In this episode of the podcast, we discuss how to train for field sports. Naturally, there are many differences between the various field sports, however, there are also many commonalities too. Having a better understanding of how to train for your sport can really help improve your performance.
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Transcript
The following transcript was generated by AI, so please excuse any inconsistencies and deviations from the source video.
Gary
Welcome to the Triage podcast with me Gary McGowan and as always Paddy. Paddy how are you?
Paddy
I’m positively splendid Gary, although in London the last while you know it hasn’t been as summery as I had hoped. It’s nice and warm it’s always in around the 20 to 25 nice but it is a little bit too overcast, you know, and but I suppose that is what you get for living in the British Isles! How has the weather been over there for you?
Gary
In Mexico it was kind of horrible to be honest just ruthlessly humid like where we are now in a more temperate area off in the mountains out of over 2200 meters in San Cristobal, something like that, but yet still more, which is not as humid, which is much more enjoyable.
Paddy
We love to see us anyway. Guy, what are we talking about today?
Gary
Today we’re talking about Field Sports. So we’re continuing the train series and we’re moving to focus on performance and we’re talking about field sports generally, obviously encompassing a lot of different that needs to have a crossover in terms of the requirements but definitely different things like, you know, Gaelic football, regular football or soccer rugby, American football potentially hockey, lots of different sports that would fit in here.
You know, they of course, have their own individual requirements, but they have something in common and that you were you’re required to be on your feet, can’t do things like repeat and sprints, jump in direction, color or the distance to be a kilometer. But we work the math and so on. You know, there are common features that we might look at in a strength or conditioning program that some would use to improve their performance of in and off to do.
Paddy
90% more shot. Except that you know there are obviously differences. I but the thing that I always like people always focus on they’re like oh well their rugby is clearly different than football, like soccer. And so we had even considered a two of those would treat them completely differently and obviously to an extent. Yeah, that’s right. Like if you’re a rugby player and especially if you’re in certain positions, you’re going to need to focus on certain aspects of it.
More like, let’s say for example, having more muscle mass, being stronger. Yeah, obviously if you’re tackling people like rugby, tackling people, you’re going to need to be stronger, you’re going to need to have more muscle mass. But there still are so many commonalities across like feel sports that if you understand that kind of baseline of these are the kind of things you need to be thinking about for field sports.
And then I layer on the more specific stuff to my actual sport. It’s actually a much easier way to conceptualize this stuff, especially if you’re a coach and because rather than having to learn about every single individual field sport, you’re like, Oh, I’ve learned the baseline, the commonalities, the foundational stuff. And I only need to learn about the specifics. Then if I’m coaching an individual with whatever goal, Absolutely.
Gary
And that’s a segment nicely into our first segment on the issue of needs analysis. So this is really important between sports and within in sport differences within athletes. So for example, if you’re not playing in goal versus you know, being a striker in soccer, they’re very different require, you know, fairly dramatic differences in rugby. Well see this between, you know, someone like Winger versus like different differences between those individual athletes even just looking at, okay, so what you have to do when you’re thinking about training brain or field or are not talking about, you know, formal training, that you begin with more or less control of talking about the strength of anything that you do in your own team or within strength conditioning coach, your tactical what’s your position and what are the general characteristics for player in that position? Okay. It’s really important and I’ll be a certain amount of selection over time. For example, if you’re 25 years old and you’ve been playing sport for 15 years of this, over time you’ve probably been selected for indicate a position based on your strength.
Okay, So you probably MacBook Air, for example, or a higher requirement in your position. Do you do more rapid changing, direct direct you do more jumping, you do more tackling. You need to have a larger body view for your position. And so the one difference of fundamental fact with what it gives you is an idea of what you should be.
And for example, if you wait 75 gig, an average player progression level is 85, 98, you in your position then maybe be the case that you’re just being an exception to the rule that makes you different than what an opposition perfectly possible. But it’s also possible that not being an ordinance could be a limiting factor for your performance.
So this is such an ABC standpoint. What is the really important? Because this is something that you would look at and even back combat sports, for example, if you were a combat sports athlete and you weigh 75 and you were in that wave, we used to be at a body count. It’s more than all the other guys that when you wake up, maybe the question would be, should you be a lower rate?
Should you be aiming to gain more weight like exact same thing, right. If you’re with respect to position.
Paddy
100% and how much you are there, we’ve talked or like a needs analysis, you’re going to need to do it for every sport. But then also, if you’re an individual coaching yourself, training yourself, you’re going to need to do it for what is wrong or I should say wrong with your game. What is missing in your game? Maybe it is a fitness component, maybe it’s a strength component, maybe it’s body composition, etc. etc. Like obviously it’s sports specific then, but I think you’re going to note it now in a second.
Like that, those like being able to be accurate in that those actually really influence how we set up our training. Then, you know, is, is or like for example, you and I, we won’t like going to the gym. So it could be our bias to be like, oh yeah, let’s go to the gym, let’s really focus on getting stronger, getting bigger, etc. right?
And we both do jujitsu. But if we’re focusing all our energy on getting bigger, getting stronger, and it’s actually taking away from our jujitsu and it’s not really something that we need to be focusing on because we’re already at the top of our weight class, for example, or, you know, we’re already in a better body composition than the same people in that weight class.
Then why are we wasting our energy? I would argue it’s not wasting your energy, but that’s my bias. But why are you really focusing on your energy on that when you would be better off focusing your energy on perhaps training, more jujitsu or training more of your sports, your specific requirements, or perhaps maybe you have great body composition, you’re strong enough, you have the muscle mass that you need, etc. Both your cardiovascular fitness is nowhere near where it needs to be for your position or for your sport in general.
