How long should practices be?

A coach once asked me how long high school volleyball practices should be. Their varsity team practiced about 90 minutes to two hours per day. Two other teams in the district practiced three to four-and-a-half hours – and those two teams ended up playing for the state championship.

It’s easy to look at that and conclude that more practice must be better. That’s a dangerous conclusion.

Those teams may have had more talent, stronger programs, better athletes, or any number of other advantages. Successful teams do lots of things differently from unsuccessful ones. That doesn’t mean every one of those things caused the success.

So the question shouldn’t really be:

How long should volleyball practice be?

A better question is:

How long does practice need to be to accomplish what we need to accomplish today?

Start with the purpose, not the clock

My basic philosophy hasn’t changed much over the years. Practice should be as long as it needs to be to get the important work done. No longer.

That means practice length should come after you establish your priorities, not before. If you know the one or two things the team most needs to improve, you can build enough opportunities around them and then determine how much time the session requires.

That’s much better than starting with, “We have two hours, so how do I fill two hours?”

As I discussed in How to Set Volleyball Training Priorities After the First Week, good practice planning starts by identifying what is most limiting the team right now. Once you know that, duration becomes a planning variable rather than the objective.

More practice is not automatically more learning

This is probably the biggest issue with very long practices. There is a point where additional training stops providing the same return.

Players become physically tired. They become mentally tired. Their concentration drops. Decision-making deteriorates. The quality of movement falls.

At some point, they may simply be going through the motions. That doesn’t mean nothing useful can happen when players are fatigued. Volleyball matches certainly require players to perform when they aren’t fresh.

It does mean you need to understand what you are trying to accomplish under those conditions. Training longer simply because more training feels productive is not a good enough reason.

Different types of work have different fatigue limits

This was a point I explored in Looking more closely at practice length. Not everything in practice is affected by fatigue in the same way.

Suppose you are working on a new skill or making a meaningful technical change. Attention and movement quality matter a lot. Players need to be able to process feedback and connect what they feel with what actually happens.

That work probably belongs earlier in the session when the players are relatively fresh.

Team organization is somewhat different.

If you are working on block-defense relationships, transition responsibilities, serve-receive structure, or rotations, some fatigue may be less disruptive because the primary focus is collective organization rather than a fine technical adjustment.

Then there is conditioning. If conditioning is actually the objective, fatigue is part of the training stimulus.

The important point is that there isn’t one universal moment when practice suddenly becomes too long. It depends on the work you are asking the players to do.

Watch for diminishing returns

Coaches tend to notice obvious physical fatigue. Mental fatigue can be harder to recognize. The players are still moving. They’re still participating. They may still be talking.

But the quality of their attention has changed. You start seeing missed cues, slower recognition, poor decisions, reduced communication, or repeated mistakes that weren’t happening earlier.

Sometimes coaches interpret that as a discipline issue.

“Focus!”

“Come on, you need to be mentally tougher!”

Maybe. Or perhaps you’ve simply reached the point where the value of another 20 minutes is much lower than the value of the first 20. That’s worth recognizing.

You don’t get bonus points for finishing every minute that was written on the practice plan.

Practice density matters as much as practice duration

A two-hour practice tells me very little by itself.

• How much of that time are players actually engaged?
• How much time is spent waiting?
• How long do transitions between activities take?
• How often does the coach stop everyone to talk?
• How many players are standing in lines?
• How much time goes into setting up the next activity?

A well-organized 90-minute session can produce far more useful work than a poorly organized two-and-a-half-hour one. This is why improving practice flow can be more valuable than adding time.

If you want more repetitions, more decision-making opportunities, or more team play, first look at whether you’re using the minutes you already have effectively. That includes something as basic as warm-ups. If 20 minutes of your available time disappears into low-value warm-up activity, the answer probably isn’t extending practice another 20 minutes. It’s worth asking whether your warm-up is wasting valuable practice time.

Younger players generally need less time

Age and experience matter too. A younger beginner group usually doesn’t need the same practice duration as an experienced college team. Partly that’s physical. Partly it’s attention. Partly it’s because beginners can reach cognitive overload fairly quickly when everything is new.

They’re learning skills, positions, rules, movement patterns, systems, terminology, and how to interact with teammates — often all at the same time. Longer sessions don’t necessarily accelerate that process. If anything, you may get more from shorter practices with a clear focus and plenty of good engagement.

For coaches working with new players, I’ve provided specific examples in the Beginner Volleyball Practice Plan, including 60-, 90-, and 120-minute options. Those aren’t prescriptions. They’re ways of scaling the same priorities to the time and group you have available.

What about older and more advanced teams?

More experienced players can generally handle longer and more complex training. That doesn’t mean they should automatically practice longer. The same rule still applies.

What do they need?

An experienced team may be able to accomplish a lot in 90 minutes because the players already understand the systems, terminology, and routines. Another team may genuinely need two hours because there is more developmental work to do.

A preseason session might run longer because you’re installing systems, evaluating personnel, and building training volume. A late-season session with a team that has already played twice that week may need to be considerably shorter.

Level changes the answer. So does the point in the season.

Practice length should change as the season changes

I would be suspicious of a program that practices for exactly the same amount of time every day from preseason through postseason. The demands aren’t the same.

