Is there a difference between pre-season & in-season training?
We chat to India Parker to find out her thoughts on this.
Polo Fitness: Pre-Season vs In-Season Training
Transcription:
Should you change your program, your training program, through the year. I mean, like with your horses, you're going to start early season and do lots of sets and things like that. And then you're going to build in the one-on-one sessions.
And then once I start to play chukkas and you're playing them three, four times a week, you know, you, you're cutting back on all the other.
Is that the same for us humans as well? You've just basically said what I would say. How you would warm your horse up, is basically what you would do yourself.
So, yes, of course. So, you know, off season. So, you either, you know, whenever you, I mean, most professional players don't really have an off season, but if say you're doing the UK season.
So, during the UK season, you strip your, your sessions down. Look you, depending on how many chukkas or tournament's you're playing each week, you would just be focusing more on the rider recovery.
So, lots of stretching, good warm-ups. And then if you have time, one or two kind of functional based workouts throughout the week.
Pre-season you work that, like you said, you start to build the polo muscles up. So, that's more functional, compound, movements, lots of mobility, lots of cardio. I always, with my clients, I pushed them quite a lot with cardio because you know, if you're playing chukkas and you finish a chukka and you're really out of breath, and then you start to make mistakes, you're tired, your body's weak.
So, actually polo is quite an-aerobics. We do a lot of HITT training and endurance stuff. And then the off season, you can either do one or two things I think. So, most people have sustained one or two injuries throughout the season.
So, this is time to strip everything back, realign any imbalances, give your body some time to recover, focus on your nutrition again, and getting all the micros and macros in for recovery.
And then when that's all done, then you start to build it back up. This is when you would hit your training sessions a lot harder so the intensity, is higher. You've got heavier weights, really strengthening and bulletproofing the body.
And it means we're ready to then slightly change it as you go into pre-season, and then it becomes more function based.
So, yes, you build it up like with your horses, you build it up to game day.
