PRE-SEASON TRAINING DO'S #22 - TIME TRIAL

A week or 2 ago I posted what you should be looking at doing from a running point of view between now and practice games.

The first thing to do is to use a time trial of some description, something probably all teams do in some capacity.

Here are some tips for running your time trial:

1 - Record ALL results and make sure very player does it.

2 - Use the same track each and every time for testing consistency so it might be wise to use your footy ground as you'll have easy access to it every week.

3 - Use a test that is repeatable

4 - Train to improve the test in between time trials where too many teams do a time trial, do some training then re-test, magically expecting improved results which is far from optimal.

5 - Make every players results public either in the change rooms, on your teams social media or both. Accountability and competitiveness can go a long way in local/amateur footy. Use +/- score to indicate improvements and detraining.

6 - The crew at Rookie Me somehow got the AFL to change their endurance test from the beep to to the yo-yo test so don't be afraid to search fro a test that suits your tam more then others. Beep tests aren't repeatable for 95% of L/A teams.

7 - If you test with linear/straight line running and use an up and back test with change of directions, then you cannot use the linear testing numbers unless you subtract for turns where players need to decelerate, turn and re-accelerate.

8 - My team has the shortest ground in football history (124m long) so to match up with our main endurance running drill we'll be doing I made our 6min time trial the same as the running drill so our scores match up better. We tested 6mins from goal to goal with turns included in the run.

9 - To make measuring easier I divided the ground into 3 so whichever 3rd you finished in at the 6min mark goes into your score. So if you managed 10 lengths (goal to goal = 1 length) and you finished in the middle 3rd of the ground, then you scored 10.2. It's not a perfect score but it works great on big group settings and you can still see improvements if they reach 11.1 for the next test.

10 - Once each player has a 6min distance then convert to meters per second where FYI, the AFL ave is 5.2m/s.

11 - EXPECT improvements from every player and let them know that is the expectation.