Men's Beach Volleyball

Mens beach volleyball is dominating the U.S. as one of the fastest growing sports. The tournaments are getting larger and the prize money is greater than ever before in the sports history. Tod Rogers and Phil Dalhauser dominated the olympics bringing home the Gold while in women's beach volleyball Misty May and Keri Walsh also won gold. The U.S. is starting to dominate the world in volleyball and it shows no signs of slowing down. With more and more collegiate players picking up the beach volleyball game we are seeing a rise in talent and competition is more fierce than ever in the AVP tour. With average height players a dime a dozen the emphasis is now on finding the best blocker possible. With the tallest person in the AVP standing 6'9" you need to have some serious height and put up an excellent block to get anywhere in the AVP today. There isn't a single person under 6 feet tall ranked in the top 50 for the AVP. But there is one that stands 6 feet tall which is very impressive.

Sand Volleyball Workouts

So you want to play beach volleyball in the AVP but you can't get your armpits over the net?
Well, lets look at some workouts you can do so you can learn how to jump higher. Jumping factors in both leg strength and speed which equals power. If you don't have strong legs then you will benefit from strengthening your legs in the gym with weights. You will want to keep reps fairly low because we don't care much about endurance for jumping. Some of the main exercises you will want to do include squats, calf raises and cleans. Now the best way to go about your workout is to do 3 sets where you lower the weight slowly and then go as fast as you can when pushing the weight up.
Now if you already have really strong legs, you aren't going to benefit much more from lifting weights in the gym so you will need to focus more on training those strong leg muscles to be faster. This is done through plyometrics, which are jumping exercises. You will want to do your jumping exercise in sand for 2 reasons. One, you will be playing in the sand so it will transfer over to beach volleyball better. And, 2 because it is much easier on your knees when landing. You want to keep these reps low as well and jump as high as you can on each jump. Some exercises you want to do are jumping at the net 6 times fast (as soon as your feet hit the sand jump again) do 4 sets of six. Then do 4 sets of 6 where you actually let yourself land and adjust before jumping again. Take a chair or something about knee high and sit on it then explode jumping up as high as possible. Do 4 sets of six of this. This will help you squat lower before exploding up to block.

Men's Beach Volleyball

Men's beach volleyball is becoming a very popular sport. Beach volleyball isn't set up the same way as other professional sports and this has it's ups and downs. One major drawback is that beach volleyball doesn't have teams that sign players for set salary's. The way men's beach volleyball is set up, once you qualify by earning a certain amount of points from winning qualifier games you are considered professional. Now the sport is only played with 2 people per team and nobody can substitute in so you have to pick your teammate wisely. You can play with a different partner every tournament if you want. There are no set teammates that you must play with for a certain amount of time. So naturally the 2 best players will want to play with each other and this is the reason for one team winning almost every tournament in the year. This is also the case in women's beach volleyball where misty may and kerri walsh have won almost every tournament for the past couple of years. This kind of makes a monopoly for the winning team because there are no set schedules with different teams, there are just different tournaments almost every weekend. Each tournament pays out quite a bit of money so the number one team gets paid very well while most of the other players struggle to make good money playing a sport professionally. In any other sport in America if you are the 50th best at your sport, you will have a really good paying contract with a team and you won't have to worry about money. The 50th best beach volleyball player will probably end up making about 10 grand playing volleyball throughout the year while the top 2 ranked players will be in the upper 6 figures.