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Off-Season Errors
by Dave
Thursday, November 12, 2009
I think we make a huge off-season error when we ignore the value of rest. Some folks force themselves to completely avoid anything even softball related when out of season and some folks consider the off-season an opportunity to practice even more than usual. I think the bigest error is to go to one of the polar extremes.
There is little question among trainers that rest is an absolute necessity. The very notion of exercise involves working muscles to the point that they get sort of "injured" and then repair themselves while getting even stronger. The body needs time to heal itself. This is why even the most strident workout evangelicals usually advocate taking one day per week to do no exercise. They also tend to advocate taking extended periods of rest every so often, like 4 weeks every 6 months or something along those lines.
When you work out by performing repetitive free exercise, using devices to isolate muscles in motion or lift weights, you basically rip muscle fibers which are then replaced by new ones. Done properly, the athlete will feel pain caused by acid buildup in the muscles as well as increased blood flow to allow for healing as well as feeding the new, more numerous muscle fibers.
As an exercise program progresses, usually athletes feel very sore early on and then the soreness diminishes over time. This is usually not indicative of a reduced amount of soreness but an acclimati0on to the kind of pain caused by the exercise. There is a different kind of pain caused as muscles become more and more exhausted and the body needs more rest and time to repair itself.
It is often difficult to differentiate between real injury and the sort of soreness one experiences when engaguing in an extended period of exercise. Particularly young athletes have difficulty distinguishing between the pain of injury and that of soreness. Worse, their parents have even more trouble evaluating their dhildrens' complaints.
Every kid is different even within a single family and each has his or her own threshhold of pain. One kid complains as if she has a broken body after a single day of exercise. Her sister speaks as if she is just a little sore when in reality she has a broken bone or a partially torn muscle. There is every sort of pain threshhold in between the two extremes and parents are left guessing when they hear their children register complaints.
What makes it even more difficult to evaluate complaints is athletes learn to deal with pain. Their pain threshholds do not remain stangnant. As they age and gain more experience training for sport, they become better able to cope with ordinary soreness. And sometimes when they are actually injured, they mistake the pain with soreness.
I know this to be true because I broke my arm during a football game and did not leave it until a quarter later when I was knocked out. I returned to practice a couple days later and lasted 2 or 3 more practices before my arm swelled so badly from the break that I could not put my shirt on. My brother broke his arm but didn't learn about it until a few weeks later when he was goofing around and dislodged the bone at the point of break. Ouch!
My daughter broke her foot once and complained briefly about it. Two years later she hurt the same location and when we took her for an xray, we learned that the bone had been broken quite some time earlier - when she originally complained about it. Whenever she complains now, we take her immediately to the orthopedic doctor!
Her sister used to complain of pain when she felt any sort of comfort. That kid had some quirks early on particularly related to any sort of sensation. It is difficult to explain precuisely what I mean by quirks. Let's just say that during the winter, she would complain about the cold and then start removing clothing. During the hot summer months, she wouold complain about the heart and start putting clothing on! In any event, we used to refer to her as the "princess and the pea." If she felt any soreness at all, she would complain as if being attacked by a hord of stinging bees. But as she aged, this changed. When, several months ago, she complained about some sort of pain, we ignored her. When the pain got worse and worse, we took her to the doctor and learned she had a very real injury which kept her out of action nearly two months.
So pain can be a little tricky. But regardless of any complaints or lack thereof, athletes need regular rest and extended periods of rest every so often. If they do not get it, their bodies do not stay as fit as they should and the chance of injury becomes greater, particularly in a sport in which tendonitis and related kinds of repetitive motion disorders are so common. Every athlete needs an off-season for their bodies to heal.
Our world has become very competitive. You do not need me to tell you that. You know it to be true just by comparing your own experiences with those of your children. When I went to school, I put out little effort, pulled Bs pretty easily, and was content with my results. My kids don't get off that easily and with good reason. My grades today wouldn't get me into the colleges I was accepted to then.
When I took the scholastic aptitude test, I basically behaved myself for several months and got a good night of sleep the night before sitting. It is rare for kids today not to have some sort of tutoring, a fdormal class, or at least performing test preparation drills regularly before taking a college prep test. Academics are absolutely critical these days.
