In-Season Training Part 1 - Training Residuals

I posted on this several times but it's still an unknown concept at elite levels let alone amateur and local level.

Training residuals refers to how long a specific strength or fitness quality can stay with you without being directly trained. When energy resources are capped as per the in-season period, this is a pretty important concept to know about.

Aussie Rules Football requires the need to train pretty much everything the body has to offer and probably more then any other sport in the world but obviously we can't train everything and we certainty can't train everything all the time.

Being the bearer of good news I'm here to tell you that you don't even have to and shouldn't even try to.

When talking training residuals we're referring to energy and nervous system demanding qualities such as;

• Aerobic Training
• Anaerobic Training
• Speed Training
• Strength Training

Each of these qualities has a lag time where max performance can stay with you without actually having to display it.

Here's how they stack up.

• Max aerobic performance will stay with you for 25 - 30 days with an optimal time of 30 days.

• Max anaerobic performance will stay with you for 14 - 22 days with an optimal time of 18 days.

• Max speed performance will stay with you for 2 - 8 days with an optimal time of 5 days.

• Max strength performance will stay with you for 25 - 35 days with an optimal time of 30 days. 

Looking at this should provide you with some training plan relief knowing that you don't have to cram a little bit of everything into each session and gaining little if any benefits for any of them.

During the in-season we have little outings called games that, no matter how game simulated you try to make training, is far more intense then training will ever be where you display most if not all of these qualities.

This means that depending on what position you play and the style of game you play, you need to take that into account as well when planning this out over a season.

For example I'm a sprinter type who pretty much sprints at 90 - 100% for the ball over 5 - 15secs as I play full forward. Compare this to a winger and they'll be running at something like 75 - 85% speed up and down the wings covering 50 - 100m in a single bout.

This builds up different types of fatigue, depending on your current fitness level and muscle fibre make up so it stands to reason for conditioning staff and/or a coach that there needs to be a little bit individualisation for some players which you would base of their player monitoring results.

Getting back to our residual times, it doesn't mean that you wouldn't train say aerobic performance at all, but you might perform some sub-maximal type aerobic work or set up your skill drills to incorporate longer running volumes.

But within the time frames provided you'll need to perform some dedicated, specific training for those strength/fitness qualities.

 So sit down and plan this out for your team's training sessions or of course it's all covered and planned out for you already in the Aussie Rules Training Manual and if you'd like to purchase it then let me know and I'll send you the link for it.

I'm picking the Cats by 22 today too!