Deload Weeks
You will likely be surprised to read this – but you aren’t actually getting stronger, or more powerful, or quicker, when you are training. You are actually gaining improvement in physical abilities in-between training sessions or training periods. In other words, it is during your recovery periods, when the actual changes within your body are occurring, that the adaptions needed for improved performance will occur. The training sessions when the hard work is being done, are merely the stimulus – which will then stimulate the adaptions during recovery. This improvement is known as super-compensation. In its simplest terms what this means is this;
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The most important point to Strength Training for Football
I will keep this to a very short and sharp point here, and give a few very important reasons for this point too.
The most important point is that no individual exercise in and of itself is all that brilliant or all that important to strength training for footy – what is far more important is how that exercise is incorporated into an overall program, and how that exercise is adapted and abbreviated to stimulate a response. In other words no individual exercise should ever be looked at as being super important – without consideration for the overall picture of what you are trying to achieve, and the other things that you must do to achieve that. Please read on to ensure that you grasp this all important key point and what we are trying to say, as well as why.
Read MoreCircuit & Compound sets for Footy Training
Paul Gamble says it perfectly when describing team sports in Strength and conditioning for Team Sports;
‘Team Sports involve a wide array of movements in multiple directions executed repeatedly in an unspecified order with high force. Contact field sports feature the added element of movement executed against resisitence.’
As a result of these points which I have highlighted in bold, many strength and conditioning experts involved in team sports choose to
Read More5 essentials to strength training DURING footy season
You have spent the previous 4-5 months slogging it out both on the track and in the gym, you have performed well in beep tests or time trials, as well as have been lifting more than you ever have before. You have managed to put on a few extra kilos in size and all importantly you have also achieved proportional gains in functional strength with this size, as a result of a well mapped out pre-season. Trial games are out of the way, the season is about to start and you feel fantastic.
From this point onwards, it is vital that you continue on with the strength training during the season in order to maintain the gains from the pre-season. After all, what is the point in all that time spent in the gym doing all the functional strength and power work specifically to improve for footy, if by round 6 or 7, every gain or improvement in physical capacity is gone, because you dropped off strength training all together when the season started. You will maintain a good level of aerobic/running conditioning from the club training twice a week, however, a conscious effort needs to be made on your part to get to the gym and maintain your functional strength training for footy.
So here are 5 essentials to keep in mind with your strength training once the season has started.
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