Through my years as a personal trainer I've probably had more female than male clients. This has provided me with the opportunity to train many different types of women, many different types of ways and I feel I can deliver the type of session that is fun, challenging and different to other trainers.
This also holds true for when I train my football players.
Women have a different skill set when it comes to physical qualities with some being very specific to footy, many of which I outlined in this blog.
Most women are trained with high reps, low weight and little to no rest periods which is great if you're training for body composition or whatever but footy is a completely different game.
You can't train Crossfit and play footy.
You can't train train marathons and play footy.
You can't train powerlifting and play footy.
All 3 of these modes have parts that cross over into footy at various points, but that's purely where the similarities end.
Whether I am training male or female footballers my theory is always the same.
Step 1 - Increase Your Top Speed
Every contest for the footy is essentially a race which makes your speed to get to, and away from the contest, critical to you and your teams success.
Step 2 - Increase Your Aerobic Capacity
Most people think of aerobic capacity as time trials and such but as easy as these tests are to administer, they really provide little data that can dictate on-field performance.
I like to class aerobic capacity by your resting heart rate, heart rate recovery and anaerobic threshold.
If you can improve 1, 2 or all of these, then you're aerobic capacity and on-field performance will go through the roof.
So you've got speed and you've got great aerobic capacity but what does that mean exactly?
If you have great speed then to actually be able to use it as an advantage over other players, you need to able to display that top speed, or close to, as often as you can during the course of a game.
Being able to do it once counts for nothing, unless you only go on for the last minute of the game, burst out of a pack and kick the winning goal on the siren.
What high levels of aerobic capacity will do is to allow you to recover from these bouts of top end sprints faster, so you'll be able to display them more often.
Have a look at Cat Phillips from the Demons/Pies game on Saturday night, especially the 2nd goal:
Without speed she probably doesn't get to that position when she needed to, she probably doesn't get there without any other Collingwood players being in the vicinity and she doesn't burn off that poor Collingwood player either.
Without speed she's "just another footballer", except I know she comes from Ultimate Frisbee, I play footy with her boyfriend, and all the "Frisbee's" as we call them, have super endurance and pretty good speed but she has X-factor speed at women's level.
At the Olympic level it is genetics that get you to the medal races but they are top .0001% in the world, but at local/amateur women's football level, which AFLW still is, correct training can produce astounding speed increases in women.
Using my female footballers for example, by using simple training sessions, at maximum intensity/speed with adequate rest periods, along with using near maximum loads in the gym for low to moderate reps, we have managed to decrease speed times for up to 4 sessions in a row before we start to stabilise them.
An improvement as small as .001 of second is still great progress in sprinting terms, especially if these gains are made consistently.
When it comes to high intensity training, or what might be better referred to as nervous system training, women are a blank canvas and this is why I love training women footballers.
The brain might decide what you'll do but the nervous system dictates to what level you do it at.
Women have rarely, if ever, been subjected to such a huge stimulus which in turn can have a huge effect on your performance output once you start to train like that.
Just note that high intensity is not to be confused with high fatigue.
Intensity is the level at which you are training at according to your maximum output.
So for running, top end or max velocity speed over 10 - 20m is your 100% output.
So for Moz her personal best flying 20m sprint is 2.75secs which equals 7.27 meters per second.
To train true aerobic capacity which we want to do so at about 60% intensity means she should drop her speed to just 4.362 meters per second.
So a 15sec tempo run for her would cover: 4.362 x 15 = 65.43m.
This would ensure that she is training only the aerobic pathways during this specific drill but most football players, men and women, will read 15secs and go all out for that time.
This results in you by-passing the aerobic pathways as it's too fast to rely on oxygen for fuel for, but also too slow to train the alactic power pathways (speed) so you end up training "in the middle".
AVOID TRAINING IN THE MIDDLE!
Yep, that's right.
The way you probably train most of time is not optimal.
It does have it's place in footy training don't get me wrong but this type of training can only be performed for 4 - 6 weeks before performance starts to drop off.
Unfortunately most footy clubs start off with this and continue it for weeks on end over the summer, essentially breaking down their players as it's very hard to recovery from, that type of training.
That being said your team training will be predominantly "in the middle" which is fine but you need to start training at the "slow and fast' ends of the spectrum in your own time.
Enter this very, very limited offer to women footballers only.
I will make available a 2 week trial period of a program that focuses exclusively on speed and aerobic capacity that fits in and around your current team training nights.
I have a template that I'll be using but I can modify it to fit your needs if needed.
There will be specific requirements you'll need to fulfill while doing the program as well as after it but you'll be instructed how to all these simple and quick tasks.
I can only limit this 2 week trial to 10 women footballers so simply fill in this application form, and I'll be in contact with any follow up questions I have.
With a Facebook page of over 1000 and a Twitter of over 400 plus the boom of women's football right now, you're best to apply for this immediately to give yourself the best chance of getting a spot.
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