how esports players train during the off season (October 2026)

How esports players train during the off season comes down to four blocks: mechanical drills and aim work, VOD review, physical conditioning, and genuine rest. The team schedule that dictates your day in-season disappears, so the off-season is the one window where a player can actually choose what to fix before the next split starts.

That freedom cuts both ways. Reddit threads on r/leagueoflegends put off-season pro hours anywhere from close to zero up to around 40 hours a week, depending mostly on the player’s own choices. Below is how those hours are usually spent, and how to build a version that fits your tier.

Updated for October 2026

How Esports Players Train During the Off-Season

Off-season training is the self-directed block of practice, review, fitness and recovery that esports players run after one competitive season ends and before the next begins. Team-mandated scrims and bootcamps stop, but patch preparation, roster movement and injury recovery keep going.

It works by swapping schedule pressure for self-managed blocks. Mechanical drills and aim training usually run in the morning, solo play and VOD review in the afternoon, conditioning and wind-down in the evening. Every block attaches to a specific, measurable goal for the coming season.

Five goals show up again and again:

• Hold mechanics steady so nothing decays during the break.
• Fix named weaknesses instead of grinding the same comfortable routine.
• Study patches and build new strategies before opponents do.
• Reconnect with teammates who may need a chemistry reset after months apart.
• Recover physical and mental debt built up across a full season.

What Is the Goal of Off-Season Training?

The goal is measurable improvement on one or two specific skills, plus a body and head that can handle the next season. Players shift from tournament urgency to deliberate practice: fewer hours, more attention per hour.

In-season, a player optimises for the next match. Off-season, a player optimises for the next season. That is the whole mental switch, and players who skip it usually end up doing eight hours of queueing with nothing to show for it.

How to Build an Off-Season Training Schedule

Build the schedule in four steps: assess honestly, pick a workload you can sustain for six weeks, split it across the training types that matter, and protect recovery days in writing before you start.

Step 1: Assess the last season with footage, not memory

Pull ten of your own losses from recent tournaments and label each one. You are looking for patterns, not highlights: how often you lost first contact, how often a timeout was called, how often you were out of position after a rotation.

Step 2: Choose one or two priorities, not seven

Three or more priorities means none of them get enough sessions to move. A common off-season goal set is mechanical consistency plus one role or map weakness, with everything else marked as maintenance.

Step 3: Split the week across four blocks

A workable split for most semi-pro and amateur players: mechanical practice four to five days, VOD review three to four days, team or stack play two to three days, conditioning three times. Whatever you choose, review usually delivers more per hour than raw queue volume.

Step 4: Lock in recovery days before you need them

Put the rest days in the calendar when you plan the week, not after a bad session. Most players who blow up in the off-season skipped rest because the schedule had no boss telling them to stop.

Compare the three common off-season block types like this:

Block	Weekly hours	Focus	Who it fits
Lighter maintenance	5-15 hrs	Warm-up routines, low-intensity ranked, review, fitness	Unsigned players, players rehabbing injury or burnout
Focused development	15-30 hrs	Targeted aim drills, VOD study, patch adaptation, one skill goal	Semi-pros and amateurs building without a team schedule
Pre-season ramp	30-40+ hrs	Team scrims, structured review, role drills, match simulation	Contracted pros in the final stretch before a new split

Which Skills Should Esports Players Practice?

Players work on seven skill areas, and the useful part is that nearly every one of them has a number attached to it.

Mechanical skill

Raw execution: flicking, tracking, micro-adjustments, first-shot accuracy, crosshair placement. Measure it in aim trainer scenarios or a custom map with a known score, tested weekly under identical settings.

Decision-making

Whether the right call was made in the first five seconds after contact. Measure it by reviewing VOD and counting how often you identified the correct play before the round turned.

Game knowledge

Lineups, timings, utility economies, agent or hero matchups. Measure it with a written checklist per map or round type, tested through aimless or utility drills rather than real matches.

Map and roster preparation

Timing a rotation, holding a site, coordinating a smoke. Measure it in scrim rounds where your team reaches the intended position with the intended utility intact.

Adaptability

The off-season is when patches move the meta most. Measure it by re-testing the same drills two weeks after a patch and recording what changed.

Communication

Callouts that arrive early enough to be useful. Measure it in team scrims by asking teammates, after the block, which call was too late.

Review of your own tournaments

The skill most players skip. Measure it by rounds reviewed per week rather than hours watched, since passive watching changes almost nothing.

