500 Words a Week - Creating Certainty from Uncertainty
Team sports can be a tricky landscape to navigate at times, especially in-season during periods of congested fixtures. This makes our work challenging as we accept the process of; game – recover – game – recover, without continuing to try and progress/ maintain our athlete’s physical qualities. Due to the congested fixtures, we can be guilty of not doing anything with our athletes because of our preconceived ideas of the training process. One of these ideas is waiting for the perfect time to perform strength work, and as this perfect time doesn’t come around, nothing gets done. I think in these periods of congested fixtures; we need to change our mind-set. Rather than constantly thinking about the perfect programme/ timing for development, we need to think what is satisfactory for development. If we are constantly looking for the perfect time, we could be waiting awhile, causing our athletes to go 1-2 weeks (or longer) without any sort stimulus imparted on them to maintain robustness and keep progressing.
Beyond reducing volume to a very low level, I’m a fan of using isometrics holds (yielding isometrics) for these periods of congested fixtures. Yielding isometrics won’t cause as much adaptation as our usual gym work but they can impart a satisfactory amount.
This is where I see an issue with being married to movement categories/ classifications for programming gym work during times of congested fixtures. Sure, they should be used when designing the overall programme and we should aim to increase our athlete’s competence in the main movement categories (squat, hinge, etc). However, during times of congested fixtures/ when a player has a certain injury or complication we must change our thinking to prioritize stimulus before movement. An example; we must prioritize the quads getting some form of strength stimulus, rather than being married to the squat pattern and when a squat is contraindicated, we throw the baby out with the bath water and do nothing.
In team sports, at the academy level players can frequently miss a gym session as they have been requested by another age group or on a recovery day, we must be conscious of this in our planning. In figure 1, if an athlete misses any of the sessions they will miss their entire weekly stimulus for that form of loading. That means it will have been 14 days till they receive another bout of that stimulus. This has negative connotations for a variety of reasons, first it’s not applying a robust methodology to our athlete and when they go back to perform that session again they will likely experience more DOMS due to missing out on a week. In figure 2, we are still saturating the quality we want to improve with the majority of the loading, but we are protecting from athletes missing sessions by keeping some form of stimulus in for all our main categories. (Figures below with the categories in are just a brief example to highlight the point)
