The Overlooked Muscle Groups That Get Exposed in Preseason
Preseason has a way of finding every weak link an athlete has been carrying around all summer. The volume goes up, the rest goes down, and the body starts to reveal what's actually been supporting it or what hasn't. Most athletes come in with decent leg strength and decent upper body strength. What breaks down in those first two-a-day weeks usually isn't the muscles they've been training. It's the ones they haven't.
At the beginning of every fall, we see talented, well-conditioned athletes hit a wall in preseason. Not because they didn't work hard enough during the summer, but because the high-volume, high-intensity demands of preseason camp exposed gaps they didn't know existed. The good news is that most of these gaps are predictable. The same muscle groups get exposed year after year, sport after sport. Here's what to watch for and how to address them before preseason reveals them the hard way.
1. Glutes
Most athletes have done some version of squats or lunges. What most haven't trained is the lateral function of the glute (the glute medius specifically) which is responsible for controlling the knee and hip during single-leg movements like cutting, decelerating, and landing.
When this muscle is weak, the knee collapses inward under fatigue. In a single sprint it's manageable. In the fifteenth rep of a two-a-day practice, it's a recipe for knee pain, IT band problems, and ACL stress.
What to train:Single-leg work, lateral band walks, hip abduction, and any movement that requires the hip to stay stable on one leg under load.
2. The Posterior Chain — Hamstrings and the Low Back
Hamstring strains are one of the most common preseason injuries across football, soccer, and track. They're also one of the most preventable. Most athletes train the quad-dominant movements (squats, leg press, lunges) far more than the posterior chain movements that actually decelerate sprinting and absorb landing forces.
When hamstrings are underprepared for high-speed running volume, they fatigue quickly and lose their ability to protect the knee. Add a low back that hasn't been loaded through full range of motion, and athletes start to compensate with their lumbar spine on every cut, jump, and tackle.
What to train:Romanian deadlifts, Nordic hamstring curls, good mornings, and single-leg hamstring loading before preseason volume ramps up.
3. The Rotator Cuff and Scapular Stabilizers
This one gets overlooked in field sport athletes who think shoulder training is for swimmers and baseball players. But any overhead athletes, quarterbacks, volleyball players, and tennis players are putting significant rotator cuff stress under fatigue. When the small stabilizers of the shoulder can't hold the joint in a strong position late in practice, larger muscles compensate and that's when shoulder impingement and AC joint stress show up.
Scapular stabilizers matter just as much. Athletes who spend hours hunched at a desk all day and then go try to block, throw, or spike with their shoulders aren't moving from a stable base. The shoulder can only perform well if the shoulder blade is positioned well underneath it.
What to train: External rotation work, face pulls, band pull-aparts, and any rowing pattern that reinforces scapular retraction and depression.
4. The Deep Core - Not the "Six-Pack" Muscles
When athletes say they train their core, they usually mean crunches, sit-ups, and maybe some planks. That's not what fails in preseason. What fails is the deep core, the muscles responsible for spinal stability under load, the ones that protect the low back when a 200-pound lineman is moving laterally for the fifth straight hour of two-a-days.
Athletes with weak deep core stability tend to show up in two ways: they either get low back pain that lingers through the first weeks of the season, or their sport-specific movement quality drops significantly under fatigue because they can't maintain position.
What to train: Dead bugs, Pallof presses, suitcase carries, and any anti-rotation or anti-extension core work. The goal is resisting movement, not producing it.
5. The Calves and Foot/Ankle Complex
Turf toe, ankle rolls, plantar fascia issues all spike in the first weeks of preseason. The ankle and foot complex is putting in overtime during high-volume sprint and change-of-direction work, and most athletes have never directly trained it. The calves are often the most undertrained muscle relative to how hard they work in sport.
Stiffness and strength in the ankle directly affects force transfer from the ground up. A weak ankle doesn't just increase injury risk, it leaks power on every push-off and every cut.
What to train: Single-leg calf raises through full range of motion, banded ankle stability work, and foot intrinsic strengthening like towel scrunches and single-leg balance progressions on uneven surfaces.
The Bottom Line
Preseason doesn't create weak spots. It exposes the ones that were already there. The athletes who hold up the best through two-a-days and the opening weeks of the season aren't always the strongest or the fastest. They're the most versatile athletes who spent time in the offseason addressing the gaps everyone else was ignoring.
