So over the last few weeks we've broken in-season training to an inch of it's life but we've just got a few little tid-bits to cover.
If you want a complete program then tid-bits matter.
GET THE MOST FROM THE LEAST - as mentioned throughout this series of posts once the season rolls around you only have a certain amount of resources you can put towards training and preparation as games are so more intensive and fatigue building then training. After dedicating a couple of days to recovery from games and then another couple of days to prep for your up-coming game then it really only leaves 2 - 4 days for you to train. This means that every session must count towards something and everything you do in each of those sessions must count towards something too.
LEAVE OUT THE GARBAGE VOLUME - backing off the previous point any training volume that does not really need to be there should go and be replaced by more important training or just left out on it's own. There's no winners for who does the most training season, just winners of games on a Saturday. If you're trying to play catch up during the season for fitness or whatever then be very careful about how you go about it or at least let your coach know you're doing some extra work but hopefully it won't affect your on-field performance too much.
INDIVIDUALISE ENERGY SYSTEMS WORK - as a coach you should have a fair idea of what your players strengths are in regards to energy systems work. Players that dominate your time trials are aerobic based athletes where your best sprinters are exactly that. During the season the time to improve aerobic or alactic capacities is probably out the window at local/amateur level because of outside stresses. Having a sprinter do a lot of aerobic based work will have a far greater effect on him physiologically then your time trial professionals as their body's love short, intensive work which is why they are naturally good at it. On the other hand having your aerobic dominant players do a lor of short, intensive sprints might fry their nervous systems more then the sprinter type and the residual fatigue from a session like this could stay until game day, affecting on-field performance. I'd keep 70 - 80% of energy systems work to their strong suit during the season making sure that the non-dominant trait is trained only when in a non-fatigued state and early in the week to ensure that output can be high and that recovery can be made during the week. You might also need to ease up on a Thursday night too if you do this but it can be done.
PRIORITISE YOUR WEEK - I've mentioned training residuals before but if you're not going to abide your training by that (which I don't know why you wouldn't) then you need to list all the things you need to train for footy and then using a long term approach, prioritise what you need to train each week. So you'd break it up into aerobic (long distance and slow pace), lactic (med distance/pace but high fatigue) and alactic (short distance and fast pace) and then you'd break down activities into those 3 categories and rotate through them all in a 2 - 4 week block. Just remember that you can't train everything all the time1
STRENGTH TRAINING - the 2 major rules here is to keep intensity and volume in check and also to don't introduce too many new exercises into the mix. Intensity and volume should be decided based on your readiness for that day and stick to it. New exercises means you'll be training through a different range of motion which will stress your body differently which generally means soreness will ensue. Don't induce this soreness if it will affect your training. Gym improvements can be made during the season but not at the expense of footy training and then games.
NEURAL CHARGE WORKOUTS - by Monday you're probably refreshed a fair bit from Saturday (unless you're 37 like me!) but training isn't until Tuesday. A good way to prime your nervous system for Tuesday training is to perform a 10 - 15min workout the uses 5 - 6 explosive, but low impact exercises either Monday night or Tuesday morning. These workouts should not induce any fatigue at all as sets should be about 5 - 8asecs long. You could also use another of these workouts on a Friday or even Saturday morning but if you do the Saturday probably make it 7 - 10mins long.
TAKE FRIDAY OFF WORK - OK a long bow being drawn here but at the very least as soon as you finish work get home and put the feet up as you'll still be recovering from Thursday training even if you don't feel like it it needed recovering from. So relax and rest your body do tomorrow you wake up with high player readiness so there are no excuses not to make an impact on the ground.
That wraps up the in-season training series of articles.
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