Early in the season, you may have more to teach and fewer matches creating physical load. Later, competition itself becomes a significant part of the training load. Players accumulate jumps. Travel accumulates. Academic pressure may increase. Small physical issues build up. Mental fatigue becomes more significant.

That should influence practice.

As I wrote in How to Adjust Your Volleyball Practice Plan Once Matches Begin, once competition starts the work needs to justify its cost. Sometimes the right answer is a shorter session.

Shorter doesn’t have to mean easier

This is an important distinction.

Reducing practice length does not necessarily mean reducing intensity. You can run a 75-minute practice that is highly demanding. You can also run a two-hour practice where the actual workload is relatively low.

Duration, intensity, and volume are related, but they aren’t the same thing. This is especially important when coaches talk about tapering as the season progresses.

In Taper training as the season goes on?, I discussed the common approach of reducing training volume while still preserving intensity. That makes sense. If you reduce both volume and intensity too much, the team can become flat.

The better goal is often to reduce unnecessary work while keeping the useful work sharp.

Don’t confuse intensity with pressure

Intensity is another term coaches sometimes use too loosely. A practice doesn’t become high intensity simply because the coach is loud, the scoring has consequences, or everyone feels stressed.

As I discussed in Training intensity without training panic, you can create high engagement through tempo, clarity, competitive structure, and meaningful problems without turning the session into a pressure cooker. That matters when you shorten practice.

If you have less time, you want good rhythm and purposeful work. You don’t need to manufacture anxiety in an attempt to compensate for fewer minutes.

Think about the whole week

Practice duration also shouldn’t be decided one day at a time. Look at the week.

Suppose your team practices Monday, plays Tuesday, practices Wednesday and Thursday, then plays Friday and Saturday.

Those three practices probably should not all look the same. Monday might be relatively short because you play the next day. Wednesday may provide your best developmental training opportunity. Thursday could be shorter and more tactically focused.

The matches themselves contribute substantial physical, cognitive, and emotional load. That’s why I like the idea that no practice should stand alone. Every session sits between what came before and what comes next. Practice length should reflect that.

Match length isn’t a perfect comparison

In the original version of this post, I asked why you would train for four hours when your matches normally last around two. I still think that’s a useful question, but I wouldn’t treat match duration as a hard limit. Practice and competition have different purposes.

Practice may include instruction, individual development, tactical preparation, physical training, and multiple forms of team play. There can be good reasons for practice to last longer than a match.

The useful comparison is workload.

If your training sessions are routinely far longer and more physically demanding than competition, you should be able to explain what you are getting from that additional load. If you can’t, then the extra time is probably not justified.

Don’t fill the schedule because you have the gym

This is another common trap. You have the court from 4:00 to 6:00. Therefore, practice is two hours.

Why?

Court availability tells you the maximum amount of time you can practice. It doesn’t necessarily tell you how long you should practice. If you accomplish the work you need in 95 minutes, there is nothing inherently valuable about inventing another 25 minutes of activity.

You could play. You could give players additional individual work if appropriate. Maybe have the players do some kind of off-court team bonding. Or you could just finish.

I’ve ended practices early before because we got what we needed. That should be viewed as good practice planning, not wasted gym time.

Be careful with arbitrary practice ranges

People naturally want numbers. So, how long should practice be?

For many younger or beginner groups, 60-90 minutes can be plenty. For more experienced youth and school teams, something around 90 minutes to two hours is common and can provide plenty of training time if the session is efficient.

Higher-level teams may sometimes train two hours or longer, particularly during preseason or when multiple components of preparation are included.

But those are only starting points. I would not look at a 90-minute practice and say it is too short. I would not look at a two-and-a-half-hour practice and say it is automatically too long.

I’d want to know what happens during those minutes, where the team is in its season, and what the players need. Three hours of deliberate, well-managed work is different from three hours because “that’s what serious teams do.”

Ask what the extra minutes are buying you

If you’re considering extending practice, ask a simple question:

What will we gain from the additional time?

More useful repetitions? More tactical work? A necessary conditioning stimulus? An opportunity for a group of players who haven’t received much work? Needed team organization?

If there’s a good answer, keep going. If the answer is basically, “More practice is better,” I’d reconsider.

The same applies in the other direction. Don’t shorten practice just because shorter sessions are fashionable. If the team needs the work and can productively handle it, do the work.

The decision should come from the training objective.

Stop when the quality is gone

Sometimes the practice plan says another 20 minutes. The players tell you otherwise.

That doesn’t mean every sign of fatigue should end practice. Players need to learn to perform when tired. They need to solve problems late in rallies and late in matches.

But there is a difference between productive challenge and low-quality volume.

If the session has reached the point where the players are no longer meaningfully engaged in what you are trying to train, continuing simply to reach the scheduled finish time doesn’t accomplish much. Change the activity. Change the objective. Or finish.

Good coaching includes recognizing when additional work is no longer useful.

The best practice length is the one that fits the work

There is no ideal practice duration that applies to every volleyball team.

Start with your priorities. Consider the type of learning involved. Account for player age and experience. Look at the physical and mental load. Consider where you are in the season and what the competition schedule looks like. Then decide how much time you actually need. And use that time well.

A focused 90-minute practice can be much more productive than an unfocused three-hour one. The goal isn’t to spend the most time in the gym. It’s to get the most useful development from the time you spend there.