Stop me if you’ve heard this before: Conditioning month is meant to bring out the best in the high school athlete. It’s a punishing routine, often run twice per day at obscene hours (5 AM morning session, 6 PM evening session) where the men are separated from the boys. The morning session involves running 2 miles to “warm up,” followed by intense 100 meter sprints and other plyometric work. Puking is common and is taken as a sign that the workout is hard enough and the coach is doing his job.

In the evening, the players convene for skill work – the soccer players run hours of foot skill drills, exhausted from the morning session, while the football players practice hitting and tackling if they’re not in the weight room performing quarter-squats with 600 pounds on their back. Basketball players are running ladders, suicides, testing their vertical leap, and jumping over plyometric hurdles – all the while feeling a burning sensation in their shins but unwilling to speak up to the coach about it. Because after all, no one wants to think that you’re not tough enough, right?

Wrong.

High school coaches are singlehandedly responsible for dogging their athletes and pushing them well past their physical, mental, and psychological limitations. The ones who succeed on these absurd five-day-a-week programs with four or more hours of intense work are the genetic freaks, the ones who are truly the outliers. The ones who fail and suffer injuries are deemed “weak” and not worthy of making the team. The rest plod through it, nursing their “soreness” (in actuality, these are injuries), icing their bodies, and sleeping for hours on end, hoping the pain will go away in time for the season to start. Training is not like a game at http://www.casino.com/ or sitting in an armchair reading a book – the human body has limits. This ‘eggs against the wall’ training philosophy, where throw enough eggs against a wall and hope that one will end up at the Olympics (but forget about 5,000 that you wrecked), has serious shortcomings. Athletes lose 30 pounds in a month, slash their 40 yard dash time, and increase the weights on their squats that closely resemble a bad leg press rather than a true full squat. Progress was made – the ends justify the means.

Wrong.

High school athletes are often rank novices – they are thoroughly unadapted to stress and can be pushed to their limit every time they train because they have no previous experience! Novices do not get stronger when they train, they get stronger when they recover. Overtraining is when you push an individual past his limitations and do not respect the time it takes to recovery from a workout that disrupts homeostasis. Overloading is when you design a program that disrupts homeostasis – good programs overload, but do not overtrain.

An example of an excellent novice program is that of Mark Rippetoe’s Starting Strength – the novice lifter works every other day, increasing the weight on all of his lifts (Back Squat, Press, Bench Press, Deadlift, Power Clean) every session. This is the linear progression model. The athlete gets one day off between workouts and two on the weekends, though adding a “metabolic conditioning” workout on one of those days is not a terrible idea (as long as there is one day of recovery before the next heavy lifting day).

Training for Novices (aka High School Athletes)

The ideal novice training cycle looks something like this:

1. Load phase. This leads to exhaustion and a disruption in homeostasis.
2. Recovery phase. This allows the body to recover and rest.
3. Supercompensation phase. This is where the body gets stronger and adapts to the stresses placed on it in the Load phase.

The first step is then repeated. However, if the load phase is started too late after supercompensation, then the effects are mitigated and the athlete may return to the base level of fitness. Confused? This excellent graph from Footballdrills.com should help:

More after the jump…

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