For outdoor sports like baseball, football, and soccer, they typically aren’t practiced in the winter. However, if they are, the practices are normally for training, season preparation, and exercise workouts. It can be easy to lose your rhythm when you aren’t playing in a sporting event every weekend or practicing throughout the week. It is not uncommon to see athletes falling into old habits, losing their fitness, and focusing on anything but their sport. Training and gameplay need to happen year-round to prevent yourself from falling into these old habits. In today’s blog, Hoover Met Complex lists some things you should do during the winter.
Indoor Drills
Rather than doing your normal drills outdoors, bring the activities inside. There are several agility drills and form drills that can be useful to keep your shooting or hitting motion fluid. The most common offseason excuse or reason for poor play is ‘being rusty.’ Simple drills that work on technical fixes, routine, and form, will keep your movements ready for the season. Depending on the sport, there are a variety of drills you can exercise. However, no matter the game, you need to work on hand-eye coordination and routine corrections.
Staying in Shape
Being at peak physical fitness will set you apart from both your teammates and your opponents. The first sporting event back from the winter is usually a great takeaway of what you need to fix going into the rest of the season. More often than not, the teams are not at the level of fitness they need to be at to compete at a high level. Train, exercise, and build muscle during the winter to come back stronger and faster than before.
Attend Open Gym Nights
An aspect that is commonly overlooked during the winter and offseason is open gym opportunities. These are a great way to compete with other players and work on fundamental skills that need improvement. Hoover Met Complex offers open gym nights several nights a week to allow players and coaches to work on their sport outside of a regular season.
Improve Your Mental Game
One athletic skill-set that is often overlooked is the player’s mental health. Playing a sport non-stop for months on end can be both physically and mentally draining. Athletes often have a hard time balancing physical strength with mental strength, because they don’t see the importance of mental health if it can’t be measured against others. Players can quickly lose their cool in sporting events if they have a weak mental game, causing trouble for the rest of the team. Take the time offseason to work on your mental health along with your physical health and see the results going into next season.
Compete at Hoover Met Complex This Winter
Hoover Met Complex offers a state-of-the-art facility that gives athletes the chance to train year-round. Our indoor sports complex, The Finley Center, gives competitors the chance to showcase their talents on the big stage through large scale tournaments. With 83,000 square feet of space, it can be transformed to accommodate sporting events, banquets, trade shows, and more. In the Finley Center alone, there are 11 basketball courts or 17 volleyball courts you can use for training. For more information about our facility or how you can train this winter, contact Hoover Met Complex today!
