Tag Archive for volleyball conditioning

Quick drills that keep players moving

May 2, 2018 Volleyball Practice Planning No comments

What are some suggestions for drills that are quick and can be run through in a few minutes consistently to keep them moving and pumped during practices?

Coaches wonder about this quite often from a couple of different perspectives. One is in terms of warming up. Another is in terms of keeping the training tempo high and players engaged. Let me address things from both perspectives.

Warm-up

For me, the main thought process behind picking a warm-up activity is getting the players’ heart rates up and muscles warm, and also executing some lower intensity volleyball skills. An example of this is what I call Brazilian volleytennis. I like this one because it involves so many elements. There’s lots of movement and relatively quick rotations, keeping players switching in and out of the play. On top of that, it requires good player communication and coordination along with a lot of reading. Oh, and it’s competitive.

A different type of warm-up activity which is more ball-handling oriented is over-the-net pepper. The version that has the most player movement and highest touch frequency is probably the 3-player version. There are lots of different pepper variations, so you have loads of options in this regard.

Depending on your age group, you might even want to jump straight in to more full game play, like doubles. Younger players, after all, don’t need the same warm-up as older ones.

High Tempo/Maximum Engagement

Once you get into the meat of a practice, keeping players moving tends to be more focused on player engagement, though it could also have a conditioning element. Basically, what we’re talking about here is activities where things happen quickly and changes are frequent. A popular example of this is Winners, also known as Queen or King of the Court, and variations on it like Speedball or the Belly Drill.

The main feature of Winners and games like it is the way players wave on and off the court. It keeps them moving, and possibly facing different challenges.

Another way to think about keeping players moving is to increase the tempo of your games and drills. Generally, this means finding ways to shorten the length of time between one repetition and the next. That tends to be a feature of wash type games and drills.

Make sure it’s not just about movement

It’s easy to come up with ways to make players move around a lot. That’s not really what we should be thinking about here. Most of us have limited time with our teams, and we can’t afford to waste any of that on activities that don’t involve volleyball. If you’re thinking that this movement could be part of player conditioning, I’d argue there are better ways to actually get in proper volleyball conditioning through the structure of your practice.

Those are my thoughts on the subject. I’d love to hear your own ideas. Feel free to share them via a comment below.

Looking at jump count

March 23, 2018 Volleyball Coaching News & Info No comments

In 2014 when I spent three weeks with a pair of German professional teams, I had a conversation with one coach about player jump counts. He was starting to use the VERT device to track jumps in training. It gave him a guideline as to when to shut things down. I had a similar conversation during one of the Volleyball Coaching Wizards interviews. It became the basis for a podcast.

All of this came after Volleywood posted something which suggested what I saw as a ridiculously high average player jump count. They said, “Most volleyball players jump about 300 times a match.” With no supporting evidence, I should note. I posted a comment contesting that idea. As this article shows, however, that idea somehow spread.

So what’s the truth?

The folks at VERT published a set of figures based on NCAA women’s volleyball. The following comes from an email they sent out which I received.

So setters jump the most, followed by setters, then outside hitters (probably including right sides). Notice none of them are anywhere close to 300. Yes, these are averages, but I’m hard-pressed to imagine any player in even the longest match getting to 300. Maybe, maybe hitters got that high back in the sideout scoring days when matches could go very long. Even then, that would be on the very high end, not the norm.

And according to the article I linked above, research indicates the average is significantly lower for beach players than indoor ones. Though for them you have to factor in playing multiple matches per day.

Training implications

So what does this mean for us as coaches?

It means it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to have players do 150 or 200 jumps a day in practice when they will do far fewer in matches. If we do, then we are likely over-training, which puts us at risk of injury as a result of either fatigue or overuse. And we shouldn’t just think about jumps in practice here. We also have to consider jumps from strength training as well. It all adds up.

