Off Season Training with Keyano
Overview
This past summer was the first off-season that I took care of the off-season strength and conditioning for Keyano College’s Mens Volleyball. In AWA fashion, the training looked quite different than what they and most athletes have experienced.
We challenged rotational patterns of the body, we explored strength through full ranges of motion, we worked towards evolving their shoulders, we lifted heavy, we moved fast, and we saw cool results!
We saw strength, agility, vertical jumping improve, and chronic pains that have plagued some athletes for years disappear.
However in my opinion the coolest result of the summer was the full team increased their serve velocity by an average of 13.8km! (These numbers were from their testing done in April and then again in September).
How is this possible? Part 1
There are a lot of possible answers to this question, but I believe a few things strongly impacted these results.
They put in consistent effort throughout the summer. Sometimes it can be that simple, if a team is working consistently in the off-season cool things happen. Consistent effort, doesn’t always mean “hard work”. They didn’t have any official workouts in the month of April even though they were done their season. In April they worked on a few simple movements like holding a deep squat, or hanging from a bar, they took care of finishing up school, and they were instructed to go for long walks.
We did this to reduce the amount of mental/emotional fatigue that comes with a full off-season of working out hard. This has been a mistake I’ve made in the past with certain athletes and by the time August came around those athletes needed to take a mental break. So learning from this experience we decided as a group to take a longer break to end the school year with the hopes that they would be super eager to get started come May and last the full summer.
Now consistent effort doesn’t mean changes in velocities will occur, but I believe when you pair up their work ethic with the upgrades we made physically we give serve velocity the potential to dramatically change as theirs did.
Part 2
One of the things we worked really hard at changing is the way their shoulders functioned. If you’ve been following AWA for a while you’ve probably seen us emphasize two things around the shoulder:
We need to get stronger with the shoulder blade spread away from the spine (in protraction). So much of our training in the weight room surrounds the idea of pulling our shoulder blades back and down. This is coupled with the idea that military posture - pulling your shoulders back and down is “good” posture. So we get athletes that constantly pull their shoulder blades towards their spine in the gym and then they are told to do the same thing to have “good” posture. They’re OVERLOADED with the shoulder blade back and down tendencies.
Retraction isn’t the enemy, but too much of one movement is very rarely a good thing. So what do we do, we instruct them to NOT pull their shoulder blades back and down but rather to keep them spread as they do their exercises with the goal of working towards more balance from their years of exposure to the “back and down” cue.
For example we do “Apiros” style push-ups where we instruct athletes to maintain their shoulder blade spread position throughout the upward and downward motion of the push-up like I do in the video below. Now push-ups are a scapular stability and shoulder mobility exercise rather than purely a “chest” exercise…we think that’s pretty cool.
Want to dive deeper into the world of posture,
check out this blog post from Apiros!
This novel position for athletes allows their shoulders to be strong away from the spine (which is where it is when we attack). Try it yourself, reach up above your head as high as you can as if you were attempting to hit a ball high over a blocker, you should feel your shoulder blade pull away from your spine, not towards it. So our idea here is, LET’S GET SUPER STRONG HERE BECAUSE WE EXIST HERE SO MUCH IN VOLLEYBALL :)
Also this position pulls the thoracic spine into its naturally rounded curvature. It is all too common that volleyball players have flat thoracic spines which don’t allow the spine to function optimally. As volleyball athletes we are rotational athletes by definition, the spine needs to be able to do really cool things to allow us to rotate and generate velocity on our serves and spikes.
When the thoracic spine is flat, or we can also say when the thoracic spine rests in the opposite position that it is supposed to, we can’t expect it to do the things we need it to at the level we need to do it at. Try it for yourself, squeeze your shoulder blades together (flattening out your spine) and then try to rotate. Now spread your shoulder blades apart and try to rotate, generally speaking you should feel more freedom of rotation or ease of rotation as your shoulder blades are spread away from your spine.
So getting the shoulders spread away from the spine is one upgrade to the shoulders we made, and the second is we trained the rotator cuff by giving it the stimulus that allowed it to evolve into what it is today. This stimulus is found through hanging, swinging, and climbing movements.
There were multiple months throughout the summer where I would check in with the athletes and ask how they were doing. One of the most common pieces of feedback was their hands were sore. I was super excited to hear that because that was a clear indicator that they were following the hanging, swinging and climbing instructions in their programs. We had athletes who couldn’t hang from a bar with one hand for 10 seconds at the start of summer getting up over 60 seconds by the end of summer. The team averaged a 30 second hang on their left and right arms at the end of summer. This is incredible not only because their left and right arms are balanced throughout the group, but because 30 seconds is actually pretty impressive for a full team to average. Try it yourself, find a pull-up bar and grab onto it with one hand, hang for as long as you can and time yourself and see what you get. I think you’ll appreciate better how impressive it is after trying it yourself that a team of 20 athletes averaged 30 seconds on each arm :)
But back to why this is all important with regards to their shoulder and the changes in velocity we saw. I learned from my mentor at Apiros, Austin Einhorn, what a terrible name the rotate cuff is for this group of muscles. The primary function of the rotator cuff muscles is not shoulder rotation but to act as glue that holds the arm in the shoulder socket. When this “glue” (the rotator cuff) works well, the shoulder can handle the demands placed on it as athletes serve and attack all season. As you serve and attack you challenge the rotator cuff by your arm essentially being pulled away from the socket because of how fast your hand is moving. So as your hand attempts to pull the arm bone our of the shoulder socket, your rotator cuff acts as glue to hold it all together and keep your shoulder feeling happy.
Not only can it handle the demands placed on it but if it is not strong your brain won’t allow your hand to move fast because it will be uncomfortable on the rotator cuff. The brain is smart, if something causes discomfort when it moves quickly, it will not allow you to move it as quickly. When the hand slows down, the velocity slows down, when the hand has the freedom to move fast, the ball will follow suit.
Part 3
The second physical upgrade that I believe had a huge impact on their ability to generate more velocity is the attention we gave the spine. In most programs for volleyball athletes most spine range of motion stimulus comes from things like rotational medicine ball throws. We love these and Keyano definitely performed them, but to us that’s like only ever training plyometric jumps to improve the jump. Can it work? Yes. Is there a way that can get bigger results and at the same time allow the athletes to become more resilient and last longer? We believe, YES.
Our training around the spine took on many forms. We moved slowly on the ground allowing the rib cage and spine to integrate and learn movement.
We challenge the rib cage and spine by integrating higher levels of demands on their core to stabilize through movement.
We added external load into the equation to ask the body to now perform similar patterns but under more stress in order to increase strength.
And then, when we have quality, control and strength as our foundation we ask the spine to move with power and speed!
I mentioned earlier, volleyball players are rotational athletes. To serve and attack with velocity and sustainability (to do so without pain/injuries), we need to the spine have access to lots of range, strength and power. When this happens the engine of our attacks becomes rotation through the trunk which allows the shoulder and hand to accelerate freely to contact the ball with SPEED!
Conclusion
Consistency coupled with a comprehensive approach of training the shoulder and spine created some cool results for Keyano.
Interested in feeling these changes in yourself?
Check out our Arm Swing Academy to start making changes to how your shoulder feels and how hard you hit the ball!
