Improving Your Fitness During the Season

For whatever the reason was that you missed pre season training, it's common for players to need to catch up fitness after the season started.

Now obviously you have training Tuesday and Thursday and a game Saturday so they need to be the times that you try to do this.

A lot of players think that they need to do more but if you train hard enough and be smart enough about it, the 2 training sessions should be enough to get your fitness up.

The game speaks for itself as the intensity and running patterns are unique to an actual game itself and last year when all I did was play on a Saturday running wise, my fitness did improve from that one session a week.

I think the " the need to do more" attitude comes from players usually doing 10km and longer runs over the pre season and that training with stop, start, sprints and such isn't the same.

Now at training you won't run continuously, but you don't during a game either. There are periods where you are stationary and sitting on the bench.

The truth is that the more intense, shorter distance sprints you'll do at training covering maybe 3 - 5kms, will do the same, if not more, then the 10kms ran at a lower intensity continuously.

Here are my tips for catching up on your fitness during the season:

• at training sprint from cone to cone for each drill. When I was at my fittest (back in the day) it was compulsory to sprint right through to the cone you've kicked or handballed to. Couple that wit fixing your own skill errors by running over to the receiver and assisting, and this can almost replicate a game in some respects.

• for some extra mileage try running some laps after training if you have the time. I prefer after training as you don't want to tire yourself out for the skills and sprint work during training.

• on a Saturday, keep running. Even if the game is out of reach, keep running like your a point behind with a minute to go. Ask the coach to pop you in a midfield role if the game is lost to work on your fitness.

• depending on how you pull up, maybe try a 3km run on a Sunday morning which can be used again for extra mileage and as a recovery tool.

The most important thing is not to ADD more sessions into your week or something will have to suffer. 3 sessions plus an optional recovery Sunday run is more then enough to catch up on your fitness and you wouldn't do more then 4 runs over the pre season anyway.

Just be sure whatever you do that it isn't affecting your ability to back up game day.