Bake the Cake: Why Off-Season Training Should Push Limits, Not Protect Athletes

Yesterday was the culmination of how social media can be used for good. I was able to talk with former NFL safety Adam Archuleta about a vast number of topics - full conversation will come out soon.

While reflecting on our talk I was thinking about one of the topics we discussed. This idea of "never burning the cake" came up. This phrase has become all too popular in strength and conditioning.

Like most things this phrase had good intentions, it was designed as a way to help S&C coaches use an analogy to help sport coaches understand why he or she cannot overwork the team in-season.

S&C coaches could say things like "hey coach, I know you want to do x, y, and z at practice but when you look at all the work we did in the prior weeks combined with how big the last few games where - the team is a bit fired right now. If we keep pushing them it would be like baking the cake longer than we should and it will come out burnt - you don't like eating burnt cake do you?"

Most of the time this analogy would hit home with the sport coach and they would adjust their plan to keep the players fresh. The problem is not here, the problem is when the cake still needs to be baked.

Sure during the in-season you do not want to burn the cake and fry the players mentally, physically, etc...but during the off-season you kind of want to.

In the off-season you should not be peaking their performing and never wanting athletes sore. You do not want them to be using all the different recovery modalities to feel 100% every day.

Coaches like Fergus Connolly were the first to introduce this concept to me. Then I heard coaches like Nick DiMarco talking about max recoverable volume.

This max recoverable volume is what I am talking about in the off-season.

How much work can the players on the team still handle, all while still being able to show up and train the next day. THIS is what coaches should emphasize in the off-season. How much WORK can they do, leave the facility, recover, and then show up the next day and repeat. Day after day, week after week, month after month.

In this way they become harder to break in-season because you have pushed up their capacity to train hard and handle hard things.

You push up their ability to hit high number of accels in a day, week, and month.

You then do the same for high velocity distance running (as defined by you and your staff), change in direction (best metric for this is taking high speed accel+decel+rcod+lcod), total volume on feet, and time on feet.

This is why you want to have your PlayerData units on the team so you can record how much work is done in a week, month, and season with the team. Then go and push those numbers to have 20% or more reserve during the off-season.

In this way they will be robust and ant-fragile to the in-season.

And to all those who think this will make the team slow - stop.

This is also why you have your Dashr timing gates so you can time their sprints EVERY time you are doing speed work. This is for accel, curve, max velo, and COD. You can have a timed speed rep every day of the week.

Push these numbers too. The same in the weight room

How fast are they making the Vitruve encoder move. They should be mentally and exhausted by the end of the week from all the effort put out in the weight room knowing that every rep of their major movement was tracked with this encoder and teammates watching their reps.

Or with their jump data. See how high their data on your Hawkin Dynamics force plates get. This is the best part of it all too - you can look "under the hood" to see how they are producing the force in the jump and you can infer the same they are performing under fatigue or not.

That was something Adam talked about - he did SO much work with Jay during a training session, and it was designed to be mentally taxing and difficult - it was designed for him to perform under fatigue. And one thing he said Jay would tell him is great you feel tired, but you are still performing - go to work.

We need to do the same. We need to bake the cake too. Not burn it, but bake it.

We don't want to eat burnt cake - it tastes bad and needs a lot of frosting to doctor it up and hide that it is burnt. In S&C the frosting we put on to hide burnt cake is we do extra recovery work in the weight room, adjust training, and try to facilitate recovery.

All good things (just like frosting is) but when added to burnt cake, the final product doesn't taste as good.

The same can be said when the cake isn't baked.

A soupy soft mess of egg, batter, and water that is not cooked does not taste good either.

This is what happens when we "don't try to burn the cake" and never push the athletes hard.

Do do this - this is just as bad as burning the cake,

So go bake the cake, train your athletes hard.

And if you have no idea what that means and you need help designing S&C programs, that is exactly what we do at SCN. We have over 180 webinars on EVRERY topic and sport. Click below to learn more about us and learn about a trial membership.