Most athletes operate on a version of the same annual training calendar, even if they have never consciously designed one. When their season ends, they train hard. When the season starts, they stop. The logic feels intuitive: practice and games take up the time and energy that lifting used to occupy, so lifting gets set aside until there is room for it again.
The problem is that this approach costs athletes at both ends of the calendar. Off-seasons get undertrained because athletes drift without a clear developmental target, doing some lifting here and some conditioning there without a coherent plan to get physically better before the next season begins. In-seasons get abandoned from a training standpoint because athletes assume their sport is doing the work, when sport participation and progressive physical development are two different things that do not reliably substitute for one another.
A better model exists, and it is not complicated once the underlying logic is clear. Training does not stop when the season starts. It changes. The goal changes, the volume changes, the session structure changes. Understanding exactly what shifts and why is what separates intentional year-round athletic development from a training calendar that just reacts to whatever the sport schedule demands.
Why Training Has Seasons at All
The body cannot sustain maximum training intensity indefinitely. Push hard enough for long enough without variation and performance plateaus, then declines. Accumulated fatigue builds faster than the body can recover from it, and athletes arrive at competition depleted rather than prepared.
Periodization is the practice of organizing training into phases with different goals, different volumes, and different intensities so the body can develop, absorb that development, and perform when it needs to. At its core, the concept is straightforward: not everything can be the priority at once, so you sequence priorities across the year.
For athletes, the two primary phases are the off-season, when building physical capacity is the goal, and the in-season, when preserving that capacity while performing is the goal. Between them sits the pre-season, a transition phase worth understanding on its own terms. Each phase has a different character, and training that does not respect those differences tends to underserve the athlete at every stage.
Off-Season Training: The Building Phase
The off-season is the most important training window of the year, and it is the phase athletes are most likely to underinvest in. Without competition on the calendar and without a coach structuring daily practice, training can become inconsistent, unfocused, or simply absent. That is a significant missed opportunity, because this is when the body has the recovery capacity to handle real developmental work.
When sport-specific practice volume is low, athletes can train three to four times per week in the weight room without the accumulated fatigue that would compromise practice or game performance. That frequency, sustained across a genuine off-season of eight to twelve weeks, is where meaningful strength gains happen. It is also when athletes have the bandwidth to address the weaknesses and movement imbalances that the previous season revealed, build power through more complex training methods, and improve the movement quality that carries over into every sport they play.
Off-season programming can also afford more variety. Exercises that would be too fatiguing or technically demanding to include during the competitive season become appropriate when recovery is not constrained by a game schedule. The off-season is where the athlete builds the engine. The in-season is where they use it.
In-Season Training: The Maintenance Phase
The most common and most costly training mistake athletes make is dropping resistance training entirely once their season begins. It feels reasonable: practice is demanding, games are frequent, and adding weight room sessions on top of that load seems like a path to exhaustion. What actually happens when athletes stop lifting is more insidious. The strength gains built over months of off-season work begin to erode within weeks. By mid-season, athletes are meaningfully weaker than they were at the start of it. By the end of a long season, a substantial portion of the physical development from the previous off-season has been lost.
The alternative is not lifting as hard as possible during the season. It is lifting enough to send the body a maintenance signal. Two well-designed sessions per week is the broadly supported standard for preserving strength during an active competitive season. These sessions look different from off-season training: they are shorter, the total volume of work is lower, and the exercise selection tends to be more conservative. What does not change is the intensity, meaning the weight on the bar relative to the athlete’s maximum. Maintaining load while reducing volume is the mechanism that preserves the adaptation without generating excessive fatigue.
Timing these sessions within the week matters. Scheduling a heavy lower body session the day before a game is a reliable way to show up to competition with sore legs and diminished power output. The standard practice is to lift in the part of the week furthest from the next competition, and allow the body to absorb the session before performance is required.
What Specifically Changes Between Phases
For athletes who want a concrete picture of what shifts between off-season and in-season training, the changes come down to a handful of variables.
Volume.
Off-season training carries higher total volume: more sets, more variety in exercises, more total work per session and per week. In-season volume drops significantly, sometimes by half or more, to manage the cumulative load that competition and practice are already creating.
Intensity.
Intensity, in the technical sense of load relative to maximum, is maintained or even slightly increased in-season even as volume drops. This is the key to the maintenance principle: the body reads heavy load as a reason to hold onto its strength adaptations. Light load at low volume reads as a reason to let them go.
Exercise selection.
Off-season programs can include a wider variety of exercises, including more technically demanding movements and more accessory work targeting specific weaknesses. In-season programs are built toward the foundational movements that deliver the most value with the least recovery cost: squat patterns, hinge patterns, push, pull, and carries.
Session length.
Off-season sessions can run 60 to 75 minutes or longer when the training calendar allows for it. In-season sessions are typically 40 to 55 minutes, built around a shorter list of high-value exercises rather than an exhaustive program.
Recovery management.
Recovery is a priority at every phase of the year, but in-season it becomes a scheduling variable as much as a training one. Sleep, nutrition, and the timing of sessions relative to competition all require more deliberate attention when the body is managing both training and competition stress simultaneously.
