Wow! Another year has come and gone. Even though it is the beginning of the year, it could be the middle of the sport’s season if your athlete plays a winter sport. With that being said, how should your athlete start this year off on a positive note that will get him/her in the best position to be successful this year?

If your athlete is in a winter sport.

So, if you have a basketball player, wrestler, or swimmer, this is probably your big season right now. The goal is to STAY HEALTHY! You don’t do anyone any good if you go get hurt and are sitting on the bench recovering.

How do you stay healthy?

First off, make sure you are eating smart. You want to keep your immune system humming with good food and nutrients inside of you. This will also help fend off some of those colds that seem to go around in the winter time. Make sure you wash your hands and be smart who you are sharing your food/snacks with.

Get plenty of sleep. Get your homework done and get to bed shooting for 8 hours of sleep a night. You are spending plenty of energy and need to have a good night’s sleep every night to aid in recovery.

Finally, I would be weight training to maintain your strength and reduce the chances of injuries occurring (or speeding up the healing process if an injury is already there). You adjust the intensity of this training during the in-season so you make the workouts short and sweet.

If your athlete is doing another sport.

All other sports are probably ramping up now for a spring season. Baseball, softball, track, lacrosse, and tennis are traditional spring sports. But club soccer and AAU basketball are becoming huge in the spring as well.

If you play any of these sports (and not doing a winter sport), hopefully, you have already been training. If not, then you need to start … TODAY!

Strength training for all of these sports at the high school level needs to be 2-3 times a week. The goal should be strength development transitioning to power development as it gets closer to pre-season practices that start usually the beginning of March.

Speed and power development is vital for all of these sports. Plyometric and speed training should be done at least twice a week. This is the time to do it when your activity level is low and the energy can be spent on these training sessions. Put your body through the sacrifice now so the regular season is a breeze.

Finally, you might want to do some conditioning to get that aerobic conditioning. If you are doing track though this might be hard. Do the best you can and maybe you can get into a few indoor track meets and use them as glorified practices.

The winter has the fewest sports going thus the fewest amount of athletes playing. So there should be plenty of athletes sitting around waiting for that spring season to start. Get a few of them off their butt to read this so that their upcoming season will be a great one.

Photo courtesy of Jayhem on Flickr: https://www.flickr.com/photos/jayhem/