Athletes and coaches often treat strength training as one program that runs year-round, but the goals of lifting change dramatically depending on the calendar. During the off-season, the job is to build new capacity — more strength, more muscle, more work capacity. During the season, the job flips to protecting what’s already been built while leaving enough energy for practice and competition.
Understanding what actually changes between these two phases — not just in theory, but in the numbers on the program — helps athletes avoid the two most common mistakes: training too hard in-season and burning out, or barely training in-season and losing the gains built all off-season.
Quick Answer
Off-season strength training uses higher volume (more sets and reps) and more varied, lower-intensity work to build a strength and muscle base. In-season training flips the formula: volume and frequency drop, but intensity (how heavy or how hard an exercise is relative to an athlete’s max) stays high, because intensity is what keeps strength and power from fading during a competitive schedule.
What Changes: Volume, Intensity, and Frequency
Volume is the first thing to shrink once the season starts. Off-season programs often run multiple sets across several exercises per muscle group, building toward higher total workloads. In-season, that volume typically gets cut substantially — sometimes by roughly a third to a half — because practices, games, and travel already demand a lot of physical output, and heavy lifting volume on top of that raises injury and fatigue risk rather than adding benefit.
Intensity works in the opposite direction. While off-season programs cycle through lighter, technique-building phases and heavier strength phases, in-season lifting tends to stay relatively heavy (lifting at a high percentage of an athlete’s current max) even as the number of sets drops. The idea is simple: heavy, low-volume work keeps the nervous system ‘reminded’ of how to produce force, which is what actually prevents strength loss — not total reps.
Frequency also comes down, but usually not to zero. Off-season athletes might lift four to six times a week across different training blocks. In-season, that often narrows to one to three focused sessions a week, scheduled around game days and recovery windows so the lifting supports performance instead of competing with it.
What Changes: Exercise Selection and Training Focus
Off-season training has room for variety — general strength builders, hypertrophy work, mobility and movement-pattern correction, and addressing weaknesses that wouldn’t be safe to chase during competition. This is the phase to fix imbalances, add muscle, and build the foundational strength a sport’s movements are built on.
In-season, exercise selection narrows to a short list of effective, efficient movements: a squat or hinge variation, a press and pull, and some targeted power or speed work, often trimmed down further around high-contact weeks. Anything that causes excess soreness or takes too long to recover from (like very high-volume leg work right before a game) usually gets removed or moved earlier in the week.
Research on in-season athletes has found that even a single well-designed strength session per week can be enough to maintain strength, speed, and jump performance that was built during the off-season — reinforcing that consistency and intensity matter more than total time spent lifting once competition starts.
Tips / Common Mistakes
A common mistake is treating in-season lifting as optional and skipping it entirely once games start — strength and especially power and speed qualities can start fading within one to two weeks of inadequate training, so some maintenance work is almost always worth keeping on the schedule.
The opposite mistake is just as common: carrying off-season volume into the season because ‘it’s been working.’ This usually shows up as accumulated fatigue, nagging soreness, and declining performance in the second half of a season.
Schedule lifting sessions based on the game calendar, not a fixed weekly template — place the heaviest work farthest from the next competition and keep sessions shorter and lighter (in volume) the closer they fall to game day.
Track how an athlete is recovering, not just what’s written on the program. If practices or games are unusually demanding in a given week, it’s normal to trim an in-season lifting session rather than force it.
Explore more: More athlete development guides.
In-season vs off-season strength training FAQs
Should athletes stop lifting weights during the season?
No — most athletes benefit from continuing one to three shorter, higher-intensity sessions per week during the season to maintain the strength and power built in the off-season, rather than stopping entirely.
Why does intensity stay high in-season if volume goes down?
Research on training maintenance consistently shows that intensity (how heavy the load is relative to an athlete’s max) is the key variable for preserving strength and power, while volume and frequency can be reduced considerably without major losses.
How much should training volume drop once the season starts?
There’s no single universal number, but many programs reduce total in-season volume substantially — often by roughly a third to half of off-season volume — while keeping a few heavy, effective exercises in the rotation.
What’s the main goal of off-season strength training?
The off-season is for building new strength, muscle, and movement capacity through higher training volume and a wider variety of exercises, since there’s more time to recover between sessions.
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Photo by Tyler Raye on Unsplash.