How to add conditioning to your volleyball practice

March 8, 2018 Volleyball Coaching Q&A, Volleyball Practice Planning No comments

I came across the following question from a volleyball coach having to do with conditioning in practice.

Anyone have any conditioning drills? I don’t want to just condition my girls without adding some volleyball into it, as they have a whole other practice specifically for conditioning. But we are slow and need to build up speed and stamina. Drills that require constant movement, reps, etc.

Speed vs Stamina

Speed and stamina are two separate issues. Raw speed is a function of power production. That comes mainly from specific speed/power training. That’s not something you will develop while playing/practicing volleyball. It’s more about things like weight training and plyometric work.

That said, there are elements of a player’s overall speed and quickness which are a function of game training. They are technique and readiness. The more efficient and automatic one’s technique (see The Talent Code), the faster or quicker they will be able to execute that skill. Similar, if a player is able to anticipate something happening – thanks to good reading skills – they will be quicker to play the ball.

Developing Stamina

Building player stamina in practice is a much easier thing to accomplish. In fact, it’s really simple. You either have to increase intensity or make things last longer. The latter is straightforward as you just have to increase the time between breaks. Nothing complicated about that!

As for increasing intensity, what I’m talking about is increasing the number of repetitions in a given period of time. For example, in normal game play where each rally begins with a serve it might be 20 seconds per rally. If you play 22 v 22 where you immediately put in a second ball after the initial rally, though, you could perhaps get two rallies in 30 seconds (15 seconds per rally, on average). And if you want to really ramp it up you could play something like Scramble where you might have four rallies in 30 seconds (averaging 7-8 seconds each).

The Second Chance idea is along those same lines. With it you could almost create what is a non-stop rally. It’s not exactly like that, but there’s very little time between the time when play breaks down and you get it going again. And if the same player makes repeated mistakes, they get lots of conditioning!

Even pepper can be a form of conditioning.

No need to lose practice time to conditioning

Because you can control intensity and/or duration in your practice, there’s no need to waste volleyball time on conditioning work (e.g. sprints). Why do something without the ball you can easily accomplish the same with it?

Now, if you only practice a couple times a week, that might not be enough total work. In that case, you’ll want the athletes doing something to keep/get their fitness level up. Cardio is not the answer here, though, especially during season. Volleyball has about a 1:3 work to rest ratio. That means a player is active for say 10 seconds, then rest for 30 – on average. This is very different from running or biking for 30 minutes straight. In fact, those sorts of longer duration exercises are counterproductive for volleyball as they train slow, repetitive movements rather than quick, explosive bursts.

Are your players mentally or physically fatigued by training?

January 27, 2016 Volleyball Coaching No comments

Orest Stanko at the Pak Men blog wrote a post mainly focused on the value – or lack of value – in physical consequences (punishment) for the failure to do certain things in training. An example is push-ups when one does not call the ball. It’s worth reading from that point of view. It follows along the lines of some things I’ve written before (see On the question of punishment in volleyball training).

Though only briefly mentioned early on, one idea Orest presents really grabbed my attention. It was that coaches should focus less on player fatigue as a training objective. Rather, your goal should be mental fatigue. Sports are generally viewed as mainly operating in the physical realm. It is therefore easy to see why coaches would think having physically tired athletes at the end of practice is the objective.

Obviously, there is a strong physical element to training. In particular, if you believe that the best form of conditioning work for your team is what you do in training, then it’s reasonable to think in those fatigue terms.

But as coaches we don’t just focus on developing physical abilities. A massive part of our role is to help our athletes the mental side of the game – reading, decision-making, etc. You may even be able to say it’s the bigger aspect of our job.

That’s where the idea of mental fatigue at the end of training comes in to consideration. How do you challenge players mentally as much as you do physically (or more)?

The answer is pretty simple. You put them in positions which force them to read and make decisions. Importantly, you also have a feedback mechanism with respect to that reading and decision-making so the players can judge their performance.

