I feel this article is long overdue, and if you're a fellow strength coach, you feel my pain. I'm not referring to the actual car that you drive but to your current adaptive reserves (CAR). This will come in handy for you and your athletes.
To understand what Verkhoshansky refers to in Supertraining (2009), you must first understand what Seyle proposed as the three phases of general adaptation syndrome. He proposed that all animals or organisms exposed to stress go through the alarm, resistance, and then exhaustion phase. “The energy source for the second stage (resistance or adaptation) comes from the readily available superficial adaptation energy source or the emergency deep adaptation energy source, depending on the level of exhaustion or depletion of energy at any instant” (p.83). This is otherwise known as your current adaptive reserves.
Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but the whole point of any training is adaptation. In our world, either we or the athletes we coach are trying to get performance and strength to improve. I know from my time competing on the bodybuilding stage that a few weeks all the way up to one month off did my body good and allowed for some serious supercompensation when I returned to training. Many of the top professional bodybuilders take up to three months off after the Mr. Olympia contest. I know that bodybuilding is more of an ‘underground’ sport, so let’s look at the big sports. NFL and NBA guys take plenty of time off after the season. Many NBA stars have passed up playing for the national team just so they could get their time off.
I train a lot of high school athletes, and although they're often resilient, they do have their limits. Many of my basketball players have gone from the scholastic season right to the AAU season. Now, they're entering summer ball leagues. Where the heck is the off-season? It takes a tremendous amount of CAR to get results when we're talking about strength, speed, power, and improved performance. This new trend that has happened in the past seven years or so is very scary to me as a strength coach. Many high school athletes play the same sport or focus on the same sport year round. Mental fatigue and burnout are huge stresses. Mental stress will take its cut out of our pizza pie of CAR. The extra practices and constant running of the athletes takes its share of pie from CAR. More than three-quarters of our CAR pie is gone, hardly enough to keep for any real adaptations.
The off-season is the time for some serious rest and regeneration. Then we can get big and strong. Strength coaches, our critical off-season is being taken away before our very eyes. If the sports coaches want us to get the athletes to improve their athletic traits, we need our off-season. You need to be in the best CAR mode possible. You all know how much energy is needed to gain one pound of muscle, jump one inch higher, or shave 0.2 of a second off your forty time. Make a stand!