Beach volleyball fitness information

In recent years beach volleyball has become increasingly popular, regularly covered on television, and even being included as an Olympic sport since 1996.

Watching pros play beach volleyball can make it look deceptively easy, but the truth is that to play beach volleyball, and to play it well, requires not only practice, but also appropriate training.

The key physical attribute is not, as you might suppose, killer abs, but explosive power. Players need a combination of explosive power, vertical jump height, stamina, and speed and agility around the court.

This means that training focuses on lower body and core work, with lots of speed and plyometric work to help develop the explosive power to get up and spike or block.

Traditional strength training will only get you so far, so if you want to excel at this sport it will pay to talk to a coach who has experience developing these types of training programs.

Although you will need a base level of aerobic endurance, power endurance is much more important - you need to be able to get up just as high on the last point of a game as you did on the first.

The other value of a well-designed training program is in reducing the incidence and severity of injury - this is quite an injury prone sport.