Think about the implications of those requirements,

A sample weight training program

August 12, 2015 Volleyball Coaching, Volleyball Coaching Articles No comments

Here is a sample weight training program currently being used by a men’s professional volleyball team. I present it for your information and maybe to provide some ideas for your own purposes. I’m not suggesting it should be used as-is for your own team.

Each sessions starts with a warm-up of 5 minutes or so on a stationary bike

After that is a series of core and shoulder stability exercises, which vary from session to session. In the case of shoulders, they do three sets of 12 repetitions of a couple exercises with either dumbbells or bands. For the core exercises, is three exercises for 40 seconds each, twice through. Obviously, this is adjustable.

The preparatory phase ends with a leg circuit of leg extensions, leg curls, and calf raises. These are meant as warm-up, so lighter weights – 3 sets of 8.

There are three rotating lifting routines.

A – Cleans, Squats, Bend Press, Low Row
B – 1-arm Rows, Lateral Raises, Chest Butterfly, Curls, Shoulder 8
C – Front Raises, Standing Rows, Triceps Extensions, Forearm Curls, Back Raise

The routines are alternated A-B-A-C-A. The team lifts 5 days per week. The sets and repetitions are adjusted over time.

Coaching Log – Sep 29, 2014

September 30, 2014 2014-15 Exeter University 2 comments

This is an entry in my volleyball coaching log for 2014-15.

Over the weekend all but one of the players took part in a beach volleyball focused trip. I did not attend, but they got a couple of sessions of coaching by the England Juniors beach coach. The main purpose was one of team bonding, and the reports suggest mixed results there. I won’t get the full story (or as much as I want/need to know, anyway) until probably Wednesday when the team captain returns from a conference. The suggestion, however, is that we may have some toughness issues and a lack of discipline. The captain suggested addressing the issue of fitness, which has been on my to-do list already.

From the beach coach I got a separate report in terms of stuff she went over with them on the court. Several elements were things I have either already started to address (footwork patterns) or had noted from last week’s work to bring up (playing with intention). She made similar observations about some of their serving as I did while creating a video for them from footage taken in Thursday’s session.

This session was 90 minutes in the small training gym. Top of my list of things to do in the session was to assess the setters and middles in terms of running quicks. I knew going it that the strongest MB could do it, but the rest was an open question. Last year the quick never developed for a number of reasons. This year I want to prioritize it if possible.

This was the plan going in:

Blocking footwork
Volley tennis
Serving warm-up and target serving
Backrow Hitting lines
Split group: Quick hitting / OH pass & hit
Player winners

I actually managed to get through all of those things as planned and more or less as anticipated. This was the first time they’ve done volley tennis and player winners. They went pretty well.

In the latter case I ran parallel games with 7 players on each half court. About halfway I had the top three players from one court swap with the bottom three from the other. This is something I’m going to keep tabs on over time to see what kind of evolution there is in who ends up on the “winners” court.

I did quite a bit of technical coaching in this session. First it was in the serving warm-up. I prepared a video of some of the serving done in the prior session to highlight the good mechanics, and posted that for them to watch. Most of them had before training, so I was able to key them on certain training points. There is starting to be progress already, though a couple players need sorting out.

The other major technical work was in the quick hitting drill. Both setters and hitters needed some direction. I was a bit disappointed in the setting side of things as one of the players I’ve been looking at as either a starter for the first team, or part of a 6-2 system was not one of the better performers. One of my projected second team setters actually did well.

I talked with the team afterwards about having intention when playing the ball, as there was a lot of “panic” type play in the 6 v 6 last session. I also talked about slowing the game down by taking the ball lower, which is something I know got discussed over the weekend. I finished up talking about fitness and getting the players to submit ideas for modifying the warm-up sequence.

I also warned the team that I will be making things harder – both mentally and physically – moving forward.