Sports are even worse. When I was in high school, I knew some kids who played 3 sports. They did football only from August to early November, played basketball during the winter, and then picked up their mitts and bats from March through early summer. There were some sports which involved year-round training but very few of them. Nowadays, the football player is expected to remain in the weight room and agility clinics during just about the entire off-season. Travel soccer, field hockey, basketball, softball, etc. players typically are involved in something team related for at least 10 months of the year. I know of one girl, just a middle schooler, who plays travel softball, soccer and basketball, each requiring practice and competition for about 8-10 months of the year, and the combined three providing absolutely no extended break from sport at any time.
Often kids today find out that such travel or club play is about the bare minimum required to eventually make the HS varsity team, let alone be a starter. Not every school is the same but some pack their entire starting teams with travel players. The kid who tries to play 3 sports at the rec level, maybe one at travel, is often disappointed by her inability to crack into the starting rotation in one of her lesser sports. So, on the one hand, you can't blame the kid trying to play travel in 3 sports. But on the other hand, you know she cannot possibly be getting the kind of rest she needs.
Physical rest is critical but what about mental rest? I think this gets the least attention due to our society's priorities of hyper-competitiveness. I recently learned of some kid playing travel ball on a team which played something like 120 games. 120 games? How do you fit that in? And this team was 12U!
When we teach and train athletes, one of the elements we want to instill in them is a sense of being able to turn on and off the element of focus - extreme mental attention. We want the third baseman to remain hyper-vigilant on every pitch. We want her reactions to be on high alert. It is not acceptable for any player on the field to allow her mind to drift. When I was a kid, that was easy because I longed to be out on the field for each and every one of our 20-35 games including all-stars. It was no effort at all to conjure up adrenaline. But even professional athletes have difficulty remaining up for 120 games. The only comparable experience is that of the major league baseball player. And those guys have great difficulty maintaining focus for the entire season even when paid millions of dollars for precisely that.
No matter how you slice it, 120 games is a bit much for 11 and 12 year olds. You have to figure in the amount of practices on top of that. The team must have conducted 20, 40, perhaps 80 practices in addition to its 120 games. You think the coach was tolerant of any lack of focus the team might exhibit during those? What about the countless private lessons and practice sessions the pitchers most certainly went through. Do you think those were good times for rest and lack of focus? So the pitchewrs on this team must have been doing games, practices, or lessons maybe 300 times a year? Perhaps they did more than that? This is most certainly a formula for only one thing, mental burnout.
I think coaches and parents forget about just how much of a mental burden sport can really be. Personal sessions require focus. Formal practices require more. And games are a whole different level onto themselves. players and teams which do this kind of program probably play really amazingly, at least for some of those games. But at some point, they are going to collapse.
I know a team that was very good at a young age. They played a bunch. After a few years of having a real off-season, players, parents and coaches found they were getting itchy in the off period. As they aged and competing at a high level became more and more important and more and more difficult, they all decided to find someplace to play during the historically off months. They found an indoor league where they could play double headers once a week. the kids did pretty well in this winter league. When they came outdoors for the early tournament season, they were well primed and played very well. As spring turned into summer, however, several instances of tendonitis popped up. If you've ever had tendonitis caused by throwing too much, you know what that does to your swing. The kids stopped hitting. Next, the historically reliable defense began to sputter as the whiole team became flat. They began to lose games against inferior teams.
The lesson is that there is nothing wrong with being itchy in the off-season.
In fact, that's what you are supposed to be. If you turn this positive into a negative and then try to resolve it, you are going to end up flat, men tally shot and injured. Instead, embrace the itch.
Think of it this way, pick something that you are very fond of. I'll make it easy. Let's say you love chocolate (please feel free to replace chocolate with whatever you want but remember, this is a family show). Think of the most chocolate you have ever eaten in a single sitting. Now, get yourself primed because you are going to have to eat that much chocolate every day for the next year.
Let's ignore what will happen to your body. Just think of the mental side of it. It is going to be Halloween every single day for the next year. In the last couple of days leading up to the end of that year, how do you think you'll feel about chocolate? Will you have uncontrollable cravings for the stuff as the hour of your daily "meal" approaches? Or will the thought of anything even slightly chocolatey make you wretch and gag? At the end of the year, will you want to follow it up with another one? That is burnout!
