500 Words a Week - Triphasic Training in Football
(Soccer for anyone unsure)
The main thing I got from triphasic training is the use of extending tempos during the eccentric or isometric phase to greater improve our athletes tissue tolerance/ physical capacities and prepare them for future strength blocks/ the long season ahead. The book is a wonderful resource and I would encourage every coach to read it during their career. However, as with everything, it doesn’t have to be an all or nothing situation where you either only do triphasic training or you don’t. An important skill for developing practitioners is gaining a filter in which you can extract useful information and methods for your situation, rather than blindly accepting what is told to you or the latest trend on social media. In this blog, I’ll mainly discuss when I like to use triphasic training.
My use of triphasic training is incredibly simple, I like to incorporate two blocks of triphasic training into the year. The first one is after two weeks of preseason, the main reason I go with this is that I like a short block at the start where we are exploring a lot of different movement competencies. Lunges in various planes of movement, re-introducing squat and hinge patterns, extensive plyometrics in various planes of movement. Due to the spike in running volume that generally occurs during preseason focusing on moving well in the gym rather than load lifted allows our athletes to expend the majority of their adaptive capacity on recovering from and adapting to the increased running demands. The second block of triphasic training I like to implement is post the small Christmas break that is present in some teams in academy football, again for similar reasons like above.
Other proposed benefits behind triphasic training is that it gives our athletes excellent constraints to learn proper technique for some of our bigger movements in the gym. Athletes will quickly find out what a poor or inefficient position is when you ask them to hold the bottom of a squat or RDL for 3-5 seconds. The extended time during the eccentric phase allows the athletes to pay attention to what the movement feels like, again if its inefficient, the athlete will know about it. These extended time periods in either the isometric or eccentric phase also give us as coaches plenty of time to see how our athletes are moving and correct them if needed.
One thing (along with a tonne of others) I picked up from interning out at Elon University under Nick DiMarco was seeing how at that time they flipped the phased approach around, and did the isometric prior to the eccentric phase. Since seeing this, I’ve done this approach with some athletes in the past and saw benefit from it. Performing the isometric phase first enables us to impart a nice strength stimulus onto our athletes without a huge amount of overall load as the isometric hold will reduce the amount of weight on the bar. This is nice during the end of that pre-season block when running loads are greatly increasing. This also prepares us nicely for the eccentric block, where generally our athletes would potentially experience greater muscle soreness if we went straight into the eccentric block.
The way I implement it is pretty simple, the main movements will have a longer tempo (3-5s) in either the eccentric or isometric phase depending on the focus of the block. The frequency is once per week for lowers, and once per week for uppers. For lowers, it would mainly be used with a bilateral push, bilateral hinge, and a split squat variation. For uppers a horizontal push and horizontal pull, followed by some high volume accessory work.
