We’re talking about practice, man!

Yeah, that’s an Allen Iverson reference.  The whole press conference is an interesting read.  At the time, Iverson was catching crap for a ton of things–the emphasis today on exercise management suggests Iverson was more right than realized at the time.

If you look at MLB, the NBA, you’ll see a lot of talk about load management or managing a player’s health.  In baseball, that leads to pitch limits or players getting days off right next to a travel day to maximize their rest.  In the NBA, they look at minutes played each night or over the course of a regular season as well as on ‘back-to-backs’ where teams play on consecutive nights.  This past year, that proved critical as Kawhi Leonard stayed fresh and dominated the post-season, bringing a title to Toronto.

This is important for volleyball as well.  There’s a coach out there, Mark Lebedew.  He coaches pro ball and is with the Australian national program–he may know something about volleyball.  Or not…I mean, he’s Australian….

Anyways, one of the things he thinks is important for developing players is watching your practice time.  Coach Lebedew believes the fewer players you have, the shorter your practice should be–at least in terms of physical activity (discounting film watching, scouting, etc).

Why?

(That’s where this blog comes in–don’t worry, it’s short—this time.)

Pretend there will be 1,000 contact in a practice.  If we have 20 athletes, that is 50/player.

If we reduce our squad to 10, then it is 100/player; 5 players and we are up to 200/player.

So if we’ve determined that 50 contacts is a good workload for an athlete over the course of 2 hours for managing fatigue, injury, focus, the works…look at what happens with fewer players.  The practice has remained the same length, but we go skyrocketing past the most effective count of ball-touches.  Thus, we can shorten the practice and still get the same amount of quality work done.

Too many coaches see fewer players as an opportunity to REALLY get more touches for available players–they want to prove toughness, make kids work, blah, blah.  By drastically increasing the reps/athlete, we also start increasing the risk of overuse injuries.

The objective shouldn’t be to work harder–it should be to work smarter.

Since pre-season is almost here for high school and college teams, consider how you can manage your practice time efficiently.  Be aware of the moments where you can say “Good enough for today, let’s call it early.”  It’ll keep your team peaking come the post-season.