500 Words a Week - A look into one of my programmes
I’m going to present one of my recent programmes for the group of athletes I’m working with and discuss certain aspects from it. Before, I do this please keep in mind the following Charlie Francis quote:
“It’s the plot not the actors”
When looking at other programmes look at the reasoning and thought processes behind them.
This programme is for those with a higher training age in our U23 team. Our strength focus day is performed on MD-4, and our more power focus session on MD-2. Depending on the schedule for the week, due to the changing game fixtures or COVID testing requirements changing the schedule, or upper body strength day is usually on MD+2 or MD-3. We currently perform gym before training due to the environment we are in. The environment we are training from has limited equipment, so we are hindered in certain aspects.
For instances, at the moment, we have no main bilateral push movement. Usually I would like to programme a trap bar deadlift for this, but we have none at the moment. Our main strength lift is our split squat, with that being said, speeds are getting better, jumps are going up and our top set on split squats are increasing, so do we even need a bilateral lift?
The overall volume is quite low, as we are performing these sessions prior to training, and we are in-season with a hectic game schedule at times. From our strength work, I want to make sure the players are receiving a quality relatively high intensity stimulus, this is why we work up to a top set. However, with the top sets I will not push them beyond what they deem appropriate for themselves, especially as we are doing gym before training and the part of the season we are in.
I feel performing 1-2 sets of accessory work with focus and intent is very much underrated. I believe it’s enough to impart some form of stimulus to keep a high degree of tissue tolerance in these injury prone areas. We are in the latter stages of the season, when the focus is on quality training sessions that will lead to impactful performances. If I believe keeping volume minimal in some of the work in the gym will help with this, that is what I will do.
There are a lot of open set prescriptions based on how the athletes are feeling, if they feel good, do the upper limits, if not stick to the lower options. I feel athletes appreciate this. This will often change compared to the programme above, the 2-3 sets will change to 1-2, or the reverse depending on the weekly schedule/ how the players are feeling.
From the programme, you can see we try to measure and record a lot of metrics. This helps drive intent and keep athletes accountable, but also helps us in seeing what type of athletes our players are. We have a modified version of a force velocity profile through the weighted jumps. We are building another jump profile in that the block shown we were performing depth jumps, we can compare that to normal CMJ jumps and squat jumps (which we are doing now) to identify how well our athletes are able to use the stretch shortening cycle. The goal is to individualise certain aspects of our training based on this.
In our strength day, we try to drip feed in some power work, and in our power day we try to drip feed in some strength work. With the intent that, if an athlete misses one day, they won’t miss that stimulus for the week. On our power day, we have our SL box squat, we perform this on a box to limit excessive ranges of motion as this is normally performed on a MD-2 so we don’t want many DOMS imparted on our athletes, yet they still receive some form of strength stimulus from it. We also perform some form of isometric hamstring work, and low intensity calf work, again with the intention of not giving our athletes any DOMS, but protecting from the downside if any of our athletes miss the strength session. A reflection on the programme, there probably wasn’t enough power elements in our strength session to protect against the downside if athletes missed the power session, so more was added into the next block.
