Load Management for your Bench Players
By: David GIl
Your starters are getting anywhere from 80-200 jumps per match day (including warm up). Setters are a different animal, looking at over 300 in many cases.
Your bench players are getting between 30-60, depending on if you have a practice early on a gameday, perhaps some serve and pass.
Taking a fairly typical Friday/Saturday match weekend (yes, I know not everyone has this type of periodization), and that’s a massive discrepancy in load.
The solution for many programs has been to adjust training throughout the week. High days may be full team, but the day before a match for your bench is far higher than it is for your starters.
Let’s talk numbers. Gameday -1 middles and outsides tend to run their lowest jump count of the week, often between 50-70 jumps, sometimes less. Some of our internal research has shown this to be an effective range for most athletes, leading to their highest vertical performance come gameday. We see a drop in vertical performance when the practice before match day is +90.
It is important to note that this all depends on your training periodization, but I find it helpful to have some tangible numbers to paint the picture, so keep in mind these numbers are not law by any means. We’ve gone through numerous teams to see if there was a correlation between gameday -1, -2 and -3 training load to gameday vertical performance. We’ll review more of this research in a future article, so stay tuned for that one; we have found some fascinating results.
Starters can have upwards of 25% higher load per week than their bench counterparts. The season is a constant balance between load and skill development, and if practice looks the same for everyone; that balance is off.
Two primary issues here.
Our bench can be at risk of de-conditioning during parts of the season, especially tournaments where there is more play and therefore even less load for bench players.
Skill development is not being optimized.
The solution is clearly to better organize practices and have a separate periodization for bench players when games come into the schedule (roughly W5 for NCAA programs). As always though, this training load adjustment requires nuance. You can adjust their day prior to the match from 50-70 to 100+, and their day in between (should that be the case) or after to a higher number, but we need to think about the stimulus they are missing from match play.
Competition! 6 v 6, scrimmage-style practices are the reps they’re observing as their fellow teammates compete against other teams. It's not simply about adding load for loads sake, or even for reduced injury risk. This load should be pointed, competitive and as game-like as possible. Programs that properly optimize load, which takes more effort in practice-planning, are the ones who build stronger depth, developing future starters and ensuring bench players are prepared should they be called to play in a match.
As you look at your practice plans, consider not just the load, but the stimulus. Starters will need more recovery post-match, bench will need more load coupled with game-like stimulus. These are the details that help programs not only stay healthy, but maintain a higher level of competition and a culture of athletes literally putting in additional effort to make it onto the court.
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