500 Words a Week - Off Season Programme Example

In this blog post I’m going to discuss one of my athlete’s off-season programmes and hopefully shed some light on the planning methods I have discussed in the past. This athlete is a football (soccer) player whose goals over this off-season period are to increase strength, size and power.

Below you will see an outline of the 8-week programme. As I have mentioned in the past, with planning and periodization we need to have an idea about where we are going, but don’t need to plan in incredible detail as we can’t fully predict how our athletes will respond to the programme. In the past I have been guilty of not laying out an overarching plan and purely going from a more week to week planning basis.

Programme Overview

This athlete had a hectic schedule for the back end of the season where he had to play/ be available to play 2 games per week. Therefore, during this time volume was kept relatively low while we tried to ensure he was available to play at his best for these games.  From this experience I gained a further appreciation for agile periodization and barbell loading strategies. To re-highlight the barbell loading strategy, we protect from the downside by ensuring a satisfactory amount of strength work is completed to impart enough of a stimulus to maintain this quality. Then we invest in the upside when potentially our athlete wasn’t involved/ didn’t play a huge amount of the game so we can invest more time into imparting a larger strength/ power stimulus.

Due to the lack of strength work volume experienced during the season and given increasing strength and size was part of our athletes goals, this was the main focus for our first 3-week block. From working with this athlete, I know he recovers incredibly well from training (be that in the gym or on field), this combined with the fact that running volumes have dropped and the decrease amount of overall stress on the athlete in that he has this period with no games/ formal training with a team and he isn’t spending 2-3 hours in a car commuting every day, we went relatively aggressive on the volume.

We have two field sessions during this first 3-week block, the first focuses on acceleration and the second focuses on max velocity. When we think about transference, my first thought is that it’s best to keep an element of what your hoping to improve still present right from the very start. Rather than going through 6 weeks of our programme, and then when we are 2 weeks out from preseason start performing sprints again with the hope that some of our strength work transfers. We are keeping an element of sprinting in right from the beginning.

Below is an overview of the programme, as you can see we are keeping things pretty simple and straightforward for this block.

The below is performed over 4 days, with the athlete encouraged to do some low intensity cardio and core work on 1-2 other days.

Gym Sessions Overview

Field Sessions Overview