Volleyball Strength
in our Volleyball Newsletter Issue#001

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Volleyball Advisors’ Newsletter - Best Volleyball Training Tips, Issue #001 - Volleyball Strength

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In this issue:

1) Welcome! Hello from Europe

2) Why should you consider sport specific volleyball conditioning?

3) Recommendations from the Conditioning Expert

• Hip Extension
• Women’s Strength Training
• Junior Athlete’s Strength Training

4) “No thanks” to weights?

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1) WELCOME! HELLO FROM EUROPE

You are very welcome to the first issue of our new newsletter Volleyball Training Tips. We hope through these newsletters we are able to bring up our passion for volleyball, share it with you and get you even more excited about this great sport.

In this newsletter we focus on some aspects of volleyball strength training and conditioning. We bring you some tips from the European conditioning expert who we just met. Also we thought it would be a good topic to start with because many players in United States are heading to the holiday break and getting ready for the season after New Years.

I am sure some of you have noticed some “foreign flavor” (maybe some grammar mistakes, missing articles etc.) in some of our articles and newsletters. Well, our English speaking contributors are doing a good job to keep them off, but I hope you understand if they appear. Volleyball is truly a global sport!

Before starting about the conditioning, we promise to keep everything short and sweet. If you have questions, concerns or want more information about the subjects, feel free to contact us and ask. We are positive somebody from our expert network will be able to deliver a good answer.

2) WHY SHOULD YOU CONSIDER SPORT SPECIFIC VOLLEYBALL CONDITIONING?

I know some of you have been wondering; why would I need to learn some exercises VolleyballAdvisors’ recommend because the old ones are working just fine and bring in results?

Generally speaking, if an athlete doesn’t have too much experience on conditioning or strength training any exercise will help them to improve in the beginning. However, some day an athlete who is doing non-sport specific exercises will run into a wall – an athlete is not able to develop anymore.

A good example of this is squatting with your body weight. Let’s say an athlete is doing countless repetitions of squats or static squat with the body weight. By doing those squats athlete is able to gain strength in the beginning - and with that added strength is able to add inches to the vertical.

Those non-sport specific squats result a nice short term solution, but when thinking faraway to the future it would be more beneficial to add volleyball specific aspects into it. By repeating the same squat exercise over and over again an athlete will run into that wall and development stops.

By the way, there is nothing wrong with the squat itself, that’s a great exercise to add volleyball strength. Even doing tons of reps with the body weight is good in the beginning phase; we actually recommend it when learning the techniques of weight lifting.

To get an idea what sport specific exercises to gain volleyball strength a volleyball player should do, click the link or copy and paste the link below into your browser:

http://www.volleyballadvisors.com/workout-for-volleyball.html

3) RECOMMENDATIONS FROM THE CONDITIONING EXPERT

• Hip Extension
• Women’s Weight Training
• Junior Athlete’s Weight Training

Hip Extension

When volleyball players are conditioning the legs, coach should pay special attention to hip extension. Why is that?

• A strong hip extension (lower back, abdominals, hips, glutes etc) pushes the player up when taking off the ground
• All those muscles together, not just your quads, will contribute to your jump

Those muscles work as a chain, firing each others to push you higher. When working out, an athlete should focus on movements which work all those muscles at the same time.

If an athlete works on individual muscles (each part of the chain) separately, muscles are not learning to act together and fire each others. For example, instead of using leg extension machine (which isolates to movement to one part of that chain), an athlete should do squats (which trains the whole chain).

To check more information about hip extension, follow the link or copy and paste the link below into your browser:

http://www.volleyballadvisors.com/volleyball-workout.html

Conditioning expert advised us, it is extremely important for a coach to pay attention to the hip extension on every leg/core exercise. It is important on medicine ball throws, kettle bell exercises, weight training, jump training... on all of them.

Whatever leg/core exercise athletes do, coaches should pay attention that the powerful hip extension is part of it and performed correctly.

Women’s Strength Training

Our friend from Europe especially gave us feedback about the volleyball strength and conditioning of female volleyball players. Women should be encouraged to do weight training also; the physical elements of females are not that much different from males. There is no reason why weight lifting would not be beneficial to female volleyball players.

We have heard often how women’s volleyball is different from men’s volleyball; women’s game focuses more on the speed and quickness while males play with the power. That can be true to some extend, but we all still play the same sport, which means the training should be very similar. Female volleyball players - break the myths and start gaining power with weight training!!

Junior Athlete’s Strength Training

VolleyballAdvisors strongly recommend weight training as part of volleyball conditioning, even for junior athletes.

Weight training can be introduced to 15-16 year olds, both males and females. However, weight training at those younger ages needs to be done with lower loads and intensities.

At younger ages athletes should use medicine ball and kettle bell training or traditional weight lifting with lower loads (for example 0 – 30% of 1 RM, 1 RM=the maximum weight you can lift), just learning the techniques first and gradually increasing the loads.

17-18 year old athlete could be ready for traditional weight lifting with higher close to the maximum weights (85 – 100% of 1RM), if the techniques have learned and an athlete has minimum of 3 months extensive strength training behind (with 70-85% of 1 RM).

4) “NO THANKS” TO WEIGHTS?

Even if we have tried to do our best to get younger as well as older athletes excited about volleyball strength training with weights and know weight training is invincible training method – we are aware that some athletes or coaches can not use it, or prefer other training methods.

If athletes or coaches don’t have access to weights in the gym, a good solution would be to use kettle bell training and medicine ball training to replace it. If that also is out of the question, athletes should do conditioning by jump training 2-3 times a week.

Our promise is we are looking forward to provide some extensive information about those alternative training methods in the future.

Keep the Ball Flying,

VolleyballAdvisors.com

P.S. Feel free to forward this newsletter to your friends, they can subscribe to my newsletter by clicking here or copying and pasting the link below into their browser:

http://www.volleyballadvisors.com/volleyball-newsletter.html

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