Every spring, the same thing happens.
Season starts, the schedule fills up, and training gets put on hold. “He’s playing every day — he doesn’t need to lift right now.” We hear it from families every year. And every year, we watch what happens next.
If your athlete has been training through the off-season, he goes into opening day feeling it. The bat is popping, the arm is whippy, he’s fast and reactive — there’s a twitchiness to his movement that’s been built over months of consistent work. Then a few weeks into the season, something shifts. He’s putting in the same effort — games, practice, bullpens — but the output starts to dip. Fastballs aren’t as heavy. Balls aren’t jumping off the bat the way they did in March. His legs feel like they’re working harder for less.
By mid-May, it compounds:
- Legs feel dead. Sprint times slow down.
- Soreness that used to clear up in a day lingers for three or four.
- Mechanics start breaking down late in games — not because of skill, but because of fatigue.
That’s not a slump. That’s de-training. And it’s completely preventable.
The Season Is Where Off-Season Gains Go to Die
Games and practice train and showcase skill. But they don’t maintain or develop the physical qualities that sustain performance and keep the body resilient. Without that maintenance, detraining sets in — and with it, degradation of the musculotendon tissue that leads to muscle strains and connective tissue injuries.
The season isn’t necessarily the most physically demanding part of the year in terms of training load — but it’s absolutely the most vital. We want to maintain neural and tissue capacity throughout. This is how athletes actually improve as the year goes on — their bodies and nervous systems have been trained to absorb and adapt to competitive stress, not just survive it.
Weeks of same-side rotation, repetitive throwing (with extended bouts of inactivity), and school stress create imbalances that compound over time. The athletes who feel “put together” in May and June aren’t just talented. They have a plan.
What Happens to the Body When Training Stops
Most families assume that stopping training during the season simply “freezes” an athlete’s development — that you can pick back up where you left off when it’s over. The research says otherwise.
Dr. Keith Baar, a leading connective tissue researcher at UC Davis who has worked with the Denver Broncos, USA Track & Field, and multiple professional soccer clubs, has shown that tendons and ligaments require consistent mechanical loading to maintain their structure and function. When that loading stops — even briefly — the tissue begins to degrade.
In as little as 10 days without proper loading stimulus, tendon collagen synthesis drops by up to 50%. That means the very tissue responsible for transferring force from muscle to bone — the tissue that drives velocity, power, sprint speed, and reactive strength — is actively breaking down between games.
This isn’t a theoretical risk. It’s a structural one. A tendon that isn’t being loaded properly becomes less compliant near the muscle. When that happens, the muscle itself has to absorb forces it normally wouldn’t — and that’s when obliques get strained, hamstrings get pulled, and arm injuries start accumulating over the back half of the season.
The performance drop is part of the same story. Tendons aren’t just connective tissue — they’re force transmitters. When tendon health declines, so does the efficiency of every explosive movement your athlete makes: first-step quickness, rotational power off the back hip, arm speed through the zone. What looks like a “slump” is often structural degradation in disguise.
How We Handle In-Season at PSP
This is where we want to be clear about something important: in-season at PSP is not a watered-down version of the off-season. We don’t simply cut the program in half and coast. What we run is a highly specialized, deliberately designed in-season system — built around the specific demands of a baseball season and the specific athlete living through it.
Athletes who have trained hard all off-season come into the season with a high training capacity. That’s an asset we use, not something we back away from. The goal isn’t to survive the season — it’s to maintain and even continue developing the physical qualities that make your athlete dangerous at the plate, on the mound, and in the field.
Two High-Intensity, Low-Volume Training Days Per Week
Twice a week, built entirely around the game schedule, your athlete trains at high intent. These sessions are short, purposeful, and focused on the qualities that directly drive performance: strength, power, and speed.
The key is how we train, not just how much. In-season, we prioritize methods that produce a powerful training stimulus with minimal tissue damage and inflammation — so your athlete can train hard and still perform two days later. That means partial range of motion movements, concentric-only loading, overcoming isometrics, loaded and long-duration ISO holds, and specialized plyometrics. These aren’t shortcuts. They’re precision tools that allow us to maintain and develop strength and power without the recovery cost of traditional high-volume training.
