Every ounce of my body is dreading this final workout.
I’m dreading having to spend hours editing another video and how sore and physically drained my body will be for the coming days.
Part of my feelings for this overwhelming dread stems from the fact that I was asked if I could handle cardio. I like to think that it’s my strength, but after experiencing workouts with baseball and basketball, I find myself questioning my fitness levels.
How hard could the volleyball workout be is a question I regularly ask myself.
Fortunately, the mental stress I put myself through leading up to the workout caused more suffering than the actual workout itself.
This is the final installment of a three-part series that gives an in-depth look at how college athletes train and how an average Joe can handle various Division I workouts. The Pine Belt News was granted access to a workout led by Southern Miss’ head volleyball strength and conditioning coach, Michael Cullen.
THE SCIENCE
This final challenge is a lift that the program completed in the final week of its offseason.
I draw the high-intensity day, which uses heavier weights but fewer reps. During the offseason, the team will have three workout days, which are broken up into high-intensity, medium-intensity, and low-intensity. The volume of the workouts will vary accordingly; for example, the lower-intensity day will have higher reps. My workout is focused on power production and maximum force output.
In the beginning stages of the offseason, Cullen’s program will focus on plyometrics, more simply known as jump training. However, as the season gets closer, those are slowly phased out since he estimates that his athletes jump between 150 and 250 times during practice.
“As we get closer to the season that tapers off, and sprinting takes more of a priority because they are getting a ton of jumping anyway,” Cullen said. “We don’t need to compound that and jump in here as well. We need to focus on what they’re not getting. That way they can stay healthier out there
“So then once (the season) starts, then we cut back on the jumping and focus more on the heavy lifting force production and sprinting. It’s a balancing act.”
As the season drags on, Cullen will only get two days with his athletes in the weight room.
“As we get into the season, we’re working a lot of musculature, mostly on their backside from the heel to the back of their head,” Cullen said. “Volleyball is a very interior-based sport, so you use a lot of musculature in the front of you, like the front of your leg. You see a lot of knee problems because of overuse from jumping, so we hammer the backside heavily and make sure we are hitting the full range of motion.”
FINAL PUMP
Like the other workouts in this series, I do a dynamic warmup that includes variations of skips, shuffles, and sprints. This leads to the sprint variation, which then sets up the cardio portion.
I can proudly say this is the only time I ever felt a little cocky since cardio is my only bread and butter in terms of exercise. As a retired high school cross country runner, I breeze through the 10-yard sprints.
I then immediately head straight into the weight room, where I go straight into an overhead press. Now, normally, this exercise would be relatively easy, but at the time of this workout, it had been only two days after doing the workout with basketball. If you remember, I struggled to raise my arms over my head. Although I wasn’t that sore, I was at about 85% mobility, which made it slightly harder than it should have been.
The overhead press requires a quick motion as I raise the bar with a quick force to put it over my head. This actually makes it more of a lower-body movement. Since this is a high-intensity exercise, the weight increases while the reps decrease. My max weight ends up being 100 pounds, but Cullen says the max he’ll see from his players is 165 pounds and as little as 60.
“I tell the girls on a push-press day that if their weight isn’t programmed for them, then there are no missed reps,” Cullen said. “The thing with the push press is that I want the speed of the bar consistent. We don’t want reps that look like they are getting stuck and the bar is moving slow. Then we are not training that quality that I want anymore.”
In between those sets, I do band pull-apart, which is exactly what it sounds like and requires pulling a workout band. Twelve reps of those add up on my shoulders, and it’s not a pleasant feeling.
“It doesn’t look like you are doing much, but it turns out it’s the opposite,” Cullen said.
My band work continues with band clams, an exercise I’m unfortunately familiar with from my running days. This requires lying on your side and putting a resistance band on your knees. You then bend your knees to 90 degrees and raise your leg. For a guy with hairy legs, this is not an enjoyable task.
“It’s a little bit of warmup to our heavy pulling,” Cullen said. “Given the nature of volleyball, too, with the stress on the knee, there’s research that the muscle group this is working, the gluteus minimus (hip in simpler terms), protects the knee joint in a way if it’s strong. That’s not to say a tiny muscle like that will prevent a knee tear, but it can help to make it work.”
MY PEAK
It’s only fitting that my finest moment of this series came at the end.
I can proudly say that I deadlifted a personal best of 205 pounds. I should say that it does help that I’ve never done this before.
There is a two-minute rest between each set so that my muscles can exert maximum effort, and like the rest of the workout, my weight will gradually increase while the reps will lower.
For the first time in my life, I felt like a bodybuilder — I even used chalk to enhance my grip. If you are skeptical of that, then I can assure you it really works.
“Technically, every set is going to be a PR (personal record) for you,” Cullen jokingly points out after the first set, which features me lifting just 50 pounds. “That’s always fun. You’re about to smash PR right now. Then you get to take it into the next set!”
NEMESIS RETURNS
If you followed this series, then you know my deep hatred for the TRX straps as this torture device returns to haunt me one last time. I hated doing it for baseball. I hated doing it for basketball. And I can now soundly say I hate doing it for volleyball too.
My hatred fuels my last three sets of eight reps, and although I complete the exercise in its entirety, it feels like the TRX straps got the last laugh.
The final workout is hamstring curls, which are similar to what I did in basketball. This time, I had to balance my legs on a workout ball. Although it was challenging, I can say I conquered it.
By the end, I’ve burned 540 calories in 70 minutes.
My final grade is an A-, which is an improvement from a B- in basketball and a C+ in baseball.
Having received that grade, it’s warranted for this workout to be my swan song, and I can happily ride off into the sunset that’ll lead me back to my couch.
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