There are many factors that influence athletic performance. Often, strength and conditioning coaches get to witness incremental achievements made both by an individual and by a team in the gym. There is little doubt that a sport-specific strength and conditioning program will always be a key driver of overall success.

When putting together a strength and conditioning program for your athletes, there are a number of factors to take into consideration:

• The number of athletes training at once
• The training age & experience of your athletes
• What space/equipment you have available for each session
• How long each training session will be
• The number of weekly training sessions
• Any injuries individual athletes may have
• Practice and competition schedule

The ability to track your athletes' progress and evaluate your program thorought the season is at the center of BridgeAthletic's software for strength coaches. While mapping results across many seasons is crucial to your team’s success, having the tools to communicate and examine your programming can serve as an equally important factor when assessing results and planning your next steps. The BridgeAthletic software for strength coaches not only allows you to track your athletes' success, but the analytical features enable you to compare those results to the composition of your programming.

Volleyball players spend extensive hours training and practicing in the off-season to prepare for in-season competition. Volleyball-specific strength training will help athletes set realistic goals and build their skills for the upcoming season. Below are tips to better optimize preseason training and in-season performance. 

Delivering an individualized strength and conditioning program to each member of a team used to be difficult. Often, we found ourselves calculating percentages based on each athlete’s 1 rep max equivalent (%1RME) and then creating unique lifting cards, containing each individual’s weight prescriptions. However, strength training software and the BridgeAthletic builder does away with these calculations. Simply choose to prescribe weight based on %1RME and deliver your workout to every athlete at once, allowing each value to automatically calculate, based on the percentages assigned. No more mistyped Excel formulas. Spend your time on the floor, not the computer.

Communicating with your team can be a challenge. Accounting for last minute scheduling conflicts, relaying workout descriptions in the off season, and generally keeping track of a high volume of athletes can be a challenge. That’s why we’ve created software for strength coaches and the Team Stream feature to help streamline all communication with your individual athletes as well as the different parts of your department, from sports coaches to trainers. While this simple messaging system can significantly impact your athletes’ engagement and your tracking of their success, BridgeAthletic’s communication features also enable the rest of your training staff to collaborate more effectively.

Testing your athletes is crucial to measuring the success of your strength and conditioning program. While it can be time consuming and difficult to collect data and analyze your team's stats, the BridgeAthletic software for strength coaches allows you to compile, organize, track, and examine your athlete's tests against each other and over time.

Ask active young athletes who they look up to and good chance you’ll get the name of an Olympian, professional athlete, or perhaps the next rising star in their sport. Many aspire to achieve elite status, or a future collegiate or professional career in a specific sport. This can lead to an excessive amount of pressure by the athlete, coaches, parents, and teammates to pick a sport to specialize in early and put in hours of training year-round. Is this the only way to achieve the skill and experience to make it to the top? What are the downsides of this? This sports science article will provide some background on sports specialization, discuss the risks of early sports specialization, how early versus late influences performance, and, finally, provide some recommendations to coaches, athletes, and parents on training.

Success on the court comes from hard work in the weight room. A volleyball-specific strength and conditioning program can optimize a player’s performance, reduce the risk of injury, and lead to quicker recovery. Here’s a six-step guide on how to build a successful volleyball strength and conditioning program: