Key Takeaways

  • Rest first. A couple of weeks off after the season does no harm. The research shows fitness starts to slip once time off runs past 2 to 4 weeks.
  • Fitness goes first, strength lasts longest. Aerobic fitness drops fastest, speed and power next, and strength holds on longest.
  • The minimum is smaller than you think. In the research, one strength session a week held strength, and two shorter, harder fitness sessions held endurance.
  • Easy running on its own doesn’t protect your speed. Short sprints and hard intervals do more than long slow runs.
  • Hamstring gains fade fast. Some of the benefit from Nordics was gone within two weeks of stopping. A little goes a long way.

Most GAA players either stop completely when the season ends, or keep flogging themselves because they’re afraid of losing what they built. Neither works that well. The off-season is where you recover properly, fix what’s been nagging you, and build the strength and speed you’ll carry into next year.

We’ll cover five things:

  1. When your off-season actually is
  2. How long to rest
  3. What you lose, and how fast
  4. The minimum that holds it
  5. How to use the rest of the off-season to build

When Is Your Off-Season?

Under the split season, it depends on who you play for.

  • County players finished in July at the latest this year, with the All-Ireland finals on 19 and 26 July. Then the club season takes over, and county teams can return to collective training from 20 November 2026.
  • Club players finish when the championship does, anywhere from August to December, and are usually back in January.

For a lot of players the gap is tiny. In the GPA’s 2025 survey, 83% of inter-county players had less than two weeks’ rest between the county and club seasons (GPA, 2025). The GAA and GPA’s own policy recommends a minimum six-week break for most players.

So the first question is how much time you actually have. The plan changes with it.

How Long to Rest

Take the first week or two off properly. Walk, swim, play something else, sleep. Research across the general population suggests losses only start once time off runs past about 2 to 4 weeks (Spiering et al., 2021). In soccer, players who took 2 weeks off and then 4 weeks of moderate training came back with their sprint and jump performance unchanged (Requena et al., 2017).

Professional rugby players describe their off-season in three stages: decompress, detach, then prepare (Mellalieu et al., 2023). The younger players were the ones most at risk from not resting enough. That matches what we see in GAA. The players who don’t switch off tend to be the ones carrying niggles into January.

Which brings us to the other job for those first weeks. If something has been sore all season, this is the time to get it looked at. A physio can assess it while there’s no game at the weekend to rush back for.

What You Lose, and How Fast

Not everything goes at the same rate:

  • Aerobic fitness goes first. Across 12 soccer studies, the off-season caused large drops in aerobic fitness, a moderate drop in sprint speed and small to moderate drops in power (Silva et al., 2016).
  • Strength goes slowest. It holds on far longer than fitness does (Mujika and Padilla, 2000).
  • Easy running doesn’t protect speed. Players who did only low-intensity runs over the off-season still lost jump height, and their 10 m sprint slowed from 1.74 to 1.79 s (Koundourakis et al., 2014).
  • Hamstring changes fade quickly. After a Nordic programme, the gains in muscle fascicle length, one of the protective changes, were back to baseline within two weeks of stopping (Presland et al., 2018). Eccentric strength itself held for at least 4 weeks.

None of this is a disaster. It all comes back. But the players who keep a small amount going come back quicker and with less risk. The GAA’s own guidelines note that players are at increased risk of injury when returning to training after a lay-off, including the off-season.

The Minimum That Holds It

This is the part most off-season plans skip. If you only want to hold what you have, the dose is small:

  • Strength: one session a week, one hard set per exercise, kept strength for up to 32 weeks in the research, as long as the weights stayed heavy (Spiering et al., 2021). In pro soccer, one strength session a week held both strength and 40 m sprint time over 12 weeks. One session every second week lost both (Rønnestad et al., 2011).
  • Fitness: two sessions a week held endurance, even with each session cut by a third to two thirds, as long as the intensity stayed high (Spiering et al., 2021).
  • Speed: the research is thin here. What we do know is that easy running alone didn’t protect it, and short hard work did better (Liu et al., 2024). We keep a handful of short sprints in every week.

Put that together and a holding week is about 90 minutes:

  • One gym session. Squat or trap-bar deadlift, a single-leg exercise, Nordics and a push and pull. Heavy, a couple of sets each, done in 40 minutes.
  • One pitch session. A few short sprints first, fully recovered, then hard intervals: something like 4 or 5 efforts of a few minutes each.

