YOU HAVE TO RETHINK YOUR TRAINING...REALLY YOU DO

Over the past couple of months I've been posting about stuff I picked up from the book Game Changer by Dr. Fergus Connolly.

It's had a huge impact on how I think team and individual training should be optimised, which always a goal of mine.

If you're a player and you're going to take the and effort to train you might as well do it right hey?

And if you're a coach and you want your players to get better, you have as much responsibility of putting them in positions to get better as they do of carrying out the actual work.

Players will get better at what you get them to do so if that's kick from cone to cone then great, they'll look great in pre-designed drills but without training in a chaotic situation like a game, they'll never get better at what matters - game day.

Enter the 4 co-actives of performance.

#1 TECHNICAL

- Encompasses the player's ability to make proper decisions during the game and to execute appropriate movement skills with the right amount of power, precision, direction etc. to be effective

#2 - TACTICAL

- Encompasses the player's ability understand the game plan and the application of the game principles based on the coach's tactical approach to winning the game.

#3 - PSYCHOLOGICAL

- Encompasses the player's psychological health, specifically how it relates to spirituality (sense of belonging) emotional intelligence and overall cognitive ability.

#4 - PHYSIOLOGICAL

- Encompasses all aspects of player fitness as it relates to having to success on the field, having a sustainable baseline of strength, power, speed, endurance, mobility etc. to perform well in the game

A lot of work trying to optimise these 4 aspects of each and every player you coach no doubt about it but hopefully you can get some support staff that can take an aspect each and cover it within the playing group.

I'd like others thoughts on this but this is probably how much a lot of clubs train these aspects:

TECHNICAL

Amount: Low to Moderate

Sure well do skill training but it's more reps of skills, regardless of actual skill level, rather than a progressive plan or program to improve skills.

Repetition of bad skills will not increase skills unless the skill is broken down and re-built.

I don't think there's anywhere near enough of this happening at any level really and we simply hope that if you play footy long enough you'll develop into the greatest kick of all time but without challenges and failures, it can't happen.

TACTICAL

Amount: Low to Moderate

We do a lot of zone defense kick out drills and all teams go over the set up pre-game but what never gets talked about is what happens after the ball is actually kicked.

We all work on clearance drills but rarely what happens after the clearance has, or has not been achieved at the clearance or in the other parts of the ground.

Essentially we train a lot of "partial tactics" I suppose but you need to start thinking of what is happening in 1 part of the ground and at the same time, how are you setting up in other parts of the ground at the same time so you can cover whether you win or lose the contest.

PSYCHOLOGICAL

Amount: Zero

We're all big on talking about mental health and for good reason, but there needs to be more practising of mental health.

Knowing your players and their challenges off the field can be critical as a coach because it can skew your entire coaching outlook.

If you've got a big full forward who's temperamental at the best of times, but now he's going through a divorce and is really on the edge, then you might use him differently for a short time while he works his way through his off-field stuff.

Another player might be new to the club and even though he came with great credentials and pay packet, he's not performing like you thought he might.

He's a quite character and gets lost in the team bonding stuff so he doesn't really know his spot in the team or the club yet, which is affecting his on-field performance.

Finding what he values within a footy club and then putting in a position to train/play towards those values will see his game day play sky rocket to what it was thought it would be.

This is probably the toughest one of these to do because it's personal and tough conversations will be needed but the solutions will often be pretty simple to implement.

PHYSIOLOGICAL

Amount: Moderate to High

We do a looooooot of this, more than anything else and in most cases sub-optimally because footy coaches aren't strength and conditioning coaches.

Division 1 local/amateur teams will now mostly have some form of fitness coach at the helm but whether that's an accredited strength and conditioning coach, a uni student, a personal trainer of group class instructor - there are still a lot of not-so-great training practices going on out there.

That being said it's not like we don't try in this area, we do more than any of the other co-actives, it's just that we need to recognise what's more useful and what's not (what my blog here was intended for when I started it).

YOUR CHALLENGE

Each and every training session try and include something for each of the 4 co-actives each and every session.

Sit down and plan it out and implement, even if it takes time initially, because the pay off could be club changing for you if you go through the short term pain.

