Once you know what your ideal bed time is then try to set yourself up for success by finding ways to turn off your brain. Most of us stay awake because we have too much on our minds and we can't seem to find the button to close the windows on those thoughts.

Think of sleep and the amount of gas in your gas tank. If you are low and miss a few hours due to an event or not being able to fall asleep. Then your body has less gas (sleep) to run on. What you must do is plan to make it up when you know you will be able to. This will allow you can refill your sleep tank and have more energy.

When I look at volume I think of its application to the nervous system and how the athlete can recover. We know from the textbooks and research that lifts with higher volume will take the athlete anywhere from 24 to 48 hours to recover from. However, lifts that are higher in intensity with lower volume are easier for the body to recover from (12 to 24 hours). On a quick side note this is why you want your in-season lifting programs to be more strength focused.  

A vector is a quantity having direction as well as magnitude, especially as determining the position of one point in space relative to another. In other words the direction in which you apply force into the ground directly correlates as to how you will be able to move and how fast you will be able to move. 

According to Seroyer, MD & Nho, MD “Increased amounts of shoulder external rotation help to allow the accelerating forces to act over the longest distance,25 allowing greater pre-stretch and elastic energy transfer to the ball during acceleration.21,31,35” While greater amount of external rotation can be a predictor of increase velocity it also causes increased stress on the UCL and we all know what that means.

My biggest advice to young coaches or coaches looking to achieve a higher level perspective on speed development is to find who the great coaches are and learn from them. I made that a mission of mine early in my career and it was an amazing adventure. Not only can you learn from their view point of how they are seeing things unfold in real time but picking up on their verbal cues is of tremendous value. An when you are trying to get athletes into the correct angels and ground contact points in real time knowledge like this is invaluable. 

I vividly remember my first day of my first assistant coach job after leaving the University of South Florida. I was watching the head coach run groups through all day and most of what we were doing was all speed and agility related. However, these were skills and drills I had never seen before and was honestly intimidated myself to demo. Now this job was in the private sector which explains why we spent more time on speed and agility then weights, unlike the college realm I had just left

Whenever I build out a speed and agility program I like to look at what movement language does the athlete need to be able to express.  When we look at each position we can see that each position group has different movement skills that they need to be successful. 

Where I have found great use for APRE is for GPP (General Preparation Phase) work and Max Strength work with my High school population. I also will use APRE for GPP work with our college and professional clientele as well to help me gage where they are when they are coming back to us. 

Now you could just use APRE and get great results with your athletes but our program we us has a few different methodologies mixed in which is why I use APRE for just those phases with those populations. APRE has three different protocols in 10, 6, and 3. 

I like the progression and regression system I have come up with because it never really allows the athlete to become so strong in the overhead press that I become worried about stressing the shoulder joint or creating the hypertrophy in the deltoid that causes superior glenohumeral migration. Rather pay attention to the body positioning we use to place the body in a position that will challenge it to learn the correct core stabilization necessary to perform the moveme

Off-sea-son: A time of year when a particular activity, typically a sport, is not engaged in.

Now that we have managed to clear up what an offseason is. Lets look at it in the context of youth sports. Most summer leagues for middle school players ends around June/July and high school players normally end summer ball around July/August.

However most of these players will join fall leagues if they live in the north until the end of September or if they live in the south their season may continue longer.

While I agree whole heartedly with the data I thought it might be a good idea to clarify how to efficiently train the biceps for those of you who ran to the ez curl bar and started doing some curls in the hope of increasing velocity.