1ST TRAINING SESSION BACK - FULL LAY OUT

I sent out the weekly newsletter last night and in it I mentioned that with the uncertainly around the lifting of restrictions here in Melbourne, coupled with my team not having a committed senior coach at the time (as of about 4 - 5 weeks ago), I put together an 8 session pre-Xmas training plan if on the off chance that we still didn't have a coach yet needed to get back into training.

In the end I spent countless hours going through all my drills I have on file, drawing them up, printing them out and making out a folder so I could categorise them all.

From there I went to work and ordered each drill within their own category to form a progression of training activities for that category.

I must have reordered them 5 times as I devised different ways to categorise them but time was a-plenty.

In the end my categories ended up being:

• Warm Up
• Kicking Development
• Defense
• Midfielders / Defenders / Forwards (split up into seperate groups at times)
• Game

Within each positional category they were then broken up into:

• Game Model Rehearsal
• Positional Tactics
• Small Sided Games / Scenarios

 As stated I built an 8 session plan where no 1 training activity is repeated except for the kicking development category.

The reason for this is that with players having been out of the game for 12 months, I want to expose to them as many situations/problems as possible as soon as possible, forcing them to have to process a lot of different information and then solving all those problems.

I don't want to do 3 - 4 cone drills that solve the same problem (if you can call no opposition or decision making a problem...hint: you can't), as we'll be well behind from the outset and need to "catch up" in fast time.

There are limited cone drills apart from some of the game model rehearsal activities but that's basically to teach positioning and they will be taken out as soon as possible.

So for this week I'll lay out the first session of this 8 session plan with all the training activities that I planned for that session.

It will be based on the types of systems our team used last year, which I believe we should build on more rather than "start again" so it might not be ultra specific to all of you but footy isn't a hard game and we all pretty much want to do the same thing with and without the ball.

Tomorrow I will post the warm up, kicking development and defense activites in the training drills section so make sure you check back in.