Kari Gibb/MDN Members of the MSU football team working on sprint speed and dynamic fast twitch fiber development in the off season at the ‘Dome’ in preparation for the 2024-2025 season

As the school calendar year comes to a close, most would attribute the change in weather, along with the change in daily tasks to vacation time. The term has been called ‘Summer Vacation’ at one point in the past. Even the recent term ‘Summer Break’ implies time off. For athletes at the high school and collegiate level, the term ‘Vacation’ or ‘Break’ is now swapped with the term ‘Training Cycle’ instead.

“Off-season training cycles vary to a large degree depending on the sport in college athletics. For example; our football team has two rather large off-season mesocycles; the first part of Spring semester that is roughly 8-9 weeks long leading into Spring Ball and the Summer which is roughly the same length leading into Fall Camp,” said Minot State University (MSU) Director of Human Performance, Caleb Heilman. “These off-season cycles give us an opportunity to map things out as we see fit and really try to focus on developing the physical qualities needed for their roster.”

With MSU men involved in eight sports and women in nine, played in three distinct seasons- the list is fluid when it comes to training cycles and ‘In’ versus ‘Off’ season.

“By contrast; our hockey teams and cross country teams spend almost the entire academic year in-season. We get a very short period on the front end of the Fall Semester to help prepare them for their competitive season, but then shift quickly into an in-season prescription,” said Heilman. “The key here is to try and identify different times of the year/competitive season to be slightly more aggressive and try to make some progress. Otherwise, a majority of exercise prescriptions are complementary and designed to facilitate recovery and keep the athlete available for the team/individual’s next competition.”

When the lines blur between ‘In Season’ and ‘Out of Season’ for athletes, the focus tends to shift into a more well rounded and balanced process of attack in the training cycles.

“Some may term what we do as a “conjugate method” because we are touching on multiple physical qualities during a training session or cycle,” said Heilman. “We do focus our efforts more acutely during off-season training depending on what we determine an individual, group, or roster might need from us. If I had to prioritize this; athleticism is our first priority.”

When talking about athleticism, there are many views on what that might mean. In the 80s and 90s the catch phrase was ‘Bigger, Faster, Stronger’ and the cycles of working out focused on each of those areas in a silo. Things have progressed since those days and the term athleticism for many, including Heilman is; “The ability to display the movement competency necessary to meet specific physical demands and project variable amounts of force in variable planes of motion within that framework.”

The days of doing isolated power lifting moves like bench press, squat and deadlift for eight or nine weeks combined with eating as large amounts of protein as possible to gain large amounts of muscle mass- then transitioning to sprint work for another ten weeks in preparation for a season of sports has been reworked.

“[The] question regarding mass; it typically isn’t a priority for us as it is simply a byproduct of consistent and effective training paired with consistent and effective nutrition strategy,” said Heilman. “Most of our athletes, if they are consuming the right foods in the right quantities, add a significant amount of muscle mass during their 4-5 years with us. Of course, there are some sports that adding fat free mass (FFM) is more important to than others, but I wouldn’t say that we dedicate any specific training cycles to doing just that.”

As seen with the recent success of Minot High 2024 senior, Maicee Burke – a four sport athlete with 20 varsity letters over her high school tenure, athleticism can and will cross the boundaries of sports and seasons when planned and executed in connection with the follow on sport / season.

“Strength and power development along with improvements in movement competency is really the golden ticket for athletes in field and court sports,” said Heilman. “If we can “move the needle” in these physical attributes with all of our athletes we know that we’ll not only be increasing their availability (injury reduction), but also improving their abilities to perform their role at a high level.”

While the training during a season and the training when not in a season has become more consistently similar, there are still some variations at play.

“As previously mentioned; or primary focus in-season is to keep our athletes available to their team for competition. Our movements and exercise selection don’t change much with our in-season prescriptions, but our volume and intensity certainly does,” said Heilman. “The goal is to prescribe interventions that promote soft tissue health and movement competency while maintaining strength/power outputs that were developed during our off-season training cycles.”

Chief of Sport Development / GM at Utah Olympic Legacy Park, Luke Bodensteiner, who was an olympic athlete and has worked with the US Ski and Snowboard team defined the difference between sprint athletes and distance athletes by the ratio of fast twitch cell fiber compared to the slow twitch cell fiber that an person is genetically born with.

“The team [US Olympic Ski teams] would take a core sample from the thigh of the athletes and look at that under the microscope to determine the ratios of cell fiber in question,” said Bodensteiner. “When mine was tested, I was 35% fast and 65% slow and that made me a sprinter. One of my friends was 20% fast and 80% slow and that put him in the distance events on the cross country ski team.”

How does MSU work this into their training systems?

“First, we don’t have any methods to determine the “genetic ratio” of muscle fiber types, but we do use testing methods to give us some insight as to how “twitchy” an athlete is,” said Heilman. “We do power and strength testing in some capacity with all of our athletes to help us determine where they might sit on the force/velocity spectrum. This could be as simple as daily testing of their vertical jump or weekly tracking of acceleration/speed metrics. We’re always trying to get as much objective information as possible to help us best identify the needs of each individual/roster, but with just two full time employees and no sports science team in house we need to keep it simple. I will say that our primary goal is to facilitate hypertrophy of the fast twitch muscle fibers with all of our athletes. We believe that if we’re doing that, the “slow twitch” groups will come along for the ride. I believe the commonly used term for this strategy is “raising the floor by raising the ceiling.”

When discussing the availability of athletes at MSU for the summer cycle, there was nothing set in stone.

“As a Division 2 institution we can’t host any mandatory training sessions during the Summer months. Anyone who is here and training on campus is doing so voluntarily,” said Heilman. “Most of our athletes go home for at least a portion of the summer to spend time with their families / friends, work jobs to save some money for the coming academic year, and either train from the remote programs we send them or on their own.”

The general idea is to wish everyone a wonderful ‘Summer Training Cycle’ and see you soon.