I hope last weeks article about „why beach camps are the best“ started to melt away the winter blues with the burning excitement for more summer beach volleyball adventures. Maybe even some of you have been super pro-active and already booked your spots for a TimeOut beach camp. If not, now might be a great time to book. Especially if you think about visiting us at our Porec and Traunsee camps as until the 18th February we are sharing the love by giving 10% off to all couples at these locations. Just drop us a message at [email protected] 

The benefits of weekly training

But back to the topic at hand. Obviously leaving the world behind you for a couple of days and placing yourself in the perfect bubble of beach volleyball and holiday vibes is hard to beat. However, it is not possible to live consistently in that holiday mode, unfortunately this bills have to somehow be paid. But, we can bring part of that joy from the beach camps home with us by doing weekly trainings sessions.

Potentially, weekly trainings can help you build and strengthen your environment by using beach training as the positive element to your hobby section. So when considering your normal daily and weekly grind, compared to camps, weekly trainings allow you a better balance of your environment home, work and hobby, which maybe you remember me talking about the importance of environment in the previous article „How to build your system„. 

As a quick recap, we try to look at the balance of Home/Work/Hobby. It is vital that at least 1 of the 3 segments should bring positive emotions into your life on a daily basis. A successful environment should be as simple as possible so it can stay as consistent as possible. This is where a weekly trainings come into their strength by being able to give you a fixed point ever week where you can build up with excitement for training; while keeping the demand of time and responsibility low (you have to love a win-win). Once you arrive, shutting out the rest of the world for those solemn 2 hours of training, competing and trying to improve. Even just the physical exertion from running and jumping in the sand will also reward you with that much addictive feel good dopamine boost.

Is once a week enough?

A study out of George Washington University, published in the January 9, 2017 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association found that weekend-only exercisers reap the same benefits as those who work out five days a week.

What they found out is if you can only get to exercise on Saturdays and Sundays. But you put in your weekly recommended 150 minutes (2 ½ hours) of moderate exercise, or just 75 minutes (1 hour 15) of intense exercise during that time, you’re good to go! You’re likely to add almost as many years to your life, and the proverbial “life to your years,” as someone who exercises all week long. 

This new research should make you feel a whole lot better about spending money to only exercises once a week. Obviously, weekly trainings are planned as 2 hour sessions, so including a nice warm up, there is maybe 1 ½ hours (90 mintues) where as long as you putting in a good amount of effort and intensity, then you’re doing good things for your health.

Your weakness will limit your growth no matter how big your strengths are

We talked last time about some of the supported evidence from sports science around the effects of learning and how travelling for a beach camp is a perfect catalyst to get your brain super-charged to learn. I also spoke about with learning new techniques and ideas your neurons need to be activated many times to become stronger and more efficient, it is crucial to repeatedly activate them.

So, if we consider that beach camps are a great way to jump start or get the ball rolling in terms of your improvement because of a high volume, high intensity environment. What weekly trainings do is provide you the environment to work on the small continuous improvements and maybe more importantly make sure that, the improvements made on beach camps are not lost. This reminds me a lot of the often spoken about 80:20 rule.

It takes 20% of the time to make the initial 80% improvement, but after that it takes 80% of the time to get the last 20% of improvement.

So, weekly training are great because they really allow players to experience specific game aspects in an environment designed to take the time to improve there players individual strengths and weaknesses. More so, sometimes to improve your skills you just need to be extra motivated by competing against others, nothing makes your feel better and hearth pump faster than healthy competition. The adrenaline you get by playing against another team and fighting it out on the scoreboard. Not to forget the things you learn by facing different opponents and playing with different partners, all with different styles of play… that’s unique.

Maybe you think you’re really good at something, right? And maybe you are. But don’t let your talent limit you. Beach volleyball demands you to be a complete player that knows how to serve, pass, set and attack. Think which one of these fundamentals is the one you’re worst at, because that is what you need to improve first. And it’s also what your opponent is looking for, in order to beat you. This is also where step 3 of „How to build your system“ – Not doing it alone comes into play.  „If you want to progress as quickly as possible then find a coach who can give you the feedback necessary to discourage bad habits while developing good habits.“

So, if you want the time and attention to find solutions and improving your weaknesses with help from our coaches, then check out the new weekly training schedule below