500 Words a Week - Off Season Programme Case Study Part 2

Programme Overview

In the past blog I presented the off-season overarching structure for one of my athletes which is shown above, but I have updated this plan (below) to highlight two points that I feel are important when using a block training approach.

Updated Programme Overview

The first being that there is a gradual transition between the various blocks. It shouldn’t be clear cut where one block ends and another begins, there should be a gradient like approach to changing meso-cycle focus’s. The second thing is that when we change our meso-cycle’s focus, we don’t just forget about what our athlete performed in the previous meso-cycle. Verkoshanky discusses how the previous focus in the past meso-cycle should become the assistance work in the new meso-cycle. With reference to this athlete, in the intensification block which we are currently running, we still have some relatively high volume assistance work.  

The field sessions have changed in that now we are doing 1 linear speed session and 1 session focused on change of direction speed. The change of direction work will place a greater demand on certain musculature around the hip compared to just linear speed, so we must be cognizant of this. This brings up an important point about why we are doing this, if we just focus on linear speed for the entire off-season, once our athlete gets the pre-season, they will be in a world of bother when having to do the intense COD associated with a lot of team field based sports if they haven’t done some of this work over the off-season.

With regards to our ESD, we have gone for a alactic-aerobic approach, the linear and COD speed will improve our athletes maximal alactic capacity. We then supplement this through sub-max aerobic work to build our athletes base. We have kept it incredibly simple with regards to this for the first 2 meso-cycles, we began with 2-3 submax continuous wattbike sessions a week, and over the course of a few weeks we begin to switch each of these wattbike sessions to a submax continuous run. The focus with this is the gradual build up the total weekly volume of running prior to preseason. What’s important to note is that linear submax running volume cannot be truly compared to running volume in season. It is the interspersed aspects of high intensity runs, accelerations, decelerations and COD that are the truly fatiguing aspects of field sports. Which we will begin to prepare for more in the final mesocycle.

Phase 2 Gym Sessions Overview