Strength and Power for Netball: How to Build It

How power is used in netball

Netball looks like a passing game and trains like a jumping game. Nothing in a match lasts long. The court is small, the ball cannot be run with, and the footwork rule means every reception ends in a stop. What that produces is one of the most concentrated stop-start loads in team sport: hundreds of short, maximal efforts inside an hour, with very little of the continuous running that most general fitness programs prepare you for.

Power shows up in four distinct places, and they are worth separating because they are trained differently.

• Jumping for the ball. Rebounds, tips, intercepts and contested holds in the circle. Most of these are reactive and off one leg, from a moving start, with a body next to you. Vertical jump measured off two feet from a standing start is a useful number, but it is not the number the game asks for.
• First-step acceleration. Netball is decided in the first metre. Creating a lead, closing a passing lane, getting a body in front. Nobody on a netball court reaches top speed, so the quality that matters is how much force you can put into the ground in the first two or three steps.
• Deceleration and landing control. This is the one most players under-train and the one that costs them. The footwork rule means you must stop, quickly, from a run, on a hard court, often on one foot while catching. Deceleration loads are higher than acceleration loads, and landing mechanics are directly linked to knee and ankle injury risk in the sport.
• Upper-body power for passes and contests. A flat, fast shoulder pass across the court, a two-handed chest pass under pressure, and the ability to hold a contest at full reach. This is trained, not inherited, and it is routinely neglected in netball programs.

Position changes the mix substantially. Tracking of elite netball match-play with an indoor positioning system found the centre covers the most ground of any position by a clear margin, the wing and defensive mid-court positions sit in the middle, and the goal keeper and goal shooter cover the least. Same sport, same hour, very different physical job. The netball page breaks down what that means position by position.

How to build power for netball

Power is force divided by time. You get more of it by producing more force, or by producing the same force faster. A good netball program does both, in that order, in three layers.

Layer one: the strength base

You cannot express power you do not have. Before jump training does much for you, you need a strength base, and for netball that base is heavily single-leg because the sport is heavily single-leg.

• Bilateral strength for the engine: trap bar deadlift, back or front squat, hip thrust. Three to six reps, moved with intent.
• Single-leg strength for the game: rear-foot elevated split squats, step-ups, single-leg Romanian deadlifts. This is where the transfer to landing and change of direction lives.
• Upper body, pulling first: chin-ups, rows, and pressing for the passing patterns. Two sets of pulling for each set of pressing keeps the shoulder balanced across a season of overhead reaching.

Two sessions a week through the off-season is enough for most club players. Progress the load, not the exercise list.

Layer two: jumping, and the landing that follows

Jump training for netball has to include the coming down, because the coming down is where the injuries happen.

• Land before you leap. Start with drop landings and stick-the-landing drills from a low box, then single-leg versions. The goal is a quiet, controlled landing with the knee tracking over the foot. Noisy landings and knees falling inward are the pattern to fix first.
• Then add the jump. Box jumps, broad jumps with a stuck landing, single-leg bounds, lateral bounds. Low volume, high quality. Ten to twenty good contacts at the start of a session, while you are fresh, beats fifty tired ones.
• Make some of it reactive. Netball jumps are rarely planned. Partner-cue jumps, ball-cue jumps and jumps out of a short shuffle bring the drill closer to the game.

Do this work first in the session, never at the end. Power training done fatigued teaches slow.

Layer three: contrast work, especially in-season

Contrast work pairs a heavy strength movement with an explosive one, for example a heavy set of three trap bar deadlifts, a short rest, then three broad jumps. The heavy set primes the nervous system, and the explosive set expresses it.

It earns its place in-season for a practical reason: it delivers both strength maintenance and power work in one short session, which is often all the time your week has left. Three pairs, three sets each, and you are out in 35 minutes with your strength preserved and your legs still fresh for the weekend.

One important nuance about how hard training should be. A study of movement intensity in elite female netballers found competition was more intense than every training activity measured, and that the closest things to it were practice match-play and match scenarios, while isolated skill and specialist drills sat furthest away. If your only preparation is drills, you are preparing for something less demanding than the game. Some of your week needs to look like the game.

How many calories do you burn playing netball?

The honest answer is a range, and anyone giving you a precise figure is guessing with confidence.

Calorie estimates for sport come from MET values, the standardised energy costs catalogued in the Compendium of Physical Activities. One MET is roughly one kcal per kilogram of bodyweight per hour, and netball sits in the vigorous band, in the region of 7 to 9 METs. The arithmetic is simply METs multiplied by your bodyweight in kilograms multiplied by hours played.

So a 65 kg player, at 8 METs, playing a full 60 minute game, lands near 520 kcal. Change any of the inputs and the answer moves a long way.

Three things drive the number more than anything else:

1. Position. As the tracking data above showed, a centre covers far more ground than a goal keeper or goal shooter, often close to double. That gap is the single biggest factor in the calorie difference between two players in the same match.
2. Minutes actually on court. International netball is four 15 minute quarters. A lot of club and social netball is four 10 or 12 minute quarters, and most players rotate. Sitting a quarter changes the total by around a quarter.
3. How hard the game runs. A tight, high-turnover game against a well-matched side costs far more than a one-sided one, even with identical minutes.

Put realistically, most club players finish a game somewhere between roughly 250 and 550 kcal, and a centre playing a full 60 minutes at pace can push past 600. Treat the number on your watch as a reasonable estimate for tracking trends over a season, not as an accounting figure to eat back.

Training around game day

The week has one fixed point, and it is Saturday. Everything else moves.

• Sunday: Active recovery. Walk, easy swim, mobility. Not rest, and not a session.
• Monday: Full strength session. Heavy work goes here, furthest from the game.
• Tuesday: Club training.
• Wednesday: Short contrast or power session, done by midday. Legs need to be clear by Friday.
• Thursday: Club training. Skills and set pieces.
• Friday: Activation only. A few jumps, some light loaded reps, nothing that creates fatigue.
• Saturday: Game.

The two rules that survive a chaotic week: keep quality high early in the week, and keep the 48 hours before a game clean of anything heavy. If you have a midweek fixture, the Wednesday session is the one that goes. The in-season training guide covers the full framework, including what to do the day after a hard game and how to handle a congested draw.

Across the year the shape is straightforward. The off-season is when you build, with three sessions a week, higher volume and real load progression. The in-season is when you maintain, with one or two short sessions, the same intensity and roughly half the volume. Trying to build strength in the middle of a season usually costs you both the strength and the games.

How Pelaris builds netball programs

Netball is one of the sports in the team sports framework, which means the program is built around your draw rather than around a generic template.

Your fixtures are fixed points. Load your match calendar once, and heavy sessions stay out of the 48 hours before every game. The day after is tagged for active recovery automatically. A midweek fixture reshapes the week around it.

Position shapes the program. A goal shooter’s week is weighted differently to a centre’s, because the physical job is different. Jump and landing volume, running load and upper-body work all shift with your position.

Landing quality gets programmed, not assumed. Deceleration and landing work is part of the plan from the first block rather than something you are told to add yourself, because it is the piece most directly tied to keeping ankles and knees intact across a season.

The plan reads your effort scores. Log a heavy game or a rough week and next week’s volume comes down before it becomes a problem. The methodology library lists the named strength and power systems the program draws from, so you can see what is actually being applied and why.

The habit worth building

Two sessions a week in the off-season, one or two in-season, jumps at the start while you are fresh, and single-leg strength as the backbone of both. Add ten minutes of deliberate landing work to every session and hold it across a whole season. It is the least glamorous part of a netball program and it does more for your availability, your first step and your contest in the circle than anything else you could spend the time on.