The Pre-Season: A Phase Worth Understanding
The weeks between the end of the off-season and the start of competition deserve their own attention because they are where athletes most commonly make a specific and avoidable mistake.
Pre-season is a transition. Training volume begins to taper as sport-specific practice ramps up. The goal is to arrive at the first competition of the year physically prepared and relatively fresh, not at a training peak. Athletes who push hardest in pre-season, treating it as a final opportunity to get ahead before the season starts, often show up to opening games with accumulated fatigue that stunts the very performance they were trying to build.
A well-managed pre-season gradually transfers energy and attention from general physical development toward sport-specific preparation. Strength training sessions become slightly shorter and more conservative. Conditioning work becomes more sport-specific in its structure. The body is pointed toward competition readiness, not further development.
The Multi-Sport Athlete Problem
The off-season/in-season framework assumes an athletic calendar with reasonably clear phases and boundaries. For athletes who play multiple sports across the year with limited time between seasons, that assumption does not hold.
A high school athlete who finishes football in November, starts basketball in December, and moves into spring lacrosse in March has perhaps two weeks between each sport where a genuine off-season training block is possible. Standard periodization advice simply does not fit that reality, and applying it rigidly tends to produce either overtraining during already demanding stretches or the frustrating sense that there is never a right time to train seriously.
The more useful framework for multi-sport athletes is to treat those short transitional windows as brief but deliberate developmental blocks, increasing training frequency and intensity for two to three weeks before the next season begins, then settling into in-season maintenance once it does. During peak overlap periods, one well-designed session per week maintains considerably more physical capacity than none. And over the course of a full year, consistent maintenance across multiple sport seasons compounds into a meaningful advantage over athletes who train only when their calendar feels uncrowded.
Multi-sport athletes benefit more than most from working with a coach who can look at the full competitive calendar and build a periodization plan around it rather than applying a standard template that was not designed for their situation.
Common Mistakes Across the Year
Understanding what the phases are is useful. Understanding where athletes most consistently go wrong within them is more useful still.
In the off-season, the most common problem is not laziness but lack of structure. Athletes who train inconsistently, follow programs that do not progress, or spend the entire off-season doing the same thing rarely arrive at the next season meaningfully stronger. The off-season demands a plan with a direction, not just a willingness to show up.
In-season, the problem is abandonment. As described above, athletes who stop lifting when the season starts lose ground every week. Two sessions per week is not a large ask relative to what is lost by not doing them.
In pre-season, the problem is misunderstanding the goal. Pre-season is preparation, not development. Athletes who train at peak intensity through pre-season often underperform at the start of the competitive season because they arrive depleted rather than ready.
Across all phases, neglecting recovery is the variable that limits the return on everything else. Training quality is a ceiling; recovery determines how close an athlete can get to that ceiling.
How Bando Approaches Year-Round Athletic Development
At Bando Performance, programming is built around the athlete’s actual competitive calendar rather than a generic in-season vs off-season approach. Off-season, pre-season, and in-season phases are deliberately different in their goals, structure, and volume. Athletes and parents know what each phase is trying to accomplish and how the training decisions within it connect to the larger development objective.
For multi-sport athletes in the greater Boston and Metro West area, that means individualized year-round planning that looks at the full picture rather than one sport at a time. The training does not stop when the season starts. It evolves. And athletes who understand that distinction tend to develop in ways that those operating on the binary switch simply do not.
FAQs
Should athletes lift weights during their sport season?
Yes. Two sessions per week is the broadly supported standard for maintaining strength during a competitive season. Athletes who stop lifting entirely when the season begins typically lose a meaningful share of their off-season strength gains before the season ends. The sessions are shorter and lower in volume than off-season work, but keeping the load on the bar is what signals the body to preserve its adaptations.
How do I maintain strength during a long season?
The maintenance principle is straightforward: reduce volume significantly, keep intensity relatively high, and time sessions to allow recovery before competition. Two focused sessions per week built around the foundational movement patterns, scheduled in the early part of the week furthest from games, is sufficient for most athletes to hold the majority of their off-season strength through an active season.
When does off-season training start?
Ideally, within one to two weeks of the end of the competitive season, after a brief deload period to let accumulated fatigue clear. Starting off-season training too late compresses the developmental window and reduces the gains possible before the next pre-season begins.
Is it bad to take a complete break from training in the off-season?
A short break of one to two weeks after a long season serves a genuine recovery purpose, physically and psychologically. Beyond that, extended inactivity in the off-season is a missed developmental window that is difficult to recover from later in the calendar. The off-season is when the body has the recovery capacity to handle real training stress and produce real adaptation. An athlete who coasts through it arrives at the next pre-season starting over rather than building on.
Final Thoughts
The athletes who develop most consistently over the course of a career are not necessarily the ones who train the hardest during any single phase. They are the ones who train with purpose at every phase, understand what each part of the year is trying to accomplish, and make adjustments that serve their long-term development rather than just responding to whatever the current week demands.In-season and off-season training are not competing priorities. They are sequential ones. Getting both right is what year-round athletic development actually looks like in practice. If you want help building a training structure that serves your athlete across the full competitive year, Bando Performance is a good place to start.
