The season is over. Your last game has been played, the boots are back in the cupboard, and you finally have a bit of breathing room.
So, what do you do now?
While the off-season is an important time to recover, it is also your biggest opportunity to work on you as an athlete.
During the season, training is often about getting through the next game. You have team sessions, matches, travel and recovery to juggle, leaving less time to focus on developing your physical qualities. The off-season gives you a chance to change that.
Instead of simply maintaining what you already have, you can use this period to build strength, improve your weaknesses and develop the physical capacity that can help you perform when the next season begins.
Get stronger before you need to be
Strength doesn’t just mean being able to lift more weight in the gym.
For athletes, strength contributes to many of the things you need to do on the field or court. Accelerating, changing direction, jumping, tackling, holding your position and producing force repeatedly all require your body to handle significant loads.
Resistance training is well established as an effective way to improve strength and can also contribute to improvements in athletic performance. A 2024 systematic review and meta-analysis of elite athletes found that resistance training was associated with improvements in sport-specific performance, although the results varied depending on the athlete and performance measure (Makaruk et al., 2024).
The important part is that you don’t have to wait until pre-season to start. The off-season is your opportunity to build the strength that you want to take into next season.
Turn your weaknesses into strengths
Think about your last season. Was there something that held you back?
Maybe your hamstrings constantly felt tight. Perhaps you struggled to win one-on-one contests late in games. Maybe you lacked confidence changing direction at speed, or you simply felt like you weren’t as strong as the athletes around you. Your off-season gives you time to work on those areas.
Rather than trying to fix everything once pre-season starts, you can spend several weeks progressively developing the physical qualities you need.
That might mean improving:
- Lower-body strength
- Single-leg strength
- Hamstring and calf capacity
- Trunk and upper-body strength
- Jumping and landing ability
- Acceleration and deceleration
- Change-of-direction ability
- General physical capacity
You don’t necessarily need more training. You need the right training for you.
Build a body that can handle your sport
Sport is demanding. Every sprint, landing, change of direction and physical contest places stress on your muscles, tendons, joints and other tissues.
You can’t eliminate injury risk, but developing your physical capacity can form an important part of preparing your body for those demands. Research supports this. A systematic review and meta-analysis published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine found that strength training was associated with a reduction in sports injuries (Lauersen et al., 2018).
That doesn’t mean lifting weights makes you injury-proof. It doesn’t. But progressively exposing your body to the types of forces it needs to handle can help you become better prepared for the demands of your sport.
And the off-season gives you time to do that progressively.
Don’t leave everything until pre-season
One of the biggest mistakes athletes can make is treating the start of pre-season as the time to start getting ready.
Suddenly, team training starts. Running volumes increase. You are expected to sprint, change direction and perform at higher intensities. At the same time, you’re trying to regain the strength and fitness you lost during the break.
That is a lot to ask of your body at once.
Using the off-season to gradually build your physical capacity means you can enter pre-season with a stronger foundation.
You don’t need to be at peak fitness before pre-season starts. You don’t need to train seven days a week. And you certainly don’t need to spend your entire off-season in the gym.
Instead, think about making consistent progress.
Small improvements over several months can add up to a very different athlete when you return to competition.
Your off-season is an investment in next season
It can be easy to think of the off-season as time away from your sport. Instead, think of it as time invested in your next season.
You have an opportunity to step back, identify what you want to improve and dedicate time to becoming stronger and more capable.
When the next season arrives, you won’t suddenly have to start building your physical foundation from scratch.
You’ll have already done the work. So before you completely switch off for the off-season, ask yourself:
What do I want to be better at when I return?
Then build your training around that.
Your next season starts long before your first game.
References
Lauersen, J. B., Andersen, T. E., & Andersen, L. B. (2018). Strength training as superior, dose-dependent and safe prevention of acute and overuse sports injuries: A systematic review, qualitative analysis and meta-analysis. British Journal of Sports Medicine, 52(24), 1557–1563. https://doi.org/10.1136/bjsports-2018-099078
Makaruk, H., Starzak, M., Tarkowski, P., Sadowski, J., & Winchester, J. (2024). The effects of resistance training on sport-specific performance of elite athletes: A systematic review with meta-analysis. Journal of Human Kinetics, 91, 135–155. https://doi.org/10.5114/jhk/185877
