Off Season 2014 is Now!!

For those fortunate to be playing finals I'm a little envy of you. There's nothing like finals footy in any grade. I'm even a little more envious when we didn't even win a game this year so we're relegated a division but we'll regroup and launch our assault in 2014.

And for me, season 2014 starts TODAY!!

For the last month or so I've been tentatively putting together my first block of training to ready me for season 2014.

The first thing I've done is to sit down and have an honest assessment of where I'm at and here's what I come up with:

Speed - initially I gave myself a 7/10 but then I re-tested 10 and 40 meters 2 weeks ago while we were still playing I am slower then I have been in the past 2 years. Now in-season is no time to be testing anything but I trained maybe 10 times for the entire in-season this year with no extra running on my own part (shit I know). Speed is developed the slowest and lost the quickest.

Endurance - always shit but in my heyday (late 90's!!) I was actually nicknamed the "greyhound". I still wasn't s great long distance runner but I would always finish top 5 in our weekly 3km runs but my repeat speed was easily my strong suit. Nowadays both are beyond terrible with the aforementioned lack of training not helping at all. This year I WILL do some concentrated running leading up to pre-season because my training availability can be dicey at times with work and family.

Strength - again I have tested this in the last 2 - 3 weeks for bench press, back squats and deadlifts. Deadlifts were an almost all-time high even with minimal pulls for the last 12 months so that's fine. Squats are down 10 - 15% from the start of the season which is also fine so I just need to get that back to the 135 - 140kg mark. Bench press doesn't really phase me but it has stalled for the last year or 2 so I might concentrate on it for s short time between now and Christmas.

So what am I doing now.

SPEED.

SPEED KILLS!

I have developed a 42 day program where I will train EVERYDAY (bar emergencies).

The focus is speed and anything to do with it. It might not get me to Rio in 2016 but I just need to sprint, and sprint a lot more often then under fatigue on a Saturday. You CANNOT, I repeat, CANNOT get fast training in a fatigued state. It's definitely something a lot more footy teams should look at because there's reserves players who have the same skill set as senior players but don;t play because they are too slow. Simple as that. I still play seniors because I am still fast-ish and believe me if I was slow with my poor endurance, I wouldn't even make our 3rds team (the booming left helps though!!)

So during my 42 day speed program I'll be training everyday covering the following performance qualities, movements and muscles, some of which I covered in my "Training Methods You've Never Heard Of" Series:

 - Foot / Ankle Complex
 - Stiffness / Relaxation
 - Bounding
 - Acceleration
 - Max Velocity
 - Hip Thrusts
 - Olympic Lifts
 - Back Squats
 - Romanian Deadlifts
 - Swings
 - Nordic Hamstring Curls

There's also a little bit of upper body and core stuff in there too.

Be sure I'm not training everything everyday, but some things I am.

I will do some form of foot/ankle, stiffness.relaxation, bounding, sprinting and hip thrusting everyday with the posterior chain exercises being alternated through but still trained everyday.

The program I have made up is based on the 40 Day Program by Dan John for which I'll be doing with Back Squats as they will have the most carryover with sprinting in the gym which has 1 - 2 days off a week from squatting for memory.

So there's a quick rundown of what I'm about to embark on.

Post 42 days I'll see where my speed is at where i'm sure I'll still need to work on but then I intend on doing a quick block of Triphasic Training then ramp up some aerobic work pre Christmas. Endurance comes pretty quickly so you only need to actually train it for a month or so before moving to repeat speed and more sport specific running patterns. I also hope to be able to drop 3 - 5kgs because 35 year old legs don't get any younger!

What are you doing?