That’s it. It won’t make you fitter. It will stop you going backwards while you rest the head.

Using the Rest of the Off-Season to Build

If you’ve more than 6 weeks before team training, there’s time to do more than hold. This is the best window of the year to build strength and speed, because there’s no match at the weekend to recover for.

Build strength

Two or three gym sessions a week, with more volume than you’d manage in-season. This is where the strength you carry into the league gets built. Our strength training guide covers the lifts and the loading in detail.

We want steady progress over the weeks. We don’t want the first week back to be the hardest session of the year, because the soreness costs you the next three sessions.

Build speed

Speed goes in from the start, not in pre-season. Short accelerations at the start of your gym sessions, and a couple of short sprint sessions a week, with flying sprints coming in as the weeks go on. Our speed training guide sets out the volumes.

Keep it short and fully recovered. Long runs have their place, but they don’t make you faster, and the research above shows they don’t hold your speed either.

The off-season is when you’ve time for the unglamorous stuff: single-leg strength, hamstrings at length, landing well, and whatever rehab you’ve been putting off. For camogie and ladies football players, landing and knee work get extra attention. Our camogie strength training guide covers why.

How it might look

  • Weeks 1 to 2: rest. Stay active, do something different, get any niggles assessed.
  • Weeks 3 to 5: build. Two or three gym sessions, sprints at the start of each, one hard fitness session.
  • Week 6: ease off. Less of everything, so it lands.
  • Weeks 7 onwards: build again, heavier and faster, until pre-season.

When your first game is about 8 weeks away, you’re into pre-season. Our pre-season training guide takes it from there.

If you only get a couple of weeks

A lot of players go straight from county to club or club to county. If that’s you, the rest matters more than the programme. Take a week or two off and do the holding week above until team training starts. Don’t try to squeeze a full build into a gap that doesn’t have room for it.

Frequently Asked Questions

How long should the GAA off-season be? The GAA and GPA recommend a minimum six-week break between seasons for most players. Within that, a week or two of proper rest, then some light training, keeps you from losing much.

Should I rest completely in the off-season? For the first week or two, yes, if you want to. Beyond about 2 to 4 weeks with nothing, fitness starts to slip. A small amount of training from then on holds most of it.

What’s the minimum training to keep my fitness? One heavy gym session and one hard pitch session a week, about 90 minutes in total. That’s based on research that held strength with one session a week and endurance with two shorter, harder sessions.

Should I do long runs in the off-season? Some easy running is fine for the head and the legs. But on its own it didn’t protect speed or power in the research. Short sprints and hard intervals do more of the job.

Can I do an off-season programme without a gym? Yes. Split squats, single-leg work, Nordics with a partner holding your ankles, jumps, hops and short sprints cover most of it. It’s harder to keep building strength without weights, but it holds well.

Want an Off-Season Plan Done for You?

If you’d rather follow a plan than build one, the Off-Season Pack is 8 weeks for October and November: recover from the season first, then rebuild strength, 2 and then 3 sessions a week in the OHP app.

If you’d rather have it written around your position, your injuries and when your season actually ends, that’s what Custom Programming does.

References

  1. GAA. Guidelines for Appropriate and Safe Training for Gaelic Games. 2018.
  2. Gaelic Players Association. Split season support, but work required on season length. 2025.
  3. Koundourakis NE, et al. PLoS One. 2014. PMID 24586293.
  4. Liu, et al. 2024. PMID 38455432.
  5. Mellalieu SD, et al. 2023. PMID 36987513.
  6. Mujika I, Padilla S. Detraining: loss of training-induced physiological and performance adaptations. Part II. Sports Med. 2000. PMID 10999420.
  7. Presland JD, et al. Scand J Med Sci Sports. 2018. PMID 29572976.
  8. Requena B, et al. 2017. PMID 27438062.
  9. Rønnestad BR, et al. 2011. PMID 21873897.
  10. Silva JR, et al. The effect of the off-season on physical fitness in soccer players: a systematic review. 2016. PMID 26530720.
  11. Spiering BA, et al. Maintaining physical performance: the minimal dose of exercise needed to preserve endurance and strength over time. J Strength Cond Res. 2021. PMID 33629972.