Time flies at this time of the year and it'll be February later this week meaning practice games are just 6 weeks away!
As I've mentioned before once pre-season games start up then you should start entering the in-season training model so it's critical that you now start incorporating some specific training around this time.
Before I go further on that then I want to look at exercise selection based on Soviet Throwing coach Anatoliy Bondarchuk.
He breaks up exercise selection into 4 categories:
#1 - General Prep Exercises that have nothing to do with your sport specifically in regards to specific movement patterns, muscles used or energy systems used so you can use pretty much any exercise here but those that serve restoration or retraining purposes are best.
#2 - Specific Prep Exercises that are similar to those used in competition that use the same energy system and muscles, but not the same action so you might train the sprinting muscles but with squats and hip thrusts but not with sprinting.
#3 - Specific Development Exercises is referred to as specific strength and combines the energy system, muscles used and some part of the specific action like a sled or hill sprints
#4 - Competition Exercise which is the competitive exercise and it's variation so acceleration and max velocity sprinting.
The exercise classification principles from above can hold true for just about any type of activity, including football, and today I want to look at skill work.
Early in the pre-season skill work should follow the general prep which might be a lot of stationary target kicking performed at sow speeds. Kicking can actually put the quads and hamstrings under a a lot of stress and too much kicking too soon can cause soreness which will affect overall training quantity and quality so there's no need to be trying 100m torps running at top speed.
A couple of weeks prior to Xmas you can introduce a more dynamic component by kicking to moving targets and also kicking while moving at moderate speeds. This might also be where you start with post Xmas training, or a mix of gen prep and special prep kicking drills.
Around this time you should be heading into specific development kicking variations with leads coming from all different directions (straight at you, away from you, diagonal, long, short, stab, chip etc) and kicks being performed from all different positions (on the run, after a mark and push back, handball receive, run a hard 10m and kick etc).
Practice games will be the competition version.
Within a training session you would use all of the first 3 variations but emphasise different categories at different times as mentioned just above.
So if you're still warmimg up with 15mins of static kicking now, then maybe re-think it a bit to get more out of your precious training time.
Sprinting wise you'd look at contact time as how to how to categorise the exercises so you might start with short acceleration sprints from various lying positions progressing to standing start variations over moderate distances and progressing to moving start variations over longer distances as well as max velocity sprint variations such as flying sprints and in and out sprints. Again practice games will be the competition exercise.
Where a lot of athletes all over the world go wrong with this is in the gym as every stays in the general prep category with the age old squats, bench press and pulldown program at slow speeds. You need to be altering your tempo and exercise selections to better prepare you for the demands of footy but even then you' might only get into the special prep stage with your gym work before you'll need to cut it back to fit more special development training into your schedule.
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