Conditioning For Beach Volleyball

So you want to begin training in a gym to improve for the upcoming season of beach volleyball?  Well, the training might be a little different than just lifting some dumbbells.  First, lets do an overview of the difference between working out and training for a specific sport.  When you workout at the gym, you are focused on doing slow controlled reps to make your muscles grow and look better.  When training for a sport you are more concerned about the performance of your muscles and not so much on how they look.  Huge muscular legs don't mean that you can jump high.  Bodybuilders have very strong legs and squat insane amounts of weight but they can't necessarily jump high.  Jumping is one of the most important things you can do to train for beach volleyball.  Jumping is a combination of leg strength and speed which equals leg power.  So it makes sense to train both your leg strength and leg speed.  If you are already working out your legs consistently then you might not have to focus much on the strength because you already have it. 

The leg speed is what we want to focus on.  Speed in the legs is achieved by something called plyometrics, which consist of jumping movements.  Every beach volleyball player wants to know how to jump higher.  Well the answer to that is simple, you jump.  So in any training program you want include a lot of jumping.  Whether it is jumping to touch the back board with rest in between jumps or jumping onto boxes.  Now one very important thing is that we want to train our muscles to jump higher, not to jump the same height we can now for a longer period of time.  That's why when doing your jump training you will not be doing high reps.  You want low reps (6-10) and you want to jump your highest with each jump.  You want plenty of rest in between sets so you can jump your highest again.  You will be resting a little longer in between sets than with your traditional workout.  We don't care if our muscles get huge, we want the muscles to produce fast twitch fibers that are ready to fire when we tell them to.  It's as much as about quantity of jumps as it is about quality. 

Now when training with weights you are going to want to do it a little differently to help you legs with explosion.  Lets take squats for an example, you will want to go down slowly and then burst up quickly on a few of your sets and then do some slowly.  Training the proper way can put a few inches on your vert in as short as a month or maybe two.  That few inches could mean you making one extra block and getting into the AVP or not.