The issue that’s come up often in talks of resuming both the NBA and NHL seasons is that of how much practice time or “ramp up" time you should be giving to players before they resume the season. After all, it’s been 2 months since most have played and it’s hard to expect anyone to come back to play at an intense, but condensed schedule safely without some ramp up or preparation.

Some may raise an eye brow at this assertion, as they see Instagram stories of their favorite athletes working out at home. However, you’d be wrong to assume this alone keeps you “in shape.”

What is the actual mechanism at work here? What is behind a need to be “ramped up?” What does that even mean?

From the S&C coach’s perspective: There’s two mechanisms to look at:

1. Work capacity

2. Maximum recoverable volume (MRV)

Work capacity is defined as the amount of physical stress your body can take in any repeatable interval without noticeable detrimental effect. People usually measure this in some relevant metric to their sport. In jiu jitsu or MMA, you may use sparring minutes or rounds per week; in baseball, possibly innings pitched for a pitcher. You would also factor strength and conditioning into this equation. For a strength sport, it may be reps over a certain percentage of your 1RM for the week/month, etc.

Work capacity is one of the easier things to adapt to, but it’s a little delicate. When training to increase it, you usually have to play through a bit of discomfort. However, do this at the wrong time and you’re sure to do more damage than positive adaption. The surest way to do this is to simply give your body time (while understanding on the other end of the spectrum, there is a finite amount of this capacity).

This is the first major hurdle in bringing an athlete back to playing often— you need time to do it. It’s not a 2 week proposition in many cases either. Time isn’t exactly a luxury anyone has right now. I imagine the coaching staff, athletic trainers and strength coaches of these teams will closely monitor practice time and all of these factors as they ramp up.

The other problem being faced by any league hoping to ramp up quickly is that work capacity is extremely specific. You may have noticed this in your own training and how it’s changed since beginning quarantine. If you’re used to doing heavy, short duration barbell workouts, the lightweight kettlebell workouts you are currently doing for 1 hour may have you feeling the residuals for days after.

Thus, with a two month layoff from the rigors of team practice, scrimmage, drills and full contact games, you can reasonably expect a drop off in the work capacity of these athletes.

This other issue is that many factors play into work capacity as well: like travel, stress, diet, sleep, etc. It’s systemic, in other words. Right now, many athletes are not affected by such things, because there is no travel, they can sleep/rest easily, etc. But to all of a sudden take that out from underneath them may spark some issues. This is why it seems to be a good idea to have a sort of “campus” solution, like the one that’s being discussed. Essentially, all teams will be in a quarantined area, playing in the same one or two arenas, and not traveling between cities, arenas, etc. This should help greatly in player health and safety.

Maximum Recoverable Volume (MRV)

Work capacity in large part drives maximum recoverable volume. This is a concept well discussed and reviewed in bodybuilding and muscular hypertrophy, but has applications here as well. Ideally, in my mind, you want your work capacity to be under your maximum recoverable volume— as your MRV is not something you should chronically be pushing.

Example: ‘Player A’ has a work capacity of 16 on-court hours per week, but is being asked to use his 16 hours in 5 days, with 7 days likely to exceed 20 hours. He can recover from this, but he’s created a slight deficit (4 hours) which does not get erased until he has his normal break time to recover from 16 hours. The more frequently that this deficit is pushed, the more you have a likelihood of complications.

There are times in the season where MRV is pushed; namely the playoffs in both sports. Back-to-back games, frequent travel, etc.

Realistically, the athletes in quarantine have not been entirely subject to the same stressors of the season, and in the case of the younger athletes, have a lot more risk associated with returning too soon because of this [in my experience].

Thus, if you have the ability of a 4 week ramp up, you can reasonably expect to modesty raise the work capacity of these athletes. I imagine most organizations have their training staff in contact with the athletes and are already working as hard as possible to leverage their bodies to be prepared for any possible ramp-up scenario.

Positive Outlooks and Concluding Remarks

60 days (the average ‘quarantine time’ as of publication of this blog) is a remarkable amount of time to do a lot of good in the body composition, GPP and structural training aspects of the body. Anyone who has been around athletes who have a very long season, understands that body composition changes greatly during the season. So much so, the first part of the off-season can be getting things back to “homeostasis.” In that sense, this can be thought of like an extended “pit stop.” It’s like a mini off-season within the season, that if used properly, can help “recharge the body armor” when they do find themselves at practice again. Given that NBA and NHL athletes are of rare physical prowess, their ability to “sponge” and reap the benefits of programs designed by the brightest minds in the industry can set them up nicely for the eventual real off-season and next season.

Currently, with my athletes, even though we’ve been unable to work together, we’ve been working very hard on impeccable eating habits, structural balance work, and GPP. The improvements in body composition, as well as the reduced mileage, will have them sitting very nicely when they do return to their respective sports. At the end of the day, no matter how you sugar coat it, it’s very hard to train without the right tools, and it’s hard to prepare for something you are physically unable to in the moment.