The best advices from Coach Raphael Busque

Your season just ended. Maybe you are happy because you just won a championship or made the all-star team. Still, chances are you want more for yourself and your team and want to get back to training to prepare for next season.

First, we recommend you take a couple of weeks of hard training after the season to let your body recover. Your muscles, tendons, and joints are under intense stress during the season and need time off to heal properly. However, you can do low-intensity work: walking outside, swimming, bike rides in the countryside, etc. You can do whatever you like, as long as it is low-intensity and you enjoy it. 

Two to three weeks after the season, you are itching to get back to training and get bigger and stronger. However, there is a better time of year to use heavy loads and put further strain on your body. If you want a successful off-season, we put the foundation in the post-season phase. 

Here are a couple of guidelines to help plan your post-season training properly : 

Don’t do too much, too soon

As we said before, you want to lay a good foundation for the rest of the offseason. Doing too much too soon will hinder your long-term progress. There will be plenty of three full-body sessions throughout the week, with a day off between each one. Make sure that your technique is on point and that you avoid muscular failure. 

For the actual training sessions, a full-body approach will be good. It will allow you to hit every motor pattern and plane of motion and stimulate every muscle in your body to some extent. Choose multi-joint movements that will give you a good bang for your buck each time you step into the gym.

Full range of motion and unilateral training

After football season, you may have lost some mobility due to injuries or prioritizing more partial range of motion training. Now is an excellent time to focus on your mobility and strength at length, which means being strong in deep ranges of motion. Like most sports, football is chaotic, and you never know which positions your body will end up in, so making sure you are strong in deep ranges can help you prevent injuries. 

Furthermore, it is also a good idea to include unilateral movements in your program: one-arm DB presses and rows, split squats, leg curls, hip thrusts, etc. These will allow you to fix left-to-right discrepancies, reduce injury risk, and improve your balance and coordination. Since you will not be using as much weight, this is a good time of year to use these tools.

Have fun!

Athletes should avoid following a bodybuilding split and try to hit every muscle individually. However, if you want to use more machine-based stuff, this is a good time of the year to do so. Machines will allow you to be more stable, give you a good mind-muscle connection, and thus give you more of a hypertrophy stimulus that you may not have had for a time. 

Make sure to do just what is necessary. Choose 1 or 2 machine movements per training and stick to 2-3 sets without getting near failure. Bonus points if you choose machine movements that allow you to get into a deep range of motion to help you increase your mobility and strength in deep ranges.

As you can see, post-season training doesn’t have to be complicated. Stick to these principles, and you will have a very good foundation for the rest of your offseason. That will allow you to push the intensity harder when you come back in January! 

 - Coach Raphael Busque