The game of volleyball is much more than digs and kills — it is about the hard work and preparation in the offseason and practice that leads to results.
Like most teams around the country, the ASU women’s volleyball team begins its workouts in the offseason.
“In the spring we did a ton of interval training,” senior libero Halle Harker said. “You get your heart rate going for a minute straight and then you take a 30-second rest, and then you do that repeatedly for a few circuits.”
One of the most important things the team tries to do with its training exercises is emulate how a game would play out.
“Basically everything volleyball related when it comes to conditioning needs to be fast paced,” Harker said. “If you look at the scientific numbers of a volleyball rally, each rally is about 13 seconds long. So we’ll run a sprint in 13 seconds or we’ll run and touch lines for 14 seconds straight.”
The team will do short sprints, digs or pancakes. Pancakes are drills where the players get the ball up by placing their palms on the ground and allowing the ball bounce off the back of their hands.
Harker said that she believes it is important to work on these types of drills repetitively because they represent situations they will see come game time.
“We obviously aren’t going to run long distances because we don’t sit there and run down a soccer field — we run back and forth to the net a few times,” Harker said. “So I think it's working with your fast twitch muscles and things like that.”
Senior middle blocker Oluoma Okaro said that the team has to work harder than they normally would during the preseason, which lessens the possibility of injury when the season begins.
“We kinda have to wreck our bodies first,” Okaro said. “You’re constantly training, so when it does come to the season, you’re only practicing once a day instead of three times a day and your body can get a little bit more rest, and now it's more elastic.”
To make sure they are prepared for every match, the players take ice baths, use ice patches and NormaTec compressors, all of which help them recover more quickly between workouts.
Head athletic trainer for women's volleyball, Ken McCarty, said that the repetitive training in such an intense sport allows the players' bodies to get used to the specific movements they are doing in the drills.
“One play or rally isn’t going to be more than ten seconds, so you’re not gonna get that kind of recurring set,” McCarty said. “But then you have to do those rallies over a two-hour period so that becomes the endurance part of it.”
McCarty said that from a maintenance standpoint, there is a difference between lifting and training during the offseason compared to fall. During the season, the team will lift typically once a week.
“They’ll have a lifting program that they do and that's more about them staying fit,” McCarty said. “During the summer, they’re going in two or three times a week because that’s more building strength.”
The trainers also created a program that the team performs prior to practice. It includes core activation exercises that get their legs prepped before practice.
“So they have a set of things they do every day before practice,” McCarty said. “Then they use things like NormaTec which is like compression boots that they use to recover.”
Those conditioning exercises help tremendously, but it is the game-like scenarios they work on in practice that serve an important role.
“We do a lot of those drills to prepare us for the game,” Okaro said. “When the game comes and the pressure is already there, we have already prepared for the pressure before.”
The ASU Women’s volleyball program heads to Arlington, Texas this weekend to compete in the UT Arlington Maverick Classic. The tournament begins on Friday where they will battle Lamar University at 3 p.m. followed by a double header on Saturday against Houston Baptist University and the University of Texas at Arlington.
Reach the reporter at klbroder@asu.edu or follow @KellyB1459 on Twitter.
Like State Press Sports on Facebook and follow @statepresssport on Twitter.
