Frequency vs Volume
I often get asked how many times you should do a drill in practice, and the thing is there is no magic number of reps, and what I would argue is that how frequently you do a drill is more important than the volume at any one practice. In fact if you do a drill for too long in practice the drill will go stale (they stop getting better and actually get worse after a certain number of reps).
Certain drills may have a time and place during a certain time of year, but then there’s stuff like pole runs that could be a part of every single practice. At Apex our athletes do 3-5 pole runs every practice. That means an athlete will do 390-660 total pole runs at the end of the year. I often get compliments from coaches on how well my athletes run, is there really a question on why? The frequency with which we do certain drills allows our athletes to continually work on various skills throughout the year and reach a high yearly volume by focusing on frequency.
Now there are drills that you may rotate in, but how much can a drill help if you only do it twice in a month? Will this drill make any impact? If you are going to improve technique or build specific strength you will have to do that drill consistently over the course of at le
ast a season. So that athlete that does 50 pole runs in a practice will not make as much progress as someone who does pole runs more frequently and hits a total number like 600. The other thing is when you hit too high a volume of reps in a single session the quality of the drill goes down, and when considering that we are doing drills to improve technique, it does no good to just get poor reps in. Once a drill begins to go stale, move on! Frequency beats Volume!
