The Season Is Here, But I'm Not Ready!

Round 1 for all of the AFL's 16 teams is over and done with and upon is round 1 for our own teams.

I'm sure you've all put in the hard yards up until now by getting stronger in the gym and increasing your work capacity on the track.

Some of us though are behind the rest of the pack for one reason or another and I'm one of them. I read on the Internet the other day on a forum where a player asked how he can reach peak fitness in 4 weeks.

Now you can run your little heart in those 4 weeks and limp into round 1 or you can take the sensible approach as organising your in season is a very delicate matter.

When you're organising your training, the most important thing is that you plan it out so that you can train hard, but not so hard that it exceeds your recovery abilities and this is even more important once the season comes around as your game day is the most important day and the one that you should be at your most freshest on.

What this means is that if you are trying to "catch up' in the fitness stakes, you need to be careful that you don't too much volume or use too much intensity that you can't fully recover between training sessions and games.

An overlooked component of restoration and recovery is overall training volume. A lot of players simply look at how much running they do or how much weight training they do on an individual basis. This is a big mistake.

Now during the in season your main goals are to maintain your new found strength levels that you improved upon in the off season as well as maintaining your fitness levels too. Now maintaining something is a lot easier that actually getting something so you don't need to use a lot of volume but it is wise to maintain, or even increase, intensity at planned stages of the year.

I actually deadlifted a personal best during the season last year, as was my dedication to my gym program/s.

Now I hate running. Despise it. Can't stand it.

Even at my fittest in my teens and early 20's, I could not run a proper 3km time trial without needing an "active rest" during it. The fact that I haven't ran continuously for more then 2kms (and probably nowhere close to it to be honest) in over 6 years just shows how much I hate it.

Last year when I made my long overdue comeback after 5 years off, I did a little running twice a week (sprints mainly, no long distance running) for the about 3 weeks before and after the start if the season and it was probably just enough to get me by. I didn't continue running during the season, even though I was playing in the midfield.

What I made sure of though was that if I wasn't going to do any running outside a game situation, I had to make sure that I got a lot of it during the game and this is where you should be getting a lot of your running volume if you're behind in your fitness base. This should also hold true during training. Instead of adding more volume to your training and simply running yourself down, use what time you do have effectively.

This means that you can aim at getting a full recovery early in the week and backing up with 2 solid training sessions on the track and 2 solid gym sessions (strength focused) in the gym each week.

Tomorrow we'll go through some weekly schedules that you can use during the in season.