COACHES MANUAL

Chapter X - Basic Physical Conditioning
Chapter X
Basic Physical Conditioning
by Mr. Phillipe Blain, President of Coaches Commission
Volleyball always requires technical, physical and mental
skills.
Our job, as a coach is to study our activity for clarifying
the working axis.
Physical training doesn’t escape this rule.
The internal logic of Volleyball is to make sure that the
ball falls down in the opponent court as well as to avoid
the ball falling in our own court. Tools at our disposal
are jumping, hitting, running as well as falling.
Actions are intensive, discontinuous and short,
information handling is determined from problems
with rhythm and timing.
It is from these sport requirements that we are going
to form and plan physical training.
Main axis in physical training in
Volleyball
1. Priority Axis
The tools that we mentioned in the previous paragraph
are all connected to co-ordination. This specific coordination
is the Volleyball player’s final goal. Any
physical training should incorporate components of
co-ordination in addition to being general, oriented or
specific. All parts of training are suspended from this
logic. They will be tools serving this target.
––
For instance we prefer a strengthening work which
uses ground support more than strengthening by
machines.
––
Endurance development will include ground support
forms close to speciality (shuttle running forward,
back and lateral) more than working only based on
athletic running.
As demonstrated by analysis of Volleyball activity, almost
all specific movements are made with high speed or
maximal speed. The action times are very short (5 or 10
seconds). So it is a “power/speed” activity. Any significant
progress goes through permanent request of these two
components, simultaneously or successively.
We have to work an intra-muscular co-ordination: the
strength and an inter-muscular co-ordination: speed.
Combination modes proposed to the coach to organise
training sessions are almost unlimited and this potential
diversity allows for covering all training axis as required
by Volleyball.
The Planning
For young players, co-ordination components learning, on
all types, make up quite exclusive axis of learning work.
Strength working is present by sheathing of the
abdominal belt and back spine axis. It aims both at
muscular strengthening and proprioception (pelvis
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