A Better You: Refresh, energise and build

It has always been thought that when football pre-season training rolls around, we need to be doing as many hill sprints and suicides as possible to ensure players are fit enough for the season ahead.

Through time this theory has largely fizzled out, but what made sports trainers finally abandon the once trusted old school methods?

In the four weeks athletes and football players have off at the end of the year, they don’t necessarily pack on the pounds or enjoy their holiday in excess, returning to training overweight and unfit.

This is great news for players that don’t enjoy the tiring fitness sessions done before the season even starts.

The idea is now to have players getting maximum touches on the ball during the pre-season, improving their technical ability on the ball while also improving their fitness levels at the same time.

If coaches have prepared their players correctly, they should still be in pretty good condition as they have hopefully been outdoors for the holidays.

This means that they, therefore shouldn’t be too unfit, but we can use this time to develop a good and constructed plan for the season ahead.

A good pre-season training plan should refresh, energise and build on the progress made from the previous season and what you want to achieve in the upcoming season.

Regardless of age and ability, pre-season training should start the same each time.

Every session should start with a good warm-up, involving mobility and flexibility work to ensure the risk of injury is reduced after time off.

Aim for a warm-up of 20 to 25 minutes.

You can then send the players around the field for a five-minute light jog to get the blood flowing to the muscles and then continue with a dynamic warm-up to prepare the muscles and body for the session ahead.

This also allows for the players to use this time as a catch up from the time off for good team cohesion.

Liverpool manager Juergen Klopp involves a handful of friendly games to start adding structure to the pre-season and have the players feeling comfortable on the ball which is ultimately what you want as a coach.

A key factor that has proven successful for Klopp is that he is always wary of player burnout.

When Liverpool won the Champions League in the season of 2018/2019, they played 53 times in one season as well as having various players turn out for their national teams.

With that being said, player burnout is something that needs to be watched and analysed as a first-class team like this cannot have key players injured or out due to niggles when the business end of the season rolls around.

Why is pre-season critical to optimal athletic performance?

• To re-establish fitness levels.
• To establish chemistry between players and staff
• To spend extra hours on technique and skill work (particularly for new and younger players).
• To start positional specific plays like defender specific programs, forward specific programs etc.
• To toy around with new strategies & game plans for the season.

Other nuances

• Pre-season training quantity and intensity needs to be ramped up carefully due to players decreased levels of fitness due to a well-deserved period of inactivity. A player going from “under-trained” to “too much, too soon” is the most popular cause of injury in players in pre-season.
• Additionally, players like goalkeepers will then be able to work on key aspects of their game, like hand-eye coordination and reaction speeds. The rest of the players will need to have their proprioceptive systems sharpened which is the athletes ability to unconsciously know its place in space.
• With that being said, there is a significant increase of injury when players return from extended breaks. Research shows that when athletes ramp up training too quickly past the point they are currently equipped to handle, soft-tissue injuries increase by nearly seven-times in the current training week and by up to 10-times in the following week.
• Certain fitness levels and key skills needs to be earned back, after extended breaks which makes the pre-season training schedule
  even more important and it needs to reflect the steady increase in intensity of training sessions leading up to the start of the season.
• Klopp also emphasises individualised programming for players during the pre-season. Every player in the team has their own specific needs and qualities.
• These needs to be built on, in the programming for pre-season dependent on factors like: Recent injury; Extended playing time in the last season (minimal off time); Positional demands; Skill development demands; Aim of the season for that specific player.

Sean van Staden is a sport scientist. Follow him on Twitter at @SeanVStaden or visit advancedsp.co.za.

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