How Athletes Should Train Year Round
Sports are year-round, but training shouldn't look the same year round. The athletes who understand this don't just get better. They stay better.
The old school training mentality was simple: work hard, train every chance you get, and trust the results will come. Random workouts, with no real structure, and no true progressions. Just intensity and intense volume, all the time. For a lot of athletes today that approach is still the default because that is what was taught to them. But the result is burnout, stalled development, and bodies that never fully recover. Then people wonder why performance suffers.
Training needs to have a purpose in every phase of the year. Not just a workout, but a direction. Here's what that actually looks like.
Offseason: build your foundation
This is the most important phase of the year and the most underused one. The offseason is when you have the time and the recovery capacity to actually build something real. Not sharpen it. Build it from the ground up.
The priorities are strength, hypertrophy, restoring and building movement quality, and general athletic development. Build general speed and power qualities. Lifting is progressive and gets heavy over time. Volume is higher. You're loading the body, expanding tissue capacity, addressing the movement problems that showed up during the season, and building a foundation for speed and power.
Speed and plyometrics have an important place in the offseason. This is the time to build on the foundation and use this window to get faster and more explosive when you can manage recovery better. We're laying the foundation with consistent volume and progressive intensity week over week, so when preseason arrives we can expand on them. That's a completely different outcome than trying to develop speed and power in a four-week window before tryouts.
Athletes who skip this phase or rush through it to get back to skill work are skipping the step that makes everything else work. You cannot convert strength you never built, and you cannot expand on a foundation that doesn't exist.
Preseason: convert what you built
This is where the work shifts. Everything built in the offseason gets converted into the qualities that actually show up in competition: speed, power, and explosiveness.
Plyometrics become a priority. Sprint work gets specific and more intentional. We are learning to express more force quickly in specific sport demands. Lifting continues, but the focus moves toward speed of movement rather than load alone. Volume comes down slightly but intensity goes up.
The goal of this phase is simple: show up to day one of the season as the most physically prepared version of yourself. Everything in this phase is pointed at that.
In season: protect what you built
This is where most athletes make the second biggest mistake. They either stop training completely during the season, or they keep the same volume they used in the offseason and pile it on top of practices and games until something breaks.
In-season training has one job: maintenance. You're not trying to get significantly stronger mid-season. You're trying to hold onto what you built while keeping the body healthy and fresh enough to actually perform. That means lower volume, compound movements, and enough stimulus to give the body a reason to hold onto its strength and keep its edge.
Stop lifting in season and you'll lose strength, speed, and injury resistance as the schedule accumulates. Train too much and fatigue compounds until performance drops or something gets hurt. The answer is a smart, stripped-down program built around your specific schedule, and the discipline to follow it even when you feel like doing more.
Club season: short windows, managed load
The club or travel season doesn't fit neatly into any one phase, and that's what makes it challenging. You're playing a high volume of games in a compressed timeline, sometimes traveling, sometimes stacking tournaments back to back. Development windows are short. The gap between games and tournaments is where recovery becomes the most important thing you can do.
The training goal is straightforward: don't lose ground, protect the body, and use whatever windows exist to maintain the qualities that matter. This is not the time for heavy volume or chasing numbers. It's the time to manage load intelligently, prioritize sleep and nutrition, and keep the body ready to compete at the level the season demands.
"The athletes who show up ready when it matters most are never the ones who trained the same way all year. They're the ones who trained the right way for each part of the year."
A year-round program doesn't have to be complicated. But it does require a plan and the discipline to follow it, even when it means doing less than your instincts are telling you to. That's often the hardest part. And it's exactly where most athletes fall short.
This is what we build for every athlete at Halsey Performance: a year-round structure that fits their sport, their schedule, and where they're trying to go.
Want a year-round training for your athlete? Train with HalseyPerformance Working with 350+ athletes across 19 teams. Private training spots available.
