Volleyball Training Program
In today's sports world, classification of the term training implies using a variety of techniques to achieve a single purpose, with the intention of improving athletic performance. Besides technical and tactical expertise, an athlete requires a variety of physical qualities to excel at the sport of volleyball. He/she must be quick, agile, strong, powerful and possess both anaerobic and aerobic endurance. Which is what I was hoping to achieve with this carefully structured 6-week training program (Appendix 1).
In order to achieve peak performance at the most critical time of the year (The Australian Schools Cup), I have tried to balance training programs throughout the weeks so that an easy day was generally followed by a hard day, which was then followed by a rest day. And after the rest was a hard day then an easy day leading to a game day. This technique will help to improve fitness whilst keeping the players from overloading and becoming exhausted or sustaining an injury.
Different training techniques produce different muscular adaptations. Strength training traditionally involves weight lifting techniques using high load with low repetitions. It is well documented that resistance training can produce increases in muscular strength, power, size and anaerobic endurance. In contrast, endurance training utilizes low loads and high repetitions through exercises such as running or cycling. These types of training protocols dramatically increase aerobic endurance and cardiopulmonary efficiency. Physiologically endurance training improves your VO2max, lactate threshold and your overall aerobic endurance. Which is why it was important to have plenty of sessions that would help with both of these aspects of volleyball.
This training program also includes at least 4 sessions on game play, and skills training, as specificity it very important, if you were to have no training on skills or tactics only fitness, you could play all day, but you would lose so fast that you would not have to.
Whilst it is important to do some of the sessions on your own, testing every 2 weeks of the program will show if someone decides not to participate in self-training, and if by chance someone shows no improvement then small punishments shall be enforced (like starting on the bench on Saturday). The program is setup so that ideally peaking should occur around the fifth week, with the tapering in the sixth week is simply for maintenance purposes.
The aerobic circuit that I have selected for this program (Appendix 2) is designed to work the whole body but in a series of different ways, with exercises like tuck jumps, sit-ups, push ups etc. This circuit of 10 stations, while having been designed for developing aerobic endurance has been found to dramatically help the components of agility also, which made the decision to include it much easier.
The skills sessions are to be made up of many different drills, e.g. setting to one another, spiking drills, serving drills and lots more, the test for the skills however will consist of, 3serves, 3 backcourt sets into a hoop, 3 backcourt digs into a hoop, 3 sets [next page]