Stop Chasing PRs in October

Ask a high school athlete in October what he is doing in the weight room and you usually get a number. He is trying to add ten pounds to his bench by the end of the month.

In February that is a reasonable goal. In October it is how you arrive at the playoffs slower than you started.

Why the goal has to change

If getting bigger, stronger and faster were the whole answer, injuries would be rare among the strongest athletes. They are not. Plenty of them get hurt, and a lot of the time they get hurt in season, doing something they have done ten thousand times.

That happens because a season is already the hardest training block of the year. Practices, games, travel, and school. The body is accumulating fatigue and compensations faster than it can clear them. Adding a heavy progression on top of that is not training. It is a second season.

What in-season work is for

Three jobs, in this order.

Hold what you built. You are not adding, you are keeping. Enough load to tell the body that the strength is still needed, not enough to dig a hole.

Correct what the season is doing to you. Every sport is asymmetrical. A thrower rotates one way. A lineman fires off one stance. Ten weeks of that leaves a shape, and the shape is what tears in week eleven.

Stay ahead of the fatigue. Mobility, stability, and work that puts the hips and trunk back where they belong, so the compensation does not become the new normal.

What that looks like

Shorter sessions. Lower load. Higher attention.

If an athlete has weak stabilisers in the hip or the shoulder, in season is when that shows up worst, because the sport is asking for those stabilisers all week and nothing is rebuilding them. Twenty focused minutes on that gap does more for the season than another set of squats.

The athlete who trains this way finishes the season roughly where he started it, instead of losing eight weeks in the spring to get back to where he was in August.