Other vigorous activities are going to take a lot of the resources your body needs for recovery from weight training.
While a sport is in season, you're going to have to cut back on your weight training if you want to continue making progress in the gym.
Sports require a lot of resources from your body. For example, football practice all week and then a 3 hour all out effort on game day is going to be tough on your body. It's going to be very difficult to lift weights several times per week and make progress.
That goes for any sport or any activity that's tough on your body.
Your weight training program while playing sports should be short and very infrequent. You can make progress with the right combination of volume, frequency, and intensity that works for your body while playing sports.
While playing sports, you need to start out with a program that's very infrequent, low volume, and low intensity.
You can make progress for certain with this style of training. You can definitely get better results with more, but your body may not be able to handle it.
So…
You simply start with a low recovery style of training while playing sports and add more volume, intensity, and frequency over time until you find the point at which your body can't take any more.
To be safe, though, you need to start with a weight training program that, without a doubt, you know you can recover from. This style of low recovery training is included within this manual. Your workout program should be similar to a low recovery program.
For example, you should weight train only 2 days per week while you are in season. The off season is a different story. While in season, though, 2 days per week will be plenty.
You also need to understand that the results from weight training aren't going to be great while you are playing sports… especially if you are training hard for that sport and competing hard and often. The body just can't do everything at once.
Size and strength will be much harder to gain while playing a sport several times per week. I'm not trying to persuade you to quit your sport or weight training but just trying to be realistic about your expectations for gains while you are playing sports.
You can use the off season to really add size and/or strength.
Small gains while in season are all you are looking for… just slight increases in strength each week will really help you perform better in your sport. Don't try to do too much in season or your performance with that sport will suffer too.
Start out with low recovery training. If you make good progress with that, you can stick with just that or you can try to move upwards from there by increasing volume, frequency, or intensity a little at a time.
And please don't expect to get spectacular results while putting your body through so much with the other sport or sports you are playing. It also fatigues the mind too which plays a very important role in all of this. Vigorous competition will wear you down and require more from your body.
Continue weight training while in season but cut it back to minimal levels. You definitely can continue progressing while in season and you definitely won't digress as you would have by not weight training.
Weight training is a great idea while playing sports but you have to know how to weight train. Now you know.
