I’ve always said that if you want to take your athletic career as far as it will go training in-season is mandatory. I don’t want to hurt any feelings here but in my experience there are two types of athletes… The ones that will do whatever it takes to reach their goals and the ones that are in it recreationally. By the way, there is nothing wrong with being in youth and or HS sports just for “fun”. I get it. It’s not what I did or would do but I get it. I also believe that you can be in it for fun and still achieve high levels of success. The reality in sports especially at the HS level is there are going to be the athletes that most of the time are going to give the beating and there are going to be the ones that take the beating… Id rather give the beating.

Now that that is out of the way… if you don’t train in-season you are basically throwing out 4-8 months out of every year, depending on the sport where you could be getting so much stronger and athletic during the athletes prime growing years! Most sports now are year round. Football has spring ball and 7on7. Baseball and softball is just nuts spring, summer, fall, winter. Soccer is year round. Wrestling is winter but then there are tournaments all off-season. So you get my point.

Athletes need to learn to train through seasons and off-season competitions or they will never reach a high level success…. I was recently reading this article on Stack its about actually lifting before games: https://www.stack.com/a/never-lift-on-game-day-exposing-one-of-the-biggest-myths-in-sports?fbclid=IwAR1hxQaALY0pxNVgqLLdGLBSE9j88XLMTSRZqJUmQYjBYm_xgtL-GH0KHW4

Here is an excerpt to hammer down my point:

“For example, during the month of June 2019, Mike Trout played 28 games. If he decided he “couldn’t work out on game days”, he’d be left with just 1-3 days each month to train. MVPs don’t roll like that.

And when guys like Trout, James or Koepa lift on game day, it’s not just warm-up weight. These workouts, which are typically conducted several hours before the start of competition, require significant effort and utilize substantial loads. In other words, it’s the type of exercise conventional wisdom says should be totally avoided on game day. But the research paints a completely different picture.”

I personally have messed around with lifting both before and after competitions with pretty good success especially most recently last summer before a few track meets. I rack pulled PRs then ran seasons bests in the 100m dash. I was doing it more for the potentiation benefits than anything but if you’re a busy athlete short on time some of the best times to get in training could be before or after competitions but it must be planned out well.