The block of training I am going to write about is probably one of the most enjoyable periods of coaching I have been involved in. Why? To be perfectly honest, it was made up of "best case" scenarios, educated guesses, and put together in a 4 day time frame.
Setting the Scene
This all took place in the UK after our second (I think, I lost track) lock down. I was in a private school working with their sports teams, particularly 1XV Rugby. During the first period away from school sport moral had been fairly high and all the players had maintained good levels of training and fitness at home. However, coming out of the second sustained break I had no real idea of who had done what, who was at what level and who was even guaranteed to be returning to school, let alone sport.
Whilst all of this was going on, we got the go ahead on 4 back to back fixtures (each 7 days apart). Unfortunately, we only found this out four days prior to the players return and the first fixture was 3 and a half weeks away. The next weeks were going to look something like this:
2x 40 min strength and conditioning sessions a week
2x 60 min rugby sessions a week
1st and 2nd XV to all train at the same time (including S&C)
Sessions open to all who want to play (some with minimal exposure to S&C)
This meant we had a total of 12 sessions (6 S&C and 6 Rugby) to cover strength, conditioning, speed, return to play, all team plays and individual skills.
The Plan
We decided on two main S&C sessions performed prior to training (Tues & Thurs) and an optional session on a Monday or Friday, depending on their academic timetable. The image below is the exact plan for their Tuesday speed, power and plyo session.
How We Used Technology
What I'm not going to do in this post is break down all of the decisions that went into the programme. I do plan on doing this in another post to highlight our "real world" approach. The big thing to remember is that we had 6x40 minute S&C sessions (plus rugby) to get 30-40 lads (many of whom had minimal gym experience) match fit in just 3 weeks.
Velocity Based Training
When it came to strength, we didn't have enough time to complete a true strength block and many of the lads hadn't been exposed to this type of training before. As a result, we got them to box squat with a controlled eccentric and explosive concentric phase. The goal was to expose them to some axial loading while moving an external object quickly.
In terms of loading, we set 1 bar at 30kg, 2 at 40kg, 1 at 50kg, and 1 at 60kg. We then instructed them to chose the bar that was closest to 50% of their bodyweight. Again, with the hope it would put a small load on them but allow them to move fast.
I was very luck to have access to a Gym Aware at school. So, to ensure the bars were moving at the kind of speeds we wanted, we rotated the unit around the platforms. The instruction was always to move the bar as fast as possible, however, when the unit was on your platform you had to move it faster than 0.75 m/s and If you managed to hit 2 or more reps at >1.5 m/s you moved to a heavier bar.
Light Gates
Again, I was lucky enough to have access to light gates and fortunately had a little bit of past data on a number of the players. So, their dribble bleeds were performed with the first 20-30m in open space and the last 20 through the gates. I wasn't too fussed on the exact timings, I just wanted to make sure they built up bit by bit. One of our main concerns was exposing them to enough sprinting to build tolerance and capacity, without throwing them in at the deep end.
Each week they performed 2-4 dribble bleeds/build ups depending on their playing position. Week 1 they were instructed to build up to 50-60%. Each week I then asked that they increase by 10-20% effort. The times on the gates were then taken to check they were actually increasing without slamming themselves into the ground!
GPS
Now, it may seem like I had all the technology I could want. I did. Kind of. We only had 10 GPS units for 30-40 players! Because of this, we split the players into 3 categories based on position. We then selected 3-4 our those we knew would most likely be our starters and gave them the vests for every training session. Having previously worn the vests for matches and training, we knew the end result we were looking for. From their we set our start point (50-60%) and increased approximately 15% each week. I know this may be quite aggressive but it was a gamble we took.
The metrics we tracked were total distance (km), total distance high speed running (>5.5km/h), and total sprint distance (>7.2km/h).
Did It Work?
I guess it depends what you define as success in this situation. For me, one of the major things I wanted was for all our boys to get game time and not get injured. After such a long period off, we just wanted them to be able to play. So, I guess the answer is yes, it work. As far as I can remember we only had 1 non contact injury, which was a minor hamstring strain that happened at Monday Night Football we were't aware of! We did have 2 concussions which were unfortunately sustained by two players who only turned up for 50% of the return to contact sessions.
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