Feature Team of the Week: Men's Volleyball

Feature Team of the Week

Men's Volleyball

1. What BUCS League do you compete in?

The Men's 1s compete in BUCS Premier North, and the Men's 2s compete in BUCS Northern 2B.

2. You also have a link with a National league programme?

The club has a strong link with the Sheffield Volleyball Club, which has teams that compete at various levels, including Super 8’s and Division 1.

3. What is your training schedule?

We usually have 3-4 court sessions per week, with two team S&C sessions per week, as well as additional drop-ins for individual work and top ups when we don’t play.

4. When are games?

We compete for Hallam in BUCS on Wednesdays and for Sheffield Volleyball Club on Saturdays and Sundays, meaning we sometimes have 3 games a week.

5. What kind of training do you do in S&C? 

We aim to get into the S&C before 7am, so that we’re ready to go. We then usually have a team stretch followed by some activation and dynamic mobility to get us all going, which is quite important when we have training until late the night before! We all work off a team-based programme that usually last around 4 weeks, but we do all have individual work to complete as well to ensure that we’re all working on our individual weaknesses. At the moment our programme has a focus on max strength and power, which has the aim to maximise jump height.

6. How do you feel S&C has helped you develop as athletes?

S&C has given everyone the opportunity to develop physically, not only in the team sessions but also having the chance to drop in for one to one sessions with Aden has helped a lot of the team to develop further and a lot quicker.

Aden Flannagan, Assistant S&C Coach, leads the Men’s Volleyball Programme, here’s what he had to say about the programme:

“Programming for the Men’s Volleyball Team can be quite a task at times, compared to most sports here at Hallam they have quite a high on court training load. When you take the nature of the sport into consideration, some positions may be jumping up to 300 times per session, so potentially 1200 times per week, in training alone. To many this may not seem like a lot, but that’s huge amount of volume, then plus the 3 potential games per week, which can make programming quite difficult.

What we’ve tried to do so far this year is to reduce the amount of impact via jumping based exercises. We’ve had a big focus on landing mechanics as well as emphasising eccentric strength in exercises to ensure that every athlete can manage the training load of Volleyball, in order to minimise the chance of conditions like tendonitis to occur.

Volleyball started with us in the S&C earlier than every other team at Hallam this year, meaning it gave me the opportunity to have a real impact on the boys, by being able to physically develop all of them prior to on court training and games had even started. We usually work off a 4-week block, which we adjust the gym-based training volume based upon how fatigued they are, as well as how many games they may have that week. Very similarly to what Andy uses with Men’s Hockey, I also use 5 repeated jumps to monitor power output on a weekly/daily basis. Using this gives me the opportunity to monitor both individual and team progression, but also to monitor fatigue levels of each athlete.

Above shows the data of how we have monitored the boys throughout the BUCS season so far. As you can see before the Christmas there was a great deal of inconsistency, which is simply due to the team’s training and playing volume, thus causing regular fluctuations. Although as a team they have all got stronger throughout the year so far, because of the jumping volume that they are exposed every training session and game, it causes a neuromuscular fatigue resulting in jump scores being affected.

Over the last 4 weeks we have had a huge focus on trying to develop lower limb max strength, as well as overloading the stretch shortening cycle to maximise jump height. The team in general have a strong work ethic and are in the gym more than twice per week, with some of the boys getting in the gym to train up to 4 times per week, all of which I try to programme for to maximise their athletic performance. You can find their latest programme below to see what we’ve used to maximise jump performance over the last 4 weeks”.