Sample pre-hab pre-training routine

August 29, 2014 Volleyball Coaching No comments

Every day before they started training during my time at SC Potsdam, the German professional women’s team, I watched the squad go through a kind of pre-hab circuit (also known as “activation”). It’s fairly straightforward (especially compared to the one I saw at USC the year before that included tight-rope walking!), so I figured I would share it here. It features 13 different stations.

1) Balance board: forward-backward
2) Balance board: side-to-side
3) Balance board: all-direction

These three basically involve the players maintaining their balance while doing slow squat movements. As you can imagine, the all-direction (basically, a platform with a half ball attached to the bottom of it) is the most challenging.

4) Bridges
5) One-leg bridges (right)
6) One-leg bridges (left)

Bridges are exercises where you lay on your back with your knees bent, then lift your butt up from the floor. In the one leg version you extend one leg up in the air, so bridging using only the leg on the ground.

7) Front plank
8) Side plank: left
9) Side plank: right

On the left/right planks, you have the players do a dip by letting their hip drop toward the floor, then returning back to the start position.

10) Crunches
11) V-Twist

The crunches featured legs straight up in the air with the toes pulled back toward the torso, but you can mix it up. For the V-twist, from a semi-piked position (legs and torso off the ground), players twist from side-to-side. Do them with an object such as a medicine ball which you can move back and forth.

12) Opposite arm/leg raise: right
13) Opposite arm/leg raise: left

These raises are done either from a prone position or on hands and knees. The player simultaneously raises the right arm and left leg (or left arm and right leg).

As you’ll notice, there’s a heavy core focus, with the balance board stuff essentially working on lower body stability. Each of these exercises is done for 20-30 seconds, with a break of a couple minutes after each full circuit. The team usually did 3 circuits.

I don’t share this routine to say this is what you should do with your team, but simply to provide some ideas for a framework. Also, it reinforces the idea that core can/should be done every day (or nearly so). You can modify as desired.

I did this sort of pre-training activity a couple days a week when I coached at Svedala. We would have done it every day, but one day practice fell after weight training, while another day we practiced away from our normal gym. I used a variety of available physical education devices (medicine balls, floor mats, cones, etc.) to set up the exercises and I mixed them up each time.

Peaking at the right time

March 3, 2014 Volleyball Coaching No comments

In any given season there is a time, or perhaps a couple of times, when you want your team playing at its absolute best. For many this is at the end of the year during post-season play. In other cases, though, there may be a desire to see a team peak for intermediate competitions. That could be a certain tournament, a big rivalry match, the start of conference play, etc.

Season structure plays a part

When I coached at Brown, the head coach talked about how different it was having gone from a situation where the Ivy League champion was determined in a season-end tournament. That system was replaced by one where the champ was determined strictly by league performance (no tournament). It changed the season dynamic. No longer could you just build things up to have the team playing its best volleyball at the end.

Taking the long view

This came to mind a while back when the Exeter university teams I coached were in the stretch run now. In less than two weeks they would both play in Final 8s. The men’s second team also had a Cup semifinal, and potentially a final as well. With the women in particular, things progressed very well in terms of peaking them at the right time. All season long my focus was getting them there, prepared to face that level of competition, and it paid off.

You really could say that I trained that team for Final 8s. If you asked the players, they would tell you I constantly talked about where we needed to be to go toe-to-toe with the top teams in the country. Obviously, we played lots of matches along the way. It was 34 by my count. Some were against good teams. Some were against poor ones. Frequently along the way I made coaching points based on our performance in them to help the players see where we wanted to be in terms of all facets of the game.

Different aspects of it

Much of my work with the ladies was on the mental side of things. That was in terms of building their confidence and a good playing mentality. It was also about making good decisions on the court and staying focused and doing their job at any given time.

Of course there’s also the technical and tactical development side of things. It’s hard to do a lot of individual skill training when you only have 3.5 hours of court time per week. The multi-week holiday break mid-season didn’t help in that regard. I focused my efforts on more team oriented stuff as the bigger priority. It was a simple question of larger gains to be had from improvements there. That said, the areas of serving and hitting are both places where notable improvement was seen through the year. Both were points of focus for me from the start. Later,, blocking came along as well.

