In-season training for high school football is two hard days a week, not four, with the volume cut and the intensity left alone. For a Friday night game that usually lands on Monday and Thursday. You are not building anything new in October. You are holding what August built, and the season itself is already supplying most of your sprinting and all of your conditioning. The week gets smaller. The bar does not get lighter.
Updated September 2026. This question came around again this month, from an athlete asking how many speed days he should keep now that games have started. The honest answer for a one-game-a-week sport is two, and the two most common places to put them are Monday and Thursday. What follows is how we build that week with the football players we see in Ocean Township, and what we take out of it first when the season starts asking for more than the athlete has.
What Comes Out of the Week, and What Stays
Start with the rule, because everything else is an application of it. An in-season program shrinks in volume and shifts toward maintaining what the off-season built. We have said that before on this site, in the questions to ask a performance coach, and it is the single thing most in-season programs get backwards.
Volume is sets, reps, total sprint yardage, minutes of conditioning. That is what comes out. Intensity is how heavy the bar is and how fast you are actually moving. That stays.
The reason is simple. Strength is slow to build and slow to lose. Two heavy sets of a squat will hold what five sets built, and they cost you almost nothing on Friday. Five sets will hold it too, and they will also show up in your legs on Thursday night. So you keep the load and you spend fewer reps under it. An athlete who drops from four sets of five to two sets of three at the same weight is not detraining. He is paying less for the same thing.
What people do instead is drop the weight and keep the reps, because lighter feels like the safe choice in-season. That is the version that actually costs you. Light and high-rep is the most fatiguing combination on the menu and it maintains the least.
Where the Two Days Go in a Friday Week
For a Friday night game, put the hard days on Monday and Thursday. It looks wrong the first time you read it, because Thursday is the day before the game. Here is why it works.
- Monday is far enough from Friday that anything you do has four days to settle. This is the heavier of the two days. Lower body, the main lift, a short set of sprints or jumps first while you are fresh.
- Tuesday and Wednesday belong to practice. Practice is already speed work and conditioning, whether the schedule calls it that or not. Adding your own on top is where in-season athletes get buried.
- Thursday is short, sharp and light on volume. A few jumps or short sprints, one or two heavy but low-rep sets, out the door in under forty minutes. The point is to remind the nervous system what fast and heavy feel like without spending anything.
- Friday is the game.
- Saturday and Sunday are recovery and food and sleep, in that order.
The Thursday session is the one that gets argued about, so be clear about what it is not. It is not a workout. If you leave Thursday feeling like you trained, it was too much. Two or three crisp sets of something heavy, a handful of jumps, done.
If You Play More Than Once a Week
Not every athlete reading this plays Friday nights. Soccer, field hockey and basketball schedules often run two or three games a week, and the math changes.
With two or three competitions in a week, you realistically get one training day, not two. Put it as far from the next game as the schedule allows, keep it to the main lift and a few explosive reps, and let the games carry the conditioning. One honest day is worth more than two rushed ones, and an athlete who tries to keep a two-day plan on a three-game week is just accumulating fatigue with extra steps.
If you are running a fall season into a winter one, the overlap weeks are their own problem and they deserve their own plan.
Your Division Already Sets the Number
Here is where the schedule question meets what we actually sell, and it is worth knowing before the season starts rather than in week four.
Our division programs run two, three or four sessions a week. Division III trains twice, Division II three times, Division I four times. In August, four days is a real option and a lot of athletes use it. In October, the sport is taking two of those slots whether you count them or not, so a four-day division and a full game schedule stacked on top is more than most high school athletes can absorb.
That is not an argument for training less. It is an argument for the number matching the season. Plenty of our athletes sit in a higher division through the summer and step down once games start, then go back up in the winter. The other way to handle it is a session pack, sold in blocks of 10, 30, 50 or 70 sessions, used on the athlete's own schedule. A pack does not care that your week has a Tuesday game in it. You can see how both paths are structured on our services page.
The Number That Tells You It Is Working
In-season, the temptation is to judge the program by how you feel, and how you feel in week six of a season is tired. That is not information.
Use the same retest we use the rest of the year: every three to four weeks, same surface, same start, same clock. If your 10-yard or your 40 is holding through October, the plan is working, because holding is the entire goal of an in-season block. A number that is drifting slower across two retests is telling you the week is too big, not that you need to train harder.
The one thing we would not do is test the day after a game, or the day after a heavy Monday, and then draw a conclusion from it. Same conditions or it is not a retest.
The Week That Goes Wrong
Almost every in-season week that falls apart falls apart the same way. The athlete has a bad game on Friday, decides the answer is more work, and adds a Saturday lift and extra conditioning on Sunday. By Wednesday he is slower in practice than he was the week before, which reads as more evidence that he needs to work harder.
Two weeks of that and the season has the athlete instead of the other way around. If something is genuinely off, the fix is usually in sleep, food and how big the week already is, not in another session. And if something hurts in a way that is not normal training soreness, that gets looked at by someone qualified before any of this matters.
Where to Start
If you are mid-season and the week is not working, we can look at what your schedule actually is before touching the training. We see athletes from across Monmouth County, and the Long Branch training page covers what that looks like for athletes coming from that side of the county. To set up a first session and get the week built around your game day, get in touch.