Conditioning Doesn't Matter

And if it does, you can't prove it

In previous Friday Fitness installments, I’ve talked about what I believe to be the most important physical indicators for volleyball:

Jump Height
Sprint Speed
Spike Velocity

Those three are pretty uncontroversial. What can get a little controversial is what people mean by “conditioning” or perhaps the always-popular being, “in shape.” I want to reclaim the term fitness. As I’ve said before:

Does the term fitness kind of sound like 80s aerobic videos or bring back memories of PE class? Maybe. But the etymology of the word fitness means something like “suited for the circumstances,” and the word fitness was probably used in an evolutionary context before it was used in a training context. And I like the evolutionary context.

So what does fitness for volleyball mean? The ability to dig, block, pass, set, hit, and complain about the set for the duration of the match. The better you are at that stuff, the more fit you are for volleyball. What most people mean by being “in shape” or conditioning or fitness or whatever means endurance.

People love different measures of endurance. Maybe some programs have their athletes run a mile. Maybe some of them do longer duration. Maybe some of them do internals like a beep test or some sort of repeat alactic intervals. And I’m here to say that:

Endurance has no effect on your ability to win volleyball matches.

Here’s why:

Endurance of [whatever capacity] measures your ability to repeat [that capacity] over some amount of time with minimal performance degradation.

That sounds good. I would like my athletes not to suffer performance degradation over the course of a match.

But here’s the thing. Nobody¹ really suffers peformance degradation over the course of the match. Seriously. In theory, it should happen. In theory, it makes sense that athletes should have some difference in performance capacity and some start the match strong but fade down the stretch while others, the “fit” ones, can maintain their performance for the duration of the match.

But those athletes, both the fit ones and unfit ones, are really hard to find. And, by extension, teams filled with those athletes are also really hard to find.

There’s many ways to coach volleyball. And there’s probably even more ways that athletes are physically prepared to play volleyball. And yet, you would struggle to find a team that can be shown to have better (or worse) endurance than their opponents.

Why? Well… we’ll get to that. But first, some numbers from the Big 10 2023 season.