Train Footy Tuesday/Thursday, Do This Wednesday

Practice games are right around the corner which means training time is decreased, recovery resources decrease and you need to find a way to train the same amount of stuff you do now, but in less time.

This less training time usually results in you skipping the small but still important rocks, and just banging out the big rocks but that simply means that every session is balls to the wall which is not really applicable for us L/A footballers who work all day then have to add training on top of that.

Your footy week should be prioritised in this order:

1. Be 100% for game day
2. Recover enough from Saturday to give 100% on Tuesday
3. Recover enough from Tuesday to give 100% on Thursday
4. Any extra training you do on your own

Recovery isn't just rest and sleep, although that is a big part of it, where your thoughts are simply on muscle tissue regeneration.

 

What you also need to think of is getting your body back to a parasympathetic state because it is only then that it can rest and regenerate. 

Having 20 beers and then sleeping for 18hrs isn't really tissue regenerating stuff, even though you've been in bed for almost a day. The alcohol will put your body in a highly sympathetic state while it processes the food and drink from last night, especially the alcohol in your blood. Only once that is complete can your body actually get to the resting stage which may be Sunday or even Monday.

Between training session you only have 46 or so hours to regenerate for Thursday training and for this I propose you use an aerobic capacity corrective exercise type session session.

This is where all the little rocks you skip during the week get a look in, you develop some extra aerobic capacity which is what you need to recover from bouts of top speed sprinting come game day, you get to train all the muscles that support your prime movers and if you do all of this at a RPE of 4 - 5/10, you'll feel a lot better and your body will have greater readiness to hit Thursday training then if you sit at home watching Swanny on Celebrity Get Me Outta Here.

My schedule right now is:

Monday - High Intensity Day

Tuesday - Medium Intensity Day

Wednesday - Low Intensity Day

Thursday - High Intensity Day

Friday - Medium Intensity Day

Saturday - Low Intensity Day

Sunday - Off

Wednesday is my training hump day which is when I perform this recovery session.

So I'll do 3 - 4 circuits that look like this:

Boxing x 60secs, Corrective Exercise x 10 - 20 reps, Corrective Exercise x 10- 20 reps

I'll have 3 - 4 different mini-circuits of these and I do than all in a row which will take me 35 - 40mins on average.

I keep my pace in check (a 4 - 5/10 isd slow, a lot slower then you would normally do this I guarantee) which is crucial to hit the aerobic pathways - I don't want to even know that anaerobic (in complete rest sprinting etc) exists during these sessions or I won't get what I want out of it.

The boxing looks like this:

Very, very easy.

Here are some exercises I've used as the corrective/isolation exercises.

Whatever exercise you use, just use one that focuses on either stability of mobility, do it for medium to high reps but as you can see from my facial expressions, I'm not going near failure.

Give it a shot today!