You Built the Off-Season Strength. Here's How Not to Lose It.

Most volleyball programs spend 12-16 weeks building a strength base over the off-season. Then the season starts, and by January, most of what they built is gone.

That's not bad luck. It's the predictable result of how most teams approach in-season training. They either abandon the weight room entirely, or they try to maintain the same volume that worked when the schedule had room for it. Both approaches fail. One burns athletes out at the worst possible time. The other lets the physical development you spent all summer earning quietly disappear.

Here's what actually works.

How Often Should Athletes Strength Train During the Season?

Twice per week is the minimum threshold for maintaining the strength you built. Research on strength retention is consistent: two sessions per week holds most of what you have. One session per week is better than nothing but falls short of genuine maintenance. Zero sessions per week produces measurable losses within three to four weeks.

For most volleyball programs, two sessions per week is achievable even in a demanding schedule. The key is accepting what these sessions are for. They're not for building new capacity. They're for holding what you already have. You're paying the maintenance fee on a physical investment. Stop paying and the investment depreciates.

If your schedule gets genuinely brutal, back-to-back tournaments with no recovery gaps, you can manage with one focused session in a given week. But plan this before the season starts. The teams I work with in South County that maintain the most strength through a full competitive calendar are the ones that scheduled training time in advance and treated it as protected, not optional.

What Has to Change In-Season

Volume drops. This isn't a preference; it's a physiological necessity. Your athletes are accumulating fatigue from matches, travel, and the demands of competing at a high level. Adding off-season training volume to that reality produces athletes who are running on empty when the pressure is highest.

Intensity is where most programs make the wrong adjustment. When coaches decide to scale back in-season, they often cut both volume and load. They move to higher-rep, lower-weight work because it feels like less. The problem is that light work doesn't maintain the neural adaptations you built through progressive loading. To hold those adaptations, you need to keep the load meaningful. The sessions get shorter. The weight stays up.

In practical terms, an in-season session for a volleyball athlete might run 45 to 60 minutes, built around two or three compound movements worked at 80 to 85 percent of the athlete's established training weight. Accessory work is stripped back or removed entirely. The goal is to go in, deliver the right signal to the nervous system, and leave. Not wrecked, not depleted. Just reminded.

Why Stopping Entirely Is a Trap

I want to be specific about what happens when teams walk away from the weight room in October and don't come back until spring.

The first two to three weeks, athletes often feel better. The training load is gone, and the freshness that comes with a deload gets misread as evidence that the lifting wasn't contributing much. It's an easy and common mistake.

Then week four and five arrive. Neural efficiency starts declining. The motor unit recruitment patterns that made athletes more explosive, more stable, and faster to react begin to reverse. These adaptations built over months don't simply pause when you stop training. They degrade.

By mid-season, athletes who haven't touched a barbell since October are measurably weaker than they were in September. Approaches feel a little less explosive. Joints that were stable early in the year are less so by December. Recovery between matches gets harder. And this is also when soft-tissue injuries spike, because fatigue accumulates while physical resilience quietly erodes.

The back half of a long season is when competition is most intense. It's exactly the wrong time to have athletes fading.

Session Timing Within the Week

Where you put training sessions relative to games matters as much as what those sessions contain.

A heavy lower-body session the day before a match creates residual fatigue that shows up on the court, even when athletes say they feel fine. I plan strength sessions two to three days before competition when possible, enough time to recover without losing the training effect. When the schedule compresses that window, you adjust intensity rather than skip the session.

This requires coordination with the coaching staff. That conversation is worth having before the season starts, not during it, when everyone is already reacting. At Output Performance, we map out the competitive calendar with every team we work with so training sessions are scheduled intelligently, not just squeezed in.

Protecting What You Worked For

The St. Louis volleyball season is long and competitive. Programs that hold up through the back half of the schedule consistently have one thing in common: they kept their athletes physically strong through the whole calendar, not just through October.

The off-season builds the foundation. In-season training is how you protect it. If you're still working on the off-season plan, we've covered [what a real volleyball off-season block looks like](/blog/off-season-volleyball-training-st-louis) and how to structure it.

If your program is heading into competition and needs a smarter in-season approach, learn more about our [team training program](/services/team-training). We can build a plan that fits your actual schedule and keeps your athletes at their best when the stakes are highest.