KEY PRINCIPLES OF PRE-SEASON TRAINING

Whether to ease into pre-season training or go hard from day one is a question many players ask. If you rush into pre-season training, either by launching into intense training straight away or by giving yourself too short a period of preparation time, your injury risk is going to be higher.

Training Load

Training load is the term used to quantify the amount of work you’re doing in a session or over the course of a week. Dr Tim Gabbett has carried out extensive research on the topic and his acute: chronic ratio is now widely used in a variety of sports to help athletes achieve peak fitness without increasing the risk of injury. The current week’s workload is your acute load and the workload of the previous four weeks is your chronic load. If the acute load is 1.4 times greater (or more) than the average week of the chronic load, the risk of injury increases significantly. For example, let’s say that over the last 4 weeks your workloads have been 100, 120, 130 and 135. Add these together and divide by 4 to get your average chronic load of 121.25. This means that if this week’s workload goes above 1.4 x 121.25 (169.75) then your risk of injury will greatly increase.

KEY POINT:

If you go straight from being on holiday or doing nothing into a high training load, the spike in workload increases your potential to pick up injuries. It’s simply a matter of adhering to the tried-and-tested principle of progressive overload. Gradually increasing the difficulty of an exercise leads to gradual improvements as the body adapts to cope with the increase in workload.

Adaptation Time

Changes and improvements in physical qualities can’t take place overnight. One huge session in the gym won’t trigger the body into producing hypertrophy, it takes repeated efforts with progressive loads to bring about adaptation and muscle growth. During pre-season, you’re training multiple elements of fitness at the same time. It may take only a few speed sessions to refine your technique and make improvements in terms of sprint performance, but training for lasting hypertrophy is going to be a longer process.

In beginners, strength gains are primarily from neural gains rather than actual muscle growth. Gains in muscle mass become noticeable at around 8 to 10 weeks into a progressive programme, so this gives an indication of the time frame needed in preseason to make improvements that will transfer into performance gains out on the pitch.

KEY POINT:

Adding muscle or improving strength is not something you can do with just two weeks of pre-season. You might be able to get a bit of a “pump” on, but the transfer of this to improvements on the pitch will be limited.

Progressive Overload

Easing into pre-season training is going to give you maximum benefits with minimum risk of injury. A sensible time frame to allow is 10 weeks, essentially giving you time to rest at the end of one season and then gradually return to peak fitness for the next season. Allowing time to follow a progressively overloaded programme will ensure you make the improvements that will boost your performance in training and matches and stay injury free. In terms of preparing for the football season ahead, slow cooking wins over microwaving every time.