It is far to common for GAA players to stop doing s+c when in season but for the love of god don’t stop doing it when your In-Season, it is very, very easy and important to maintain a decent level of strength. There is no point putting all that time and effort into off and pre-season training only to let all that strength fall off because you’re doing nothing to maintain it.
Doing one s+c session per week is enough, the aim here is to hang onto roughly 90% of top end strength and this is what I do with my players;
- On the week of a match(only referring to championship match’s for this article) we don’t lift a barbell at all
- Non match week (usually Tuesday or Wednesday) we do a relatively heavy session with some barbell work.
When you have a match every other week this works out perfectly as it did with the individuals that I tested in the tables below for 14 weeks .
In an ideal situation I think we could hang onto very close to 100% top end strength with a little bit of added barbell work on game week and a second s+c session on non game week, but is that necessary or even needed? I really don’t think so.
If you can hang onto 90% of top end strength that should be more than enough once you’ve put the work into your off-season and actually gotten strong that is. Remember that when in-season nothing is more important than doing sports practice so doing 1 light s+c session per week to maintain around 90% of top end strength is plenty.
We all need to remember that GAA players are not paid professional players, most have full time jobs or are in full time education and/or have family commitments on top of 3-4 training sessions per week. We can’t just keep adding more to that already busy schedule.
I’ve seen a lot of articles from world class coaches out there that call for 2 s+c sessions a week when in season, remember when reading these articles that they are often written with the professional athlete in mind whose job is to perform, train and recover in between, they are not written with the GAA players schedule and pay-scale(or lack there of) in mind.
With all that said our In-Season training looks something like this;
Game week Non game week
- Goblet squats: 3×10 1. Depth jump: 8 singles
- Box jump: 10 singles 2. Box squat: 75% 3×2
- Band pull apart: 4×15 3. Deadlift: 60% 1×5
- Inverted row: 4×10 – Just bodyweight 4a. Bench press:70% 3×5
- Push ups: 3×12 – Just bodyweight 4b. Pull ups: 3×5
- Deadbugs: 3×16 5. Pallof press: 3×12 each side
*Do 100 band pull aparts throughout session
As you can see nothing here is very difficult, our game week session is not too dissimilar to a good warm up, it can easily be done in 15-20 minutes.
After some post season testing we showed that going back and forth doing sessions similar to these we managed to maintain around 90% of our top end strength which was the goal. See results below which were done 3 weeks after the last barbell training session.
Once I had gathered the results and done up my comparison tables the first thing that came to mind was how much less could we do while maintaining 90% top end strength, not what can I add to get to 100%. Its not realistic or fair to aim for 100% with a GAA player. I want to know how little we can do in-season while maintaining strength so the player can recover better and give more energy to his/her sports practice.
| Athlete A (92.5kg) | Pre season test – July | 19/11/2019 | ||
| Movement | Distance/reps/weight | Distance/reps/weight | Difference | % held onto |
| Broad jump | 9 foot 6 inches | 9 foot | -6 inches | 95% |
| Pull ups | 18 reps | 18 reps | No difference | 100% |
| Bench press | 130kg | 120kg | -10kg | 92% |
| Deadlift | 230kg | 200kg | -30kg | 87% |
| Athlete B (81.9kg) | Pre season test – July | Post season 19/11/2019 | ||
| Movement | Distance/reps/weight | Distance/reps/weight | Difference | % held onto |
| Broad jump | 8 foot 10 inches | 8 foot 10 inches | none | 100% |
| Pull ups | 13 reps | 10 reps | 3 reps | 77% |
| Bench press | 75kg | 70kg | -5kg | 93% |
| Deadlift | 160kg | 150kg | -10kg | 94% |
| Athlete C (92kg) | Pre season test – July | Post season 19/11/2019 | ||
| Movement | Distance/reps/weight | Distance/reps/weight | Difference | % held onto |
| Broad jump | 10 foot 4 inches | 10 foot 1 inch | -3 inches | 98% |
| Pull ups | 15 reps | 18 reps | 3 reps | 120%(20% gain) |
| Bench press | 120kg | 110kg | -10kg | 92% |
| Squat | 150kg (Full range) | 150kg to box at paralel | no difference with box | 100% with box |
Matty Costello