Lest I forget, I'm not here to pretend to be a physical trainer or to evaluate the practices of certain teams. What I do want to say is that rest is an absolute necessity for physical training, to avoid injury, and perhaps more importantly, to provide the level of focus required to be successful in this sport for an extended period. A softball player must have rest. She must have regular rest during extended periods of play. And she must have extended rest for a period of off-season. If she does not, she will not be at top physical condition, she may get hurt, and, worse, she will probably burnout sooner rather than later.
The extended periods of rest can be problematic. What should one do? Should you sit around and do absolutely nothing but watch TV, play video games and eat bon-bons? No, by no means. Some of that is probably advisable but anything done to excess is bad. You don't want to put on 15-20 pountds in the off-seaon, allow your muscles to weaken significantly, or develop back problems from becoming a couch-potato. If you allow yourself to become a complete non-athlete in the off-season, you are going to pay during the season and that's not much fun.
What I do suggest you do during an extended period of rest is 1) first make sure you get rest, probably 4-6 weeks worth of relative inactivity; 2) work on muscles that generally don't get worked on during the stress of the season but which are required for successful play like core muscles, quads, etc.; and 3) work on mechanical issues with professional trainers/instructors in the rarified atmosphere of the off-season when you have few worries about in-game performance.
When I say 4-6 weeks worth of relative inactivity, the emphasis is on the word relative. If your regular regimen consists of 4 one hour pitching sessions plus an hour of lessons, 2-4 hours at the tee and during batting practice, 4 hours worth of defensive practices, a couple hours of speed, agility, baserunning, etc., plus 6-10 games per week, you do not have to be placed inside a comfort chamber to get relative rest. You can go out and play whiffle ball games. You can engage in a neighborhood soccer or football match. You can even perform some sort of regular exercise program. But you just must do a lower volume and intensity of heavy exercise.
For catchers, I think doing anything that builds up the quads or hand strength is a good idea. You can purchase a special squeeze ball or device, or just use a tennis ball to build hand strength. You can do all sorts of free exercise to build up the strength and endurance of quad muscles.
Pitchers know which muscles are important to them. I suggest the ones that the parts of the body most forgotten are the forearm, wrist and fingers. A pitcher can dramatically improve her in-season performance by strengthening her pitching wrist in the off-season via exercises performed as little as a half an hour per day, four times per week. She does not need to throw and throw a lot during the entire off-season. Core muscle strength and overall flexibility are very important for pitchers. The off-season would be a great time to enter a core muscle exercise program or sign up for that yoga class offered at the school or community center.
Everybody on a softball field understands that there are certain skills and muscles which if strong, will improve performance. I can't go through all of this. The off-season is the time to work on those things. I think you can handle this yourself.
As the season approaches and presumably your 6 week period of relative inactivity has ended, you can begin to prep for the coming season. Get out and throw but start slowly. Pitchers should pitch and catchers should catch them. Batting lessons should start up now, before the first practices. Running should become proogrammed and gradually increase in intensity. 60 foot sprints and running all bases is a good way to prepare for practice. Otfielders want to get out and run in fields, track down flyballs if you have someone to hit them. Infielders need to begin doing intense side to side short sprints. It is time once again to really prep the body for the stresses of the season.
By the end of this off-season period, I hope that you will experience a few manifestations of this period of rest. For one thing, your mind should be refreshed and should actually be a little impatient about getting back onto a real softball field to play a real softball game. The muscles you begin working when you start throwing a ball, taking swings, etc. every day, should be completely rested. The muscles you need but which get little real workout during the season should be stronger. Your core muscles should be in better shape from correct use rather than abuse. Your body, mind and soul should be ready to go. You should be itching both physically and mentally to play ball.
You can decide for yourself what to do and how much, of course, but I suggest to you that if you decide that the offseason is going to be a time when you play all out or pitch twice as much as usual, or engage in some sort of extreme physical conditioning while not taking any down time, you may be sorry. It may not be this season. It may not be for quite a while. But if you get in the habit of eating chocolate every single day in large amounts, you most certainly will get sick of the stuff.Labels: attitude, injuries, pre-season preparation, relaxation
 
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