Then there was the physical aspect of peaking. That’s having your players in the best possible condition when it matters most. This is probably the trickiest part. After all, volleyball training is about developing team and individual abilities and tactics. Hopefully, that is a path of continuous improvement. Trying to peak a team physically – and mentally, for that matter – is about knowing when to push and when to give them a break. And this isn’t just about what happens in the gym, because quite often what’s happening outside it plays a part (like exams and heavy course-load periods for students).

So what did I do?

With that team I had the advantage of having a pretty good idea of where they would be in the league. I knew we were strong enough to at least earn a spot in Championships. I also knew the team’s priorities. I didn’t have to worry too much about results along the way (though the team was 25-9 overall across all competitions heading into Final 8s). That gave me some leeway in terms of working different line-ups. I could focus on certain aspects of play, etc.to keep the team moving in the direction I wanted. Things aren’t always quite so easy.

Basically, for this team it was a question of building progressively through the season. I’m talking about training intensity here – both mental and physical. Every week I expected a little more of them. Sometimes it was been subtle. Sometimes it was overt. Along the way I introduced physical and mental challenges intended to prepare them to take things up a notch and to be able to fight through in the face of adversity. It wasn’t a straight path, but then it never is!

In the final two weeks of training (4 sessions) I continued that process in terms of looking for a little more out of them each time on the court. My only shift was getting more specific with line-ups and tactics to prepare for Final 8s.

By the way, we reached the national semifinal that season. 🙂

Assessing player upper and lower body power

November 16, 2013 Volleyball Coaching 2 comments

During the Volleyball England level 3 coaching course, one course subject was physical assessment. In particular, we looked at how to judge the sort of work players needed to do to improve their jump and upper body power. Here is a PDF with the specific tests.

The first test is for the upper body. A progression of medicine ball throws start with the shoulders. It then adds in upper core, then mid- and lower core. Full-body effort is the final stage. We expect longer throws at each stage in the progression. You can identify weak/strong areas based on that progression (or lack thereof).

The second test is for jump vertical testing. It uses a jump from a squat position (static) and a jump from a standing position (counter move) to assess plyometric efficiency. You’re looking for the latter being about 10% higher than the former. If so, then jump gains will mainly come from strength/power training. If not, then plyo training is required. Ideally, the arms are kept at the side, so testing requires some kind of jump mat or similar type of device. One could, however, use a standard jump reach testing device as an alternative.

The last test is of lateral jumping, but with the same basic idea. You compare a players single standing broad jump, multiplied by 3, to their triple broad jump (three jumps done in a row with no pause), again looking for that 10% differential. Just watching how well a player executes the triple broad jump, in fact, will tell you a lot about where they are in terms of plyometric development and coordination.

The last part of the document is a table giving distance ranges for UK female national team athletes.

Page 1 of 3123
nike tn pas cher nike tn pas cher nike tn pas cher nike tn pas cher air max pas cher air max pas cher stone island outlet stone island outlet stone island outlet stone island outlet stone island outlet stone island outlet barbour paris barbour paris barbour paris barbour paris barbour paris piumini peuterey outlet piumini peuterey outlet piumini peuterey outlet piumini peuterey outlet piumini peuterey outlet canada goose pas cher canada goose pas cher canada goose pas cher canada goose pas cher canada goose pas cher canada goose pas cher woolrich outlet online woolrich outlet online woolrich outlet online woolrich outlet online woolrich outlet online woolrich outlet online Fjllraven Kanken backpack Fjllraven Kanken backpack Fjllraven Kanken backpack Fjllraven Kanken backpack Fjllraven Kanken backpack Fjllraven Kanken backpack woolrich outlet online piumini woolrich outlet moncler outlet online moncler outlet piumini moncler outlet moncler outlet online peuterey outlet online peuterey outlet cheap oil paintings pop canvas art