You don't have to pick

Every family thinks the answer is drop a sport or wait for the season to end. It is neither.

Every fall I have the same conversation, and it always opens the same way.

"We'd love to do this. Can we start after the season?"

I understand why. The calendar is already full. Practice three nights, games on the weekend, school on top of it. Adding one more thing sounds like the opposite of what anybody needs.

Here is the problem with waiting.

The season is not neutral. Games and practice spend what your athlete built in the summer. Nothing inside a season puts it back. Four months of spending with no deposits is why so many athletes finish a year slower than they started it — and then spend the next off-season getting back to where they already were in August.

That is the cycle. Build in the summer, spend it in the fall, rebuild in the spring, spend it again. Two years of that and a kid has run hard and arrived nowhere.

What it actually takes is smaller than you think

Not another season stacked on the one they are already in. Two or three short sessions a week that fit inside it.

• Strength — keep what you built. You are not chasing new numbers in October.
• Mobility — keep the range. It is the first thing a season takes.
• Stability — hold it together. This is the one that shows up in the last twenty minutes of a game.

That is it. Short sessions, low volume, specific purpose. The goal in season is not to get better. The goal is to still have it in November.

Nobody drops anything

I have never once asked a family to leave a team to train with me. Not once in twenty years. The plan gets built around the schedule you already have, because the schedule you already have is not going anywhere.

If your athlete is in three practices a week, we work around three practices a week. If there are two games on Saturday, Saturday is not a training day. That is not a compromise, it is just how in-season training works.

In season is not the wrong time. It is most of the year.

If you count it honestly — fall sport, winter sport, spring sport, maybe a summer team — most families have about six genuinely open weeks in a calendar year. If you only train in those six weeks, you are training six weeks a year.

This week

1. Count the actually-open weeks on your family calendar between now and June. Write the number down.
2. If that number is under eight, waiting until the off-season is not a plan.
3. Pick two days a week that already have nothing after 7pm. Those are your days.
4. Twenty minutes on those days beats ninety minutes you never get to.

General training guidance for healthy athletes. If something hurts, stop and have it looked at.

Written for the CSF families, from Piedmont Elite Sports Performance. No charge. A new one goes up every Sunday.

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Movement and performance guidance for healthy athletes. Not a medical evaluation, diagnosis or treatment.