From amateur to elite level, players need to know their tactical role in the game. For example, how a Full-Back defends and close spaces. It may be a position/individual specific drill or how a player behaves in the collective structure. Individual (Video 1): individual responsibilities of each player. According to Delgado and Villanueva (2018), we can categorize the levels to:ġ. How does a player behave? How do a group of players behave? And in the end how does the whole team behave when we have the ball or when we don’t have the ball. If you see that something is not working the way you wanted, just change it!įigure 1. Training Process B) Level of Structural OrganisationĪn important aspect we need to consider before starting to design our weekly plans and drills is the structural organization of our players in the game. There aren’t any magic formulas and secrets, just be demanding with yourselves, discuss with your staff, always targeting players’ improvement as a priority. As you can see at (figure 1) training is a live process from pre-season to in-season. A competitive game is always the best test for you as a coach and for your players’ understanding of the game. Identify their tactical and physical weaknesses and work on them throughout the pre-season training testing their improvements with friendly games. Kicking off early July (or earlier) in pre-season, the first thing you should do is to run a ‘needs analysis’ of each of your players. Recently, researchers have attempted to quantify and study different periodization models from elite teams (Malone et al, 2015 Martin-Garcia et al, 2018), however, it is not ideal for coaches to adapt plans and training models from elite teams, as elite players’ characteristics are not the same. Monitoring and analyzing your training sessions and your periodization models can help you improve as a coach. Don’t stick to pre-planned strategies, you must be prepared to modify your plans. Periodization of recovery plays a crucial role in keeping your players fresh and ready to perform. Training your team in relation to competition demands could be an advantageous strategy for coaches to use within their training periodization models (Martin-Garcia et al, 2018). Hence, the target should be finding a balance between loading the players in training sessions or matches to promote adaptation and reduce injury risk. The key element is to keep the players fit on the pitch without injuries. The tactical periodization model integrates all these and provides the coaches with the ability to work on a more holistic approach when preparing their team for competition. Coaches need to find a way to have efficient training sessions covering the tactical and physical principles of the game. However, in an annual soccer season with 50-60 competitive games, the “windows” of opportunity to improve physical variables are short. A variety of periodization models have been used in soccer, from traditional: Matveiev’s model & Pendulum model to contemporary: Verkhoschansky training blocks & Bompa’s extended performance model (Delgado & Villanueva, 2018).
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Thus, the main objective of practitioners working in elite football is to increase (or maintain) performance throughout the year and reduce the rate of injuries. Soccer periodization is a planned variation in training load and fatigue levels and should be designed in order to keep players’ readiness across the competitive season as high as possible (Van Winckel et al, 2014). Before going to our training methods and methodology, there are some important issues that we need to address: A) Planning and Periodisation Players are smart and ask a lot of questions therefore, coaches have to be ready to provide answers! So, after understanding the necessity to train as we play (and play as we train), it’s time to start thinking about how we can achieve that. Nowadays, players’ buy-in is fundamental! Then, explain it to staff, and later to their players.
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Coaches should have their training methodology written down. Coaches should know their strengths and weaknesses and adjust their philosophy way of playing according to the team they are working with. Sometimes, coaches tend to overcomplicate their work with fancy equipment and ideas but in the end, they forget their initial target.
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What does this mean? If anyone comes to your training and asks about your session or a given drill, you must be able to explain it in simplified terms.
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“If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough” Albert Einstein In case you missed the first part of this article series, click HERE. Balancing Physical & Tactical Load in Soccer A Holistic Approach – Part 2: Build Your Own Training Methodology