GAME CHANGER NOTES PART 11 (...ANYONE CAN DO #8)

- Introducing a stimulus too soon after the last one like it will blunt adaptation and minimise learning

- The amygala is our danger sensor which uses fear to trigger evasive/combative action when threatened and uses the long term memory bank for emotion which are recalled to put each situation into context and determines how we react to it

- You don’t ever fully recover, you simply complete the adaptation process

- Find different ways to elicit a similar response to fasten up adaptation but you’ll need to take into account volume/intensity/frequency/mode

- It’s not the stressor that makes you stronger but the recovery from the adaptation to the stressor

- Every exercise is to organise the team for 1 of the 4 game moments

- Practice game skills how they’re performed in a game

- The score will take care of itself when you take care of the effort that precedes the score

- A morphcycle (week) is day 1 x game, day 2 x recovery, day 3 x restoration, day 4 x micro principle, day 5 x macro principle, day 6 x unit principle, day 7 x refinement and back to day 1 game again

- The application of a technical skill depends on what the brain has done before in practice and competition

- Players should be in competition every session to get used to delivering when it counts and to train hard/fight easy

- Throughout the week you work your way through 4 distinct morphocycles with 1 each for technical, tactical, physiological and psychological and within each of those you need to plan volume, intensity, density and contact

- A tactical morphcyle develops strategy based on game moment objectives plus game day tactics

- The 3 main goals between games is individual correction/recovery from the previous game, acquisition of learning experiences that improve tactics and further game plan objectives and the rehearsal of patterns before facing the next opponent but if time is short then minimise/skip the learning option 2

TACTICAL FOUNDATION (YOU HAVE TO USE THIS!)

This is taken from an article by Fergus Connolly but it also appears in his book GAME CHANGER.

There are 4 elements of tactics:

#1 - Locationing / Positioning

#2 - Man Circulation / Movement

#3 - Ball Circulation / Movement

#4 - Relationship / Timing / Sequencing

#1 - Locationing / Positioning 

- Refers to knowing where you are generally, in relation to the ball, to your teammates and to the opposition

- Once play resumes if you out of position then it’s too late 

– all movement is now being processed cognitively in relation to the last understood location so you’re movements will be out of place because you started out of place

#2 - Man Circulation / Movement 

- Refers to how you move either with an assigned task to complete or on the fly in respect to everyone else

- All player development/game correction needs to be based with this in mind (were you too close or too far away from the contest? How close should you have been? Where were you in relation to your direct opposition?)

#3 - Ball Circulation / Movement 

- Refers to how the ball is moved or allowed to move  and determines the movement of the opponent

- You can move your opponent around as little or as much as you want by moving the ball, and you can compress them or spread them out

 - Defensively you direct the opponent to area's you want them in by how you position and move your players

 - You have just as much, if not more control over the game without the ball then with it

#4 - Relationship / Timing / Sequence

- Refers to the timing of all of the above, how they move and in what order

- This is the most complex to develop because it is dependant on the game sense of eacg individual player

- Any and all practice must replicate the game scenarios you face and want to improve, otherwise why even bother training?

- These 4 foundations form the basis for identifying the area's of focus/improvement of game sense in your players

- Is the player making tactical errors? Are they not aware of their positioning? This can be addressed/fixed by using more breaks to allow them practice of self locating

- Perhaps they are not moving properly in relation to teammates on defense or they're not close enough as they move which can be developed by changing numbers or making uneven numbers for small sided games in practice or 7v7

- Is it a timing issue where they haven’t played enough? Is your team preparation archaic? Is there not enough focus on game sense with too much gym and running?

If you have a less talented and/or skilful team, and at local/amateur level most of it do, then using the game model principles by Fergus will give you a far greater chance of competing, and hopefully winning, then spending 15mins a night on zone kick out drills and useless cone to cone drills that has close to ZERO transfer to what happens on game day.

Use this stuff now and be the first to implement it and reap the benefits which will lead to greater success, better players/coaches being attracted to your club and all of a sudden you're a powerhouse leaving everyone else in the dust.

The full article can be found here.

GAME CHANGER NOTES PART 10 (...#12 MY PICK)

- Grog reduces excitatory neurotransmitters while increasing inhibitory neurotransmitter activity, decreases testosterone/growth hormone and increases estrogen

- Prevents game related learning

- While the brain is telling you you’re happy as grog releases dopamine, the production of emotion governing hormones are being disrupted

- Long term grog intake decreased gaba meaning you’re less alert/engaged

- Another excitatable hormone that gets impeded is glutamine meaning reduced reaction time 

- Decreased adenosine, which plays a vital part in energy transfer, restful sleep and heart function

- Limits serotonin production leading to depression and the negative effects on the cerebellum (balance/coordination)

