A closer look at an in-season weekly training layout
In the last few weeks we covered some of the essential principles and areas of focus when it comes to performing strength sessions during the season – including how you should approach it if you are only just introducing strength work for the first time in-season (having not done anything over the pre-season). So now lets look a little more specifically at the programming itself in a given week or period.
So as we know the most common layout for the week for local and junior players is for team training on Tuesday and Thursday, with matches usually Saturday. As a result the simplest layout when adding in your 2 strength sessions in season (as 2 sessions are ideal in-season) is to add them on the alternate days to club/team training.
Screenshot of table taken from Agility Speed & Conditioning for Aussie Rules
Of course this will be dependent on your own schedule with your other commitments, as well as what time of the day you do your strength sessions. This isn’t ‘the’ way to layout a week, there are several options, as long as several key principles are followed;
The most relevant of which is to avoid the strength work (in the standard manner it is performed) within 48 hours prior to game (ideally.) You do read about certain pro’s in certain sports doing it closer to matches – Michael Jordan famously did strength work on game-days before matches with his private trainer Tim Grover. Additionally it is common place to do ‘neural priming’ (or similar low rep, explosive methods) on the day of certain events – most commonly olympic weightlifting but also becoming more common in track and field. However the type of strength work local-level footy players are doing combined with the physical nature of the games, mean that this 48 hour interval is important.
So if you perform your strength work in early mornings – say 6am before work – then your ideal weekly layout (in terms of maximising your input into club sessions as well as strength sessions) would probably look closer to the table below. This shift of Wednesday to Thursday for the 2nd session means that you aren’t backing up the morning after club training. Additionally, the double session Thursday isn’t a concern, given that the Thursday night at team training is generally short and sharp, and the 2nd strength session for the week can also be shorter and sharper than the earlier one (we will come to this shortly.)
With such a layout, you also have a nicely spaced out week with more than a full day recovery (in this case at least 36 hours) between;
- Game day and session 1 the following week
- Session 1 and session 2
- Session 2 and session 3
- Session 4 and the following game day.
Only session 3 and 4 have less than 36 hours between them, and as covered, they are shorter and sharper sessions.
So play around with the layout in regards to what suits you best – and don’t be too rigid with ‘Wednesday is strength day’ for example. If you need to adjust – even change from week to week, do it. The best program is a flexible program, not a rigid one set in stone. These are 2 good examples of what a good layout would look like, but there are other options of getting in your 2 sessions a week, just be sure that these adjustments you make don’t resort to doing sessions the day before a game or the day of a game.
What about if I’m only doing 1 session a week?
If only performing 1 session a week, there is less juggling required and you can put it anywhere in the early part of the week, and not experience any real interference effect (clash between strength work and club work.) The only thing to be aware of is that you may be tempted to do an extra-long session and cram 2 nights worth into 1 night – with a 90 minute session or similar. This is a mistake, as beyond a certain number of sets, the quality will drop, and the fatigue accumulation resulting from that 1 session will be high – especially for an in-season session. So if only doing the one session (and it can be slightly longer than if you were doing 2 sessions – we are coming to this) make it early-to-mid-week.
So what about the length of a session?
Despite the fact that you can – and should – still be performing strength work in-season, including more maximal level lifts (provided they are appropriately programmed and based around your own ability level and level of experience), this does not mean sessions should look the same as they do over the pre-season. Even though similar levels of intensity can be met at different times (we will expand on this soon), volume should not be as high as during the pre-season. That is not only total volume for the week that should not be as high, but also the volume per session.
When looking at this, it can be misleading to explain the length of sessions in terms of length of time – ’30-45 minutes’ for example. This is because any one of a number of things can contribute to the time taken in a session. You can achieve varying amounts of work in 30 minutes for example – and often for many young guys at the gym, there is a whole heap of talking and phone time in between the odd set of bench press and bicep curl. In other words, you could achieve jack-shit in the same amount of time as you can achieve a lot – so time is misleading. Thinking more in terms of total sets is a better way to look at it. There are an infinite number of different sets and reps and programming combinations – and so it is impossible to give specific numbers here for actual sets and reps etc. However, as a ball park, where the total work sets in a session over pre-season may be 20-24 sets total, during the season this should be reduced to 12-15 work sets total, as a ballpark number. The moral of the story, whatever you are doing in pre-season, reduce it to anywhere between 50-70% depending on your ability level, during the season.