How Much Individual Practice Is Enough?

Roughly 15 to 25 focused hours a week is the useful ceiling for most players in the break. In-season, published figures put contracted professionals at 6 to 10 hours a day, split between individual skill work and six to eight hours of team scrimming. Off-season, those same players report anywhere from nearly nothing to about 40 hours a week.

The gap between those two numbers is not motivation. It is structure. When a team supplies a schedule, a coach and five teammates, the hours add up. Without that, players frequently overtrain out of guilt and hit diminishing returns long before they hit useful gains.

One widely cited account from a top-level player described a best-case trainer output of five to six hours a day, split into two shorter sessions, which contradicts the ten-hour grind story that circulates online. Shorter blocks with real breaks generally produce more usable practice than one long block.

Four hours a day of focused play is not too much for an adult with a desk job and good sleep, but it is a lot to sustain without structure. Four hours of unguided queueing after a full season is often how players end the break worse than they started it.

How Do Players Use VOD Review and Scrims?

Effective review works in a loop: find the repeated mistake, compare your decision with a stronger player’s, convert that into a drill, then test it in a limited scrim with a named thing to check.

Start narrow. Review two or three rounds from your own losses rather than a full match, and write down what happened before the mistake, not just the mistake. “I got hit in the duel” is a description; “I did not pre-aim the angle for two seconds” is a finding you can drill.

Then compare. Watch how a top player handles the same situation, especially the boring parts: how they move before contact, what information they buy with utility, what they do after a won round.

Scrims come after the drill, not instead of it. Give each block one thing to check, such as first-contact timing or utility usage, and let a coach or analyst note it. Running three scrims with no question attached is the same as queueing with better teammates.

Splitting the week roughly 10 to 15 percent aim work, 50 to 60 percent team or scrim play, 15 to 20 percent ranked, and 10 to 15 percent VOD review is a common in-season split, and it holds up reasonably well off-season once real recovery days are added.

What Physical and Mental Training Belongs in the Off-Season?

Sleep, strength work, mobility, and stress management belong here more than in-season, because this is the only block with enough free hours to build them. General information only, not medical advice: if you have an injury, a persistent pain issue, or a sleep problem, talk to a doctor or physiotherapist first.

Physical activity matters more than most players expect. Systematic review work on esports players has reported daily inactivity averages in the range of 5.5 to 11 hours, with a small share exercising specifically for performance. A break that adds nothing but sitting is easy to pay back later with an injury.

Keep it boring and repeatable: three sessions a week of basic strength work, daily mobility for wrists, shoulders and hips, and a walk or bike ride between practice blocks. Session length matters less than showing up.

Sleep is the cheapest performance lever most players leave on the table. A consistent wake time does more for reaction quality than an extra hour of queueing, and the off-season is when habits reset.

Mentally, the break is where burnout gets addressed or ignored. Signs worth taking seriously are dread of loading the game, flat performance without effort, and irritability around teammates. A sports psychologist is genuinely useful here, not a luxury.

Set goals you can write down and check. One measurable target per priority, reviewed weekly, beats a vague intention to just play better.

How Players Transition Back to Competition

The last four to six weeks before a qualifier are a ramp, not a restart. Players raise team hours, run full match simulations, refine the competition plan, and then deliberately taper in the final week.

Ramp coordination first. Pairs that have not communicated in months need low-stakes reps before high-stakes ones, so start with structured team play rather than jumping straight into scrims.

Practise the pressure situations that actually decide matches: the overtime round, the economy round, the one-sided retake. Simulating those beats running comfortable rounds all week.

Refine the plan in writing. If the meta shifted during the break, update the map pool, the default setups and the protocols for calling mid-round, then scrim against the new version until it stops feeling unfamiliar.

Finally, taper. Cut volume in the last few days, keep some aim work so hands stay sharp, and protect sleep. Match sharpness survives a few light days; it does not survive a week of nothing followed by an elimination match.

Frequently Asked Questions

Conclusion

How esports players train during the off season is less about volume than ownership. Without a schedule and a coach, the players who improve during the break are the ones who choose two priorities, measure them weekly, and protect their rest on purpose.

Start with ten losses from your last tournament, label what went wrong, and pick two things to fix. Then build a week that gives each one real hours, includes VOD review rather than pure queue volume, adds three conditioning sessions, and leaves at least two full days off.

Six weeks later you will have either numbers that moved or a routine that needs replacing. Either answer beats grinding.