- Technical ability cannot be assessed or considered outside of a tactical context

- Great teams don’t peak for finals but prevent as little drop off as possible via recovery/resolution modalities

- Coaches are high performers too and also need functional reserve to be able make tactical game winning decisions

- All coaches must speak a clear language (explosive = quick off the mark + starting speed + acceleration)

- Everyone meet and decide on language pre-season

- Technical ability creates space for players when tactics fail

- Group cohesiveness is physically less costly

- The will to win is good but the will to prepare is better

- The morphcycle approach to team preparation stresses focusing on 2 elements (vol/Int/density/contact-collision) at a time

- A coach trying to instil change needs to look at the influence of the most dominant personalities on the team

- Testosterone elevates with positive reinforcement

- Regardless of how you feel inside if you behave in a way that makes you feel how you want to feel than the feelings will likely follow

NEW RULES OF POST XMAS PRE-SEASON PART 3

#3 - RAISE THE FLOOR THEN RAISE THE ROOF

We all know that we need to build a fitness base prior to harder work but let's actually break it down to what that actually means.

The base/foundations are always at the bottom of the pyramid and everything is built in that.

Repeat - everything is built on that.

Without building your foundation/s then essentially nothing else can be obtained.

In the case of footy fitness this is aerobic capacity.

Aerobic capacity is the ability to perform a high volume of low to moderate intensity work with limited fatigue build up.

This is the getting from contest to contest type work during a game as well as the ability to recover between sprints.

From a speed point of view, building "good enough" mechanics is the foundation and some extra force production work in gym wouldn't hurt either.

Once you built a sting base/foundation then you've raised the floor.

At the same time you'll have raised the roof but also given yourself far more potential to raise it even higher with more intensive training.

Starting your training with 100m sprints and repeat 400's is trying to raise the roof without flooring and the end result is short term fitness benefits that leave as fast as they came plus a huge of fatigue and the Injury risk that comes with that.

Be patient - there's still plenty of time to build what you need if you sit down and plan it out!

NEW RULES OF POST XMAS PRE-SEASON PART 2

#2 - DEVELOP YOUR GAME MODEL

The Game Model has been popularised by Dr. Fergus Connolly - author of Game Changer.

It refers to a model of philosophy rather than a set of rules, developed around your club’s culture and playing group with the end result being your game style.

It all starts with your 3 Pillars.

After that you move to the 4 game moments being offense, transition defense, defense and transition offense.

You are in either one of those 4 game moments at all times of the game.

You then break down the game moments into macro moments for each of the categories.

You can also categorise the game/macro moments into structure, strategy and tactics.

This is mostly the job of the coach but it can also be handy to ask for player input as the coach will need buy-in from the playing group for any type of game Model they would like to use.

Any form of strategy/tactics is useless without buy-in.

The end result of the Game Model is that all players will be on the same page in any game situation - essentially making your teammates predictable to each other in any area of the ground.

At local/amateur level, 100% of the playing all playing the same way and under the same set of “rules” is a huge advantage!

NEW RULES OF POST XMAS PRE-SEASON PART 1

#1 - MAKE EVERY SECOND COUNT

Generally speaking you have 20 team training sessions between now and practice matches.

Let’s say most blokes do 80% of those then that’s 16 sessions.

16 sessions to get ready for 18 games - that’s not even 1 session per game.

Breaking it down you can easily see that as the coach, and/or a player training on their own, you cannot really afford to be time and energy on training that won’t give you the most benefit.

This means that you need to abide by the “performance hierarchy” from most important/must do as much of as I can to least important/only if I can fit it in without effecting the most important stuff.

In my opinion the performance hierarchy looks like this:

1 - Sport Specific Skills

2 - Sport Specific Skill Conditioning

3 - Speed Training

4 - Strength Training

5 - Energy Systems Training

6 - Hypertrophy Training

I’m not saying you might not even get to the last few points but you’ll need to micro-dose most of your ancillary training (points 3 - 6), doing what you need to do - not what you can do and getting the most from the least.

Planning your sessions also needs to be streamlined as much possible which can be done via:

- Running multiple groups for the same drill to keep player rest down and touches of the footy high

- Using familiar drills but with minor tweaks to progress learning

- Sending new training drills/concepts to your players prior to training so they’re semi-familiar with new training an to decrease learning time but not learning volume

- Follow the 4 coactive model from Fergus Connolly where most training drills train technical, tactical, physical and psychological simultaneously

How are you making every second count?