Weekly exposures to low-volume speed and sprint work keep the nervous system sharp and reactive. This matters for every position — a player who hasn’t sprinted with intent in six weeks isn’t going to run the bases or track a fly ball the same way.
Structured Recovery and Mobility Days
Between training sessions, athletes have structured in-house and remote recovery and mobility days. These aren’t optional rest days — they’re a programmed part of the system. Dr. Baar’s research reinforces what we’ve always known: connective tissue needs continued exposure to low-level stress to stay healthy. Complete rest doesn’t maintain tendons — it allows them to degrade. These sessions keep the tissue responsive, the joints mobile, and the body ready for the next high-output day.
Daily Hygiene Routines
Every PSP athlete in-season is equipped with daily routines they can do on their own — before practice, after games, at home. Hip and spine mobility, arm care, soft tissue work. Short, targeted, and consistent. These aren’t extra credit. They’re the connective tissue between everything else we do, and they’re what separates athletes who stay healthy all season from those who start breaking down in May.
Gameday Prep and Pitcher Arm Care
For athletes who want an edge on performance days, we build gameday preparatory lifts designed to potentiate the nervous system — short, targeted sessions that prime the body to move fast and express power when it counts.
For pitchers, post-outing arm care is programmed the day after every start or high-effort bullpen. This is where Baar’s work is most directly applied: the tissue needs intelligent loading between outings — not rest, and not more throwing — to stay structurally sound across a full season of high-velocity work.
The PSP Recovery Room and Full-Season Monitoring
In-season success isn’t just about what happens in training sessions. We monitor nutrition, sleep, and hydration throughout the season — because an athlete who is under-fueled and under-recovered can’t express the work he’s put in, no matter how well the program is designed.
Athletes also have access to the PSP recovery room, where we use PEMF therapy, red light therapy, shockwave therapy, e-stim, and compression arm sleeves and leg boots to keep the body fresh and address soft-tissue and inflammatory issues before they become something bigger. Most programs wait for injuries to happen. We build the infrastructure to prevent them.
Your athlete should leave every week feeling better than he arrived — sharper, more mobile, more ready. If the season is wearing him down instead of building him up, something is missing from the plan.
A Note on Pitchers
If your son is a pitcher, in-season training isn’t optional — it might be more important for him than anyone else on the roster.
Here’s why: pitching is one of the most tissue-demanding movements in sport. Every outing places high-velocity stress on the same structures — the shoulder tendons, the UCL, the scapular stabilizers, the entire kinetic chain from the hip through the fingertips. Those structures aren’t being maintained by pitching itself. They’re being spent by it.
Dr. Baar’s research is especially relevant here. Tendons adapt to the specific loads placed on them — but only when those loads are applied consistently and intelligently. A pitcher who throws hard every fifth day without any supportive loading in between is asking his connective tissue to absorb enormous forces without the structural maintenance to back it up. Over a 14-week season, that’s a recipe for breakdown — not because of overuse, but because of under-preparation between outings.
His legs drive the delivery. His trunk controls deceleration. His scap and upper back support the arm through high-stress reps every week. When any of those links weaken over the course of the season, the arm compensates — and that’s when velocity drops and injuries happen.
We build pitcher schedules individually around outings, bullpens, and recovery days. The key isn’t more lifting — it’s the right work at the right time.
The Real Cost of Stopping
The off-season isn’t free. Your family invested months of early mornings, committed schedules, and real money into building your athlete’s foundation. Pausing for three months doesn’t just “freeze” those gains — the season actively erodes them.
Every week without a maintenance plan, your athlete loses ground — not just in the weight room, but at the tissue level. The tendons and ligaments that took months of consistent training to build up begin degrading within days of stopping. The muscles built to drive his performance have less structural support behind every swing, sprint, and throw.
The best version of your athlete in June should be close to the best version in March. That only happens with a plan.