Why Individualized In-Season Training Continues to Separate Athletes
As the offseason begins to wind down, athletes across all sports transition back into their in-season team structure. For youth hockey players, that usually includes practices, games, and some form of general team off-ice training. At the junior level, resources and access to truly individualized performance training can vary significantly from program to program. Even at the Division I level, where athletes may have access to outstanding facilities and resources, the realities of training an entire roster can make it difficult to provide the degree of individualization that every developing athlete needs.
That leads to one of the most common questions I receive every fall: “If my son is practicing two or three days a week, playing games all weekend, and working out with his team, why does he still need to train at Kaifas Athlete Development?”
It’s a fair question, and after more than twenty-five years of coaching, my answer has remained the same: team development and individual development are not the same thing.
Team practices teach systems, hockey IQ, tactical play, and skills within the structure of the team. Team workouts can build accountability and culture while providing a baseline level of physical preparation for everyone on the roster. All of those things have value. The limitation is that team workouts are designed around the needs of the group, while my responsibility at Kaifas Athlete Development is to maximize the development of the individual athlete.
When 15 or 20 athletes are expected to complete essentially the same workout, some degree of generalization is unavoidable. Those athletes may have completely different strength levels, movement deficiencies, injury histories, mobility restrictions, body compositions, physical maturity, and long-term goals. One athlete may desperately need to add muscle while the athlete standing next to him needs better ankle mobility and acceleration mechanics. Giving both athletes the same training stimulus may satisfy the requirement of completing a workout, but it doesn’t necessarily maximize the development of either athlete.
That distinction is at the center of everything I do at Kaifas Athlete Development. My goal has never been to simply provide workouts. My goal is to create a long-term developmental plan for each athlete. Before deciding what an athlete should do, I determine what that athlete actually needs. From there, training is individually prescribed, measured, progressed, and continually adjusted. I’m looking at where that athlete needs to be this season, next offseason, two years from now, and ultimately what physical qualities will give them the greatest opportunity to reach the highest level their ability can take them.
For some athletes, the priority may still be adding 10 or 15 pounds of functional muscle before they’re physically prepared for junior or Division I hockey. Those athletes need to continue receiving an appropriate hypertrophy and strength stimulus during the season while learning how nutrition, sleep, and recovery support that process. Simply stopping hypertrophy training for eight months and expecting to retain everything built during the offseason isn’t an effective long-term developmental strategy.
For another athlete, additional size may not be the priority at all. We may need to focus much more heavily on ankle mobility and stability, hip function, posture, single-leg strength, acceleration, deceleration, coordination, or overall movement efficiency. Another athlete may need to maintain maximal strength and power. Someone returning from an injury may require an entirely different program. No two athletes have identical needs, and that is precisely why I don’t believe they should all train identically.
One of the biggest misconceptions in hockey is that development occurs during the offseason and the season is simply a time to play. If the physical qualities developed over the summer aren’t appropriately trained throughout the season, however, they begin to decline. Strength, power, speed, mobility, and muscle mass all require continued stimulus. Families invest significant money, time, travel, sacrifice, and emotional energy into offseason development. Allowing those gains to gradually disappear because structured training becomes an afterthought once games begin wastes a significant portion of that investment.
Research supports what I’ve observed throughout my career. A review published in Sports Medicine found that properly programmed resistance training during the competitive season can maintain and, depending on the athlete and programming, continue developing strength and neuromuscular qualities despite the additional demands of practices and competition (Cuthbert et al., 2021). The season doesn’t have to mean the end of physical development. It means the training prescription has to change.
At Kaifas Athlete Development, that is exactly what we do. We titrate training throughout the year rather than turning it on in the summer and shutting it off during the season. Volume, intensity, exercise selection, and frequency are adjusted according to the athlete’s practice schedule, games, tournaments, travel, school demands, physical condition, and recovery. A lighter competition week may give us an opportunity to push development. After a demanding three- or four-game weekend, the priority may shift toward mobility, restoration, and active recovery. The program changes because the athlete’s needs change.
The goal of in-season training isn’t to pile additional stress onto an already under-recovered athlete. It’s to provide the right stimulus at the right time while teaching athletes how to fuel, recover, and physically and mentally reset. During the season, I spend considerably more time educating athletes about nutrition, hydration, sleep, mobility, and recovery. We talk about how to fuel a demanding practice, what needs to happen nutritionally between games during a tournament weekend, how sleep affects recovery, and how athletes can use mobility and active recovery to prepare themselves for the next training or competition.
This is also why I don’t believe in removing meaningful strength training simply because the season begins. Barbells, dumbbells, and other resistance-training methods are tools. The question isn’t whether an athlete should use them in season; the question is how much, how often, and at what intensity. In many situations, overall volume needs to come down while sufficient intensity remains to preserve strength, power, and neuromuscular qualities. The art of coaching is understanding how to provide enough stimulus to create or maintain adaptation without creating unnecessary fatigue that interferes with hockey performance.
Individualized programming becomes even more valuable when injuries occur. Hockey is demanding, and throughout a season we regularly deal with shoulder injuries, concussions, ankle sprains, groin and hip issues, and other acute or overuse problems. Instead of automatically stopping all physical development, training can be modified around the injury and integrated with the athlete’s rehabilitation and return-to-play process when appropriate. Research published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine has also demonstrated that appropriately prescribed strength training can substantially reduce acute and overuse sports injuries, reinforcing why resistance training should be considered part of keeping athletes physically prepared rather than something that disappears when competition begins (Lauersen, Andersen & Andersen, 2018).
Perhaps the greatest validation of this philosophy for me, however, comes from watching athletes follow it over many years. Many of the Division I and professional hockey players I’ve trained began working with me at Kaifas Athlete Development when they were only 12, 13, or 14 years old. They didn’t reach those levels because of one great summer of training. They followed a developmental process year after year.
We maximized their offseasons by aggressively developing strength, speed, power, muscle where appropriate, mobility, and overall athleticism. When their seasons started, we didn’t abandon that work. We titrated it. Training frequency and volume changed, priorities shifted, recovery became more important, and programs evolved around hockey and school—but individualized development continued.
Over several years, that consistency matters tremendously. Instead of repeatedly spending every offseason rebuilding qualities that were allowed to disappear during the previous season, these athletes were able to begin each offseason from a higher starting point. We could build upon the previous year’s development rather than constantly trying to regain it. Those incremental improvements accumulated into meaningful differences in strength, speed, movement quality, durability, and athleticism.
I believe that is one of the reasons so many of those athletes were eventually able to separate themselves from their competition and create opportunities at the junior, Division I, and professional levels. It wasn’t one workout, one summer, or one exercise that made the difference. It was years of structured, measured, individualized development, with the training appropriately adjusted throughout every phase of the competitive calendar.
That’s ultimately what separates the philosophy at Kaifas Athlete Development from simply providing another workout. I’m not interested in checking a box or making an athlete tired for an hour. I’m interested in identifying exactly what that athlete needs at that stage of development, prescribing the appropriate stimulus, measuring the response, and continually adjusting the plan.
The goal is bigger than preparing an athlete for next weekend’s games. The goal is to maximize who that athlete can become over the next five to ten years.
