You have to overtrain

But not in a "get really tired" way

I’m here in Korea and we’re in the thick of pre-season training camp. The first match of the season is 1 month away and I don’t have to tell any coaches reading this how quickly those last few practices to go. Almost every day at practice we say something like:

Every single team in the league is improving. We can’t just get better today at practice. Our rate of improvement has to be faster than everybody else. It’s not just the velocity, it’s the acceleration.

At the high school and juniors level, you have to squeeze every rep out of practice that you can. You just don’t get enough practice time. A typical American club team practices twice a week for 2 hours. You got to hit the ground running! At the NCAA level, and particularly at the NT or Pro level, you have a lot of training time. If you only maximize for reps, you can grind your players straight into the ground.

So at this level, coaches sometimes talk about overtraining. You don’t want to overtrain. Are we overtraining? This is usually from a fatigue or load management perspective. Is the training volume so high that, instead of a positive adaptation, the athlete gets into a spiral of under-recovery and their body actually adapts by decreasing performance. (To anthropomorphisize your central nervous system, imagine it’s saying, “I can’t seem to recover from jumping 30” into the air and landing 300 times a day, but my muscles and joints could probably handle 300 landings from 20”, let’s turn down the neural output next practice.”)

But I have a slightly different perspective on overtraining that I’ve been talking with my staff and players here, and this sort of overtraining has a positive adaptation.

Technical Overtraining

My first “real” role with the USA WNT was radar gun guy. Among other miscellaneous duties at practice, I would hold the radar gun during serving and tell the players the speed of their serves and/or record them on the white board. Later, I’d compile them into spreadsheets or whatever we were doing with that data. The point is: I spent a lot of time that summer (and in subsequent years) radar gunning servers.

One of the great things about doing entry-level grunt work is that, if you’re observant, you start to become an expert on some really small piece of the puzzle. For another example, I spent a ton of time doing heat maps about where balls were attacked. This menial task has been one of the most important things I’ve ever done in my career. Remember, stats are just observations with a good memory. When I teach at a GMS Coaching Clinic, I’m not just showing a picture on a page. I’m showing a picture on a page that represents me sitting there and watching video of thousands of attacks and looking at where those balls went on the court.

Okay back to radar gunning serves.

One thing I realized was that serving is easier in matches. And that observation seems counter-intuitive, doesn’t it? Don’t players focus more in matches? Don’t they step up and rise to the level of competition?

Kind of. But that’s also kind of the point.

We know that loss aversion makes the pain of an error greater than the thrill of success. So when players “focus more” in the match, they end up focusing more on serving the ball in, not necessarily on serving better. Well, that’s my opinion, there could be another causal mechanism. But the fact this is rooted in is:

Players serve slower in the game than practice.

(This is more true for float servers. Some spike servers will hit a bit harder in-match because of adrenaline, etc.)

You can also look at serve error % in practice and in match. Although individual players might go through the yips in matches at times¹, on an overall level, for any kind of extended period of time, I’ve never seen a team who missed serves more frequently in matches than in practice.

What Does This Have To Do With Overtraining?

If you want to serve good in a match, you have to serve really good in practice.

If you want to hit within 5’ of the sideline in-match, you have to put the ball right on the sideline in practice. If you want to serve within a ball’s height of the tape in-match, you have to scrape the tape with your serves consistently in practice.

In my experience, this applies to many skills.

Setters tend to set a bit slower in matches. So if you want to run fast in-match, you have to run real fast in practice.

Hitter fans narrow in-match. So you have to overtrain attack angles. For my DV heads out there, if you only go to Cone 5 in practice, you’re getting a lot of Cone 4 in the match. And we do NOT like Cone 4 amirite?

Passers are always more complex with their mechanics in the game than they are in practice. If you want your passers to be simple in the game, they have to be flawless in practice.

Now like physical overtraining, you also have to know your limits with this too. You can end up changing the goal of the skill so much that you make things unrealistic or almost start performing a different action entirely. So to circle back to my comment about setting, one thing that I think gets offenses messed up IS that setters tend to set a bit faster in practice.

So, initially, the goal is to set faster in practice than you do in the match, if your goal is to raise your attack tempo in a match. That’s kind of obvious, right? But soon, it’s less about going faster in practice and more about not letting yourself go slower in practice, ever. If you want a 1.0s tempo to the left-side in-match, it’s not that going to some crazy 0.8s tempo in practice and hoping it drags up your match tempo.² It’s more than you have to completely and systematically root out any 1.05s balls, much less 1.1s balls.

Kind of a 2-stage process: first, raise the top-end. Next, eliminate the bottom end. That’s the kind of overtraining that’s actually productive.

1. A bit of a separate phenomenon so I don’t want to chase that one too far.

2. I mean, it might, but probably not in the most productive way.