HOW TO AVOID

Training Interference

Interference describes the potential negative effect of attempting to train multiple elements of fitness at the same time.

In football, you need stamina to stay out on the pitch for 90 minutes and you also need speed to keep up with the game and make an impact. You need both stamina and speed, but the training required to improve each of these elements is very different.

Training for stamina usually involves using a combination of low, medium and high intensity actions and movements with the aim being able to sustain these efforts over time. Training for speed, on the other hand, involves short, fast-paced sprinting to develop fast-twitch muscle fibres and improve the phosphagen and glycolytic energy systems.

The two interfere with each other if trained at the same time. If you’re doing a lot of stamina training, your energy and nervous systems are going to be taxed, inhibiting your ability to produce maximal sprint speeds.

An extreme example would be an Olympic athlete trying to train to win both the 100m and the marathon at the same time. Their marathon training would be inhibiting their potential to become a faster sprinter and vice versa. They are two different qualities which must be developed separately from one another if progress is desired.

As a result, this athlete is likely to become average at both and world class at neither, despite having the potential to be world class. Of course, during the season, the goal shifts to simply needing to maintain the gains made during pre-season. This is why you will often see teams combining many different elements of training into one session during the season.

Linear Periodisation

It goes without saying that footballers need a combination of all elements of fitness in order to be effective on the pitch, which is why things can become puzzling. So how can somebody like Ronaldo display incredible levels of speed, stamina and strength all at the same time?

The truth is that to become an elite football athlete like Ronaldo, it takes years if not decades. It’s a repeated cycle of producing the right stimulus and allowing enough recovery time (combined with optimal nutrition) for adaptations and progress to occur

You cannot speed up time, but what you can do is ensure you’re training in the most optimal way (and not wasting precious time).

The order in which you train various elements must make sense. For example, in gym training, the common order would be to train for hypertrophy first and then strength. With hypertrophy training you would be increasing your muscle mass, which would then enable you to lift a greater load in the strength phase. Increased strength means a greater ability to produce force, so after the strength training phase you’d move onto power training, learning how to apply that force at an increased speed i.e. explosiveness.

You train one thing which makes the next thing better and then you train the next thing because it makes the thing after that better. This is known as linear periodisation or block periodisation.

Structure Your Season

You’re always going to get better long-term gains when you concentrate on one element of fitness at a time and combine that with complimentary elements.

There are some fitness elements that can be trained for at the same time. For example, sprint training works well alongside power training in the gym and muscular endurance training goes well with stamina training on the pitch. Categorising your training into field-based or gym-based in this way can help to identify elements that will complement each other.

Planning which elements of fitness are most important for each period of the season allows you to structure your training in a way that makes sense and linear periodisation makes it possible to improve as a player with each block of training potentiating the next block, building on existing gains to create further improvements.

Filling Your Glass

Avoid overfilling your glass by putting too many fitness elements in there all at once. Add one element at a time and consider the most beneficial order to pour them in.