Benefits of Hypertrophy Training in Team Sports
After the rigours of a season, you’ve most likely lost some body weight. This is likely a loss lean tissue so the aim of the first block after some time off should be to add some muscle mass. Why do we do this?
Body armour: super important for contact sports, the extra mass behind you can help reduce the risk of contact injuries and help you win contested ball.
Larger muscles have greater potential for being stronger muscles: more muscle doesn’t automatically relate to a stronger person but it does give you a greater foundation for strength in the future. A stronger muscle then has the ability to be a more explosive, powerful muscle if trained correctly.
Increases the tendons and ligaments to tolerate load: helping prevent a bunch of soft tissue injuries and increasing the health of the joint
Improved body composition: Muscle is an active tissue meaning it burns energy (as opposed to fat tissue). This is good if we want to be lean. More lean muscle tissue = better fat burner. What does this kind of training look like? - More volume: sets of 8-15 reps - Lower intensity: as volume goes up intensity/load must go down. - Greater variation of exercises - Increase time under tension: specifically the eccentric/lowering phase of the lift. After a cycle like this we’ll then go back into focusing on more athletic qualities like speed, strength, power and energy system development. #one22