it can actually absorb it. Spread that same stress evenly across the week and every day ends up moderately taxing and nothing ever fully recovers, which is often how athletes end up feeling flat in games despite training less overall.

Low Volume, High Output

Prioritizing low-volume, high-intensity lifting with heavier loads can enhance performance by maximizing output while minimizing overall training volume. This allows for sufficient stimulus to promote adaptation and strength gains, while facilitating better recovery between high-intent sessions.

Volume is the variable most responsible for how sore and fatigued a session leaves an athlete. What we're actually chasing with low volume, high-intensity work is high motor unit recruitment, keeping the nervous system fluent in firing the fast-twitch fibers responsible for strength and power, without piling up the total workload that drives fatigue and soreness. Heavier loads and near-maximal efforts recruit those higher-threshold motor units almost immediately, so an athlete doesn't need many reps to get the signal in, they need the right intensity.

Overcoming isometrics are one of our favorite tools for this. Pressing or pulling against an immovable object at or near maximal effort recruits a high percentage of motor units with essentially no eccentric component and very little joint travel, which means we get a strong neural stimulus with almost none of the mechanical wear that comes from moving heavy loads through a full range of motion repeatedly. It's a way to keep an athlete's strength expression sharp without asking their tissue to absorb more total work in season.

We also shift our high-intent lifts toward more concentric-focused work in season, meaning less emphasis on the slow, controlled lowering portion of a lift and more on the forceful, shortening contraction. Slow eccentric lengthening under load is one of the biggest drivers of delayed onset muscle soreness, because it creates more microscopic damage in the muscle fibers than a concentric contraction at the same intensity. In season, an athlete can't afford to walk out of the weight room sore in a way that affects how they move on the field the next day or two. Favoring concentric emphasis lets us keep the intensity high enough to maintain strength and power while keeping the soreness cost low enough that it never competes with practice or games.

Use Partial Range of Motion

Incorporating partial range of motion (ROM) exercises, such as pin squats and pin bench presses, can enhance performance by increasing output while reducing joint stress. However, it's important not to overlook deep ROM. Building awareness and endurance in these positions through yielding isometrics can help restore mobility and improve joint stability within specific ranges of motion we are not overloading.

Partial ROM lifts let an athlete load heavier than a full-range version of the same movement without asking as much of the joints and connective tissue that are already managing a full season of sport-specific stress. That's a useful trade in season, but it's not free. Spend an entire season only training partial ranges and an athlete can quietly lose capacity in the ranges they skipped. Yielding isometrics are how we hedge against that, holding a controlled, sub-maximal position at end range keeps the joint and the surrounding tissue accustomed to being there, without adding the fatigue cost of loading through the full range dynamically. It's a way to keep the door open on mobility while still training with the heavier, more joint-friendly partials day to day.

Program What You're Not Getting

Sprinting and rotational volume is already high, chances are you don't need much more of that in the weight room. Prioritize strength and power to maintain performance, and continue to build on movement quality and hypertrophy in isolated areas.

Think of an athlete's weekly training load as one total bucket, not separate buckets for the field and the weight room. Sprinting, cutting, throwing, and swinging are already loading the same tissues and the same rotational and ballistic qualities that a lot of off-season programming is built to develop. Adding more of that same stimulus in the weight room doesn't build anything new, it just adds risk on top of a system that's already working hard. What the field usually isn't providing is maximal strength work, controlled loading, and targeted hypertrophy for areas that get under-trained by sport movement alone, so that's where in-season lifting earns its keep.

The hypertrophy we're after in season isn't about adding size for its own sake, it's about durability. More cross-sectional area in a tendon's surrounding musculature, in the rotator cuff, or through the posterior chain gives those tissues a bigger buffer against the repetitive stress of a full season of throwing, swinging, and sprinting. An under-sized muscle around a joint has less capacity to absorb load before that stress gets passed on to the tendon, ligament, or bone underneath it. Building isolated hypertrophy in the areas that take the brunt of the sport's repetitive demands, the shoulder, the elbow, the hips, is one of the more effective ways to keep an athlete available for the whole season rather than just performing well for the first half of it.

Auto Regulate

Be prepared to adjust training volume in response to weekly on-field demands. Listen to your body and modify workouts accordingly, ensuring that weight room efforts complement, rather than compromise, on-field performance.

Every principle above assumes a normal week, and normal weeks don't really exist over the course of a season. A big series, a jump in innings or pitch count, or a stretch of travel changes how much the body has left to give in the weight room that week. Auto-regulating means the plan on paper is a starting point, not a mandate, and it's built around simple signals: how the bar speed looks on a given set, how an athlete rates their own readiness, how they're sleeping and eating. When those signals say the tank is lower than expected, the right move is almost always to pull back the lift, not push through it, because the whole point of in-season training is protecting what's already there, not testing how much more the body can absorb.

Lastly, get a coach and develop a plan. Don't try to navigate everything on your own. At The Shed we offer both in-person and online training options to help you progress in season.