Friday Fitness - Let's Race

Something for everyone

This spring I’m doing 3 different running article series.

On Tuesday, I’m releasing articles aimed at giving you a small, specific tool to make your in-practice or in-match coaching more effective. On Fridays, I’m writing about ways to increase the physical capability of players. On Sundays, I’m releasing a more statistically-oriented beach article.

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The first Friday Fitness article of this spring dealt with jump testing.

Jumping is the most important raw physical ability in volleyball. Spike velocity is probably next, and I was going to address that in this week 2 article. However, a comment by reader Matt Greene on last week’s article caused me to flip things:

I really like this. Another thing to bring out competitive culture in the team. I can hear my back row now. “What about us coach?” Any thoughts on a good measure for them? Something that replicates explosive moves to the ball?

Okay, so let’s flip weeks 2 and 3 and bump up what I was going to talk about next week. Let’s talk sprinting.

(Note: I spend the next 1000 words NOT talking about sprinting so feel free to skip to the end if you want to avoid the back story and just get to the practice recs.)

Actually, first, let’s talk existing biases first. Some of you may come from a similar background as me, so maybe you can relate.

I’ve never done any kind of sprint or speed training with my volleyball players before. I come from the church of Carl McGown and have long taken the position that, “skills are specific, there’s no such thing as general athleticism, etc, etc.” I generally still do.

I have been a weightroom guy, because I (think) it helped me a lot in my volleyball career. I entered college touching 10’10” and left touching 11’7.5”.¹ I attributed most of this to strength training as I entered college like many lanky volleyball players barely able to squat the bar and left with some fairly impressive strength numbers.

I still think there’s some value in heavy lifting. Raw squat strength probably helps your jump. There’s a certain type of athlete with decent levers for jumping, decent natural bounce, and a decent predisposition to gain muscle. These sorts of athletes tend to do well on typical powerlifting/weightlifting programs, especially if they are playing a lot of volleyball/basketball which are natural plyometric workouts. So that was me in college.

But…

There’s a fair amount of athletes who aren’t in that sweet spot. And interestingly enough, they are almost on opposite sides of the spectrum. You have your natural strength athletes. They are usually a little thicker-limbed, usually not too bouncy, and they usually take to lifting pretty quickly. Ironically, these athletes are generally not helped by standard strength training programs, because it’s just giving them more of what they already need. They get better at lifting weights but they don’t get much faster or more explosive.

On the flip side, you have the greyhounds. These are your natural athletes who usually have thin joints and a lot of natural spring. No cankles on these athletes. They are rarely weak but they are often not good at expressing strength in traditional weightlifting movements because their nervous system and muscle insertion points make them more wired for bounce than strain.

With these athletes, the danger is that you start doing too much heavy, strain-based lifting and you start teaching that bouncy, rapid-firing nervous system to hold on to tension and muscle movements. And god forbid they are naturally loaded with fast-twitch fibers (and they probably are) because then they’re going to pack on muscle very quickly. And now you have a heavier athlete who has lost their bounce and that’s a recipe for a less-effective volleyball player.

I saw the example of that last case first hand when I was a club coach. I had a player test a legit (plyomat) 24”+ standing vertical² and touch almost 10’ at 5’9”. As soon as she got to college she heard how she was too skinny and she needed to get stronger and put on some muscle. This kid had a natural 6-pack since she was 14 and could do multiple dead-hang pullups. She wasn’t weak, just naturally wiry. The next summer she came back to train, 15lbs heavier and way stronger on the squat. She also tested 19” standing vertical and couldn’t hit 9’6” on her approach.

So yeah, let’s not do that.

Then What’s The Answer?

I’m getting there but you’ll have to bear with me a little longer. I rewrote this section a couple times to keep it from being novel-length and because the trial-and-error of me learning about physical preparation is a bit outside the scope of this article. There’s some lessons that I’d like to share, but they’re more appropriate for another time.

Suffice to say, over the past 15 years I’ve had everywhere between “zero” and “near-total” control of the physical preparation of teams ranging from U12s to National Teams. There’s been tweaks here and there, but overall I felt that I found a formula that worked well. To sum it as succinctly as possible:

1. A base level of strength using the most bang-for-the-buck, dummy-proof exercises. Heavy sled drags or pushes are the preferred. Trap-bar deadlift can be appropriate for some. For younger kids just holding the basic volleyball defensive positions for 30s works well. Barbell back squats avoided at all costs.

2. Force absorption via landings off a box. (Or more basic drills if needed).

3. Plyometric bounce. Jump rope is the entry point and that will last many kids a long time before they need to advance to more challenging hops and hurdles.

4. Some upper-body stuff in shoulder flexion³, mostly pull-ups (regressed, for most kids especially girls) and band stuff. Although I increasingly think that all you really need to do is hangs. I used to do some push-up type stuff but increasingly I think that pressing strength (like bench press, overhead press) is somewhere between irrelevant and actually-counterproductive. Bear crawl stuff might be helpful because you mobilize your scapula.

5. Test and compete (against yourself and others) in your jumping ability and spike velocity.

In situations where I led the programming, this is what I would do. In situations where I was working with a strength coach, I would make sure these qualities were being addressed. There were also situations (such as USA WNT) where I had no input into the physical prep but I was fortunate enough to get to learn from some great people in those various roles.

Wait, Isn’t This Article About Sprinting?

Yes, yes it is. And here we go.

I’ve never really done any running with my volleyball players. You don’t really run on the volleyball court. And I’ve never worried about the endurance component. Volleyball is an alactic game, and the best way to train for the energy system demands of a volleyball game is to play volleyball games and then recover from them. (More on this in a future article.)

So I’ve always done some of the strength stuff and then the jumping/plyo stuff. But never any sprint work. Until this season.

What changed my mind? This guy. And physics.

If we accept (and I do) that we need to be as specific as possible in our skills training, then I think we need to be obsessed with bang-for-the-buck in our physical preparation. And I think there’s some good argument that sprinting might give you the most bang-for-the-buck of anything you can do off the court.

This is because sprinting is probably the most stimulation that an athlete can apply to their central nervous system in the shortest amount of time. It is also likely the highest-force activity that an athlete can do.

In a way, this is what I was going for with my existing training model. I just didn’t go one step beyond the power absorption/production plyometric drills into the highest-force action that an athlete can do: sprinting.

So this off-season, I was convinced to give my athletes some exposure to sprinting.

What Does It Look Like At Practice