What about the intensity of a session?
Intensity is a tough one to give specific direction on, as this more than other variables like total sets and reps, will be largely effected by experience and ability level. When it comes to strength training, intensity generally means the % of your 1RM (1 repetition maximum) that you are lifting. So for example if your 1RM on the bench press is 100kg, and you are doing a set of 8 repetitions at 65kg, your intensity would be expressed at ‘65% of 1RM.’ This can get a little tricky – and unnecessary I may add (even the worlds most well known – and arguably the most successful – strength coach Charles Poliquin states that he doesn’t program intensities based on 1RM, but rather prescribes sets and repetitions, and lets these variables dictate the weight that is used.) Getting a little off topic here, but intensity is generally thought of as how close to your maximum you need to push on every particular repetition. So say a set of 3 repetitions at 90kg would generally be thought of as a higher intensity than a set of 8 at 65kg.
“If the competitive phase is longer than 5 months, athletes should dedicate 25% of the total work to the maintenance of maximal strength, because the detraining of maximum strength will negatively affect overall muscular endurance capacity."
‘The longer the competitive phase is, the more important it is to maintain some elements of maximal strength because this type of strength is an important component of both power and muscular endurance.”
Tudor Bompa.
This higher intensity (and lower repetition per set) of lifting is definitely getting to a more advanced stage in terms of the ability and experience required to do it. So this discussion point should only relate to more advanced and experienced lifters in the first place. In the general introductory article to the in-season training, we discussed varying the stimulus in season between a block of ‘volume’ and a block of ‘strength.’ This ‘strength’ block represents the higher intensity, lower repetition work – and once again, as we covered in this previous article as well, shouldn’t be part of your programming at all if you are inexperienced, and certainly not if you haven’t done any over the pre-season. But for those who have, another option – and we get asked about this too – is maintaining one higher intensity session each week, as well as a lower intensity session each week.
But players who have the experience and ability to be performing this kind of lifting shouldn’t be sacred-off from doing this more maximal lifting in season. Maintaining this more maximal stimulus is important to maintain if you have the ability to do so – it just needs to be programmed a little more smartly/carefully during the season than in the pre-season. Indeed former GWS strength and power coach (now high performance manager at Paramatta Eels) Lachlan Willmot discusses in this podcast their aim of giving players regular exposure to both high velocity (sprinting) and high force (heavy weight) training. OK, this is the elite level, and the method may be a little different, but the principle applies in terms of the importance to look to maintain this physical quality.
If you are still performing the higher intensity session each week during the season, it would be best placed earlier in the week – Monday or Tuesday, with the lower intensity session to come later.
One ‘High’ and one ‘Low’ per week
Note this ‘high’ and ‘low’ day weekly layout doesn’t just apply to intensity – but volume too. In other words, even when doing a purely ‘volume maintenance’ block or if a beginner/semi-beginner and maintaining fairly standard sets and reps during the season, you may find it advantageous to have 1 ‘high’ day and 1 ‘low’ day. In other words, having one day were you have a higher total work volume on one day, with a lower one on the other. This is no different to what you would likely be doing out at club/team training, with Tuesday being the main/longer session, and Thursday being shorter and sharper. The same applies here, with the ‘high’ day – whatever it may look like for you – being best performed earlier in the week, and the ‘low’ day being later.
This isn’t a necessity and may begin to make your layout more complex than it needs to be – it is merely an option that you may wish to play around with to maximise recovery and freshness later in the week.
So hopefully some of the initial questions posed are being answered – at least in your head as you apply this to your own unique situation. Because as always, information can only be general or broad in the sense that anything not tailored to an individual situation is broad. Being more specific is very individualised. Sometimes this key point can get lost among the ‘this is THE WAY it should be done’ mentality that sometimes pervades. Having said that, there should be some important takeaways here to apply to your own unique situation.
A couple rounds in, lets keep the physical condition up.
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