Stick the essentials. If you can just get one gym session in I'd recommend doing a deadlift, a single leg exercise (split squat or lunge), horizontal push (bench press variation) and a horizontal pull (inverted rows or single arm rows). I'm assuming your relatively experienced and plyos are being done at pitch training. Get in and out in under an hour and you should still remain good and fresh for training/games.

A lot of county teams do gym work during the winter and focuss on the football or the hurling once things get serious.Gym work is essential for any athlete but it must be done with the correct technique otherwise you will do more damage than good to yourself.

Check out this video, it is quite good at explaining why we need to continually have strength training as part of training regimen.

Its a good video that I recently watched on youtube about why we should incorporate absolute strength training to transfer into absolute speed aka what we want to improve on i.e deadlift, squat, powerclean, pull ups, bench and press!



However, lets not forget to keep it balanced, functional and specific and completly warm up correctly as the guys from totalgaacoach have written articles about!

Hope this helps anyone who might be debating whether or not they should be doing strength training in season!

Dan

Fintan - all good info posted above by Jason, rm2 & Dan.
The video Dan linked is from Eric Cressey and has loads of good info in it.
Like most other sports there is a time for training and time for competing. Also important though after working hard over the winter months to keep up your gym training through the season. I think many gaa players do not keep up their gym work for whatever reason and lose all the gains they have previously made.
In keeping it simple I would include a good warm up, do something for the lower body (squat/deadlift) double or single leg, pull something (chin up/row) push something (bench variation).
With your pitch practice and game schedule there may be some weeks where you have time for 2 sessions and other weeks where you only have time for 1. That is fine. Just keep a track on yourself and try to gaurantee 1 a week. You trained hard over the winter to be a better footballer/hurler, not a weightlifter. Just make sure you have enough recovery time between sessions and in season gym sessions should really be done in around the 45 min mark. In comparison to off season training where you may lift 3-5 sets of anywhere from 3-15 reps, with in season programmes I generally stick to 2 sets of 4-8 reps
Have a look at this article - http://www.totalgaacoach.com/page/id_125
Some info in there that should also help.
Barry