Again, you need to do this needs analysis to identify where you’re weak because then it will allow you to actually create a more and I’m going to say consistent a more appropriate program for your needs. You know, and the unfortunate thing is most people just skip this step. They’ll type into Google or whatever. I go three day gym rugby plan.
I really give you this generic, Oh yeah, here, focus on these things. Do these movements do this amount of volume in the gym? Cool. And yeah, that’s great for getting you started or at least get you into a training routine, whatever, but it might or might not be specific enough for your exact needs. And I know the two of us, we have a lot of clients on our roster both now and in the past from various field sports where they’ve fallen down this trap of just following a generic plan of action or hearing these soundbites about their sport.
Like we’ve a lot of excuse me, soccer players, for example, and they’re like, Oh, it’s a repeated sprint sport, you know, so I need to be hammering sprints. I need to be I got the best possible like sprinting performance. But then you look at their actual like aerobic fitness and it’s nowhere near where it actually needs to be to be able to have that repeated sprint effort occur, especially not for 90 minutes, and especially not if we’ve got multiple games per week, you know, so you can’t just rely on the soundbites.
You have to actually really dig a little bit deeper into the sport in general, the like the requirements, the needs of the sport. And then your needs as an athlete yourself.
Gary
Absolutely. And that’s a good point because early on, a good athlete, like let’s say when you’re a teenager and like a general like man of Action is actually a pretty good thing because what you’re trying to do early on as an athlete is be somewhat of general that you’re trying to develop a general basic quality. Then over time and you mature, you’re able to identify more weaknesses that you can generate that you can then address.
So I had a conversation with a doctor who had spoken recently and he was putting out and felt that he needed to get to maximal intensity sprint session per week on top of the rest of the training. He had heard that that was good. At the end. He thought it was good idea and it would be potentially if that was a big weakness in his game and we really needed to focus on developing it whenever it wasn’t.
We’ve got to deal with a problem of injuries that were, in my estimation, likely provoked by all these high intensity effort. So what we did was we did pull out one session to reduce the volume of the one that we kept in because it was already a training game. The one point in adding all of these to have all of training contributing to betterment of the performance, we all see this a lot in Gulfport that to have a kind of active mentality and interest in bodybuilding, technique, development, you know, they like going to the gym because they want to look good as well, but they don’t training as if they’re a professional bodybuilder and it kind of taken away from their game. And that’s fine. If the game isn’t your priority, but if it is your priorities and the effort putting you in potentially compromising performance so priorities and then needs analysis. The other thing you can do here when it comes to like identifying weaknesses is ask yourself what have you or other identified weaknesses in your game.
So, for example, look back and ask yourself what really let me go. That season was it recurring injury, for example? Was it that I could never keep up with the speed that I’m getting later on in games and with the totality, not the body, not the power of my opponent? And then I saw, you know, other players maybe that a visit to the club, your manager, your coach, investor, try to be as objective.
Both energy can be that you’re not objective about that what you end up doing is kind of maybe what’s trendy or maybe what everyone else is doing or feel you should be doing, but you’re not being objective about it. Okay, that could be important. And then just on how to know.
Paddy
Like this is actually so hard to do because it does require a good bit of introspection because one of the things might be something like your attitude, you know, like your actual you like, Oh, I just I turn up late and I go home early and stuff like that where you’re just like, like they’re all fine. Like if you’re doing this as a hobby, you know, like, cool.
No big deal. But if you are someone that’s really trying to milk your feel sports performance for all it’s worth, you kind of need to be that person. That’s, you know, I’m I show up early and I am the last person to leave and I’m I’m volunteering to clean up afterwards and maybe get a few extra minutes of, you know, training in or whatever, you know.
And so it is quite hard to do a needs analysis and be honest with yourself because while we’re obviously focusing on the more strength and conditioning aspects and things here and, you know, maybe the health aspects as well, some of the things are just more psychological, more the way you interact with the sport, which obviously, again, you do have to be a lot more introspective then like if someone says you just have a shit attitude to the sport, you’re not a team player, like you have to take that on board and that might be something that you need to work on.
Then you might not know how to, but at least you’ve identified the the pitfall in your game.
Gary
Absolutely. And that then comes to define a key question. Need to know what does what you really have strength conditioning depth or is the skill or sports vision against you is so important because you can just see your way out of the problems. This is something else I didn’t do just you. For example, you look at the top guys and you look at what they want.
They actually do training. It’s like, okay, they all have very different strength training programs, train like bodybuilders on a train and more of what might look like a sports specific faction. And there’s probably some role for these types of things there. But fundamentally what they do is they just do it for, you know, for hours and hours and hours and hours every single day for years on end.
Okay. And that activity is something that I get asked a lot. You know, people are like, oh, I know. I just you just do this for me, for my listening. And at that point, like, this is probably a problem and it’s feedback to them. Or are you let’s say you were at agape they’re not prepared like you know, are you, are you accurate?
Are you accurate when you’re taking the ball? So how do you get to your subject? You tell me and I’ll be following all these different skills that are fundamental to or need to be a big focus in your training. You know, if it’s going, you could be the strongest guy, you could be the most powerful guy. But if you’re not able to accurately, accurately the the ball of the batter, you’re not able to catch, you’re not able to give specific skills or sport, then you’re not really going to get anywhere.
If it doesn’t look, we can both go to the Olympics. I know the dignity of the ball on day four. Okay. So that’s incredibly important. Don’t miss out on that.
Paddy
100%. So with that in mind, with field sports. Where do we actually start with all this? Like again, we’ll call it strength and conditioning. It’s just training.
Gary
Yeah. So I think conditioning or cardio fitness training, whatever you want to call it, is probably one of the core areas that’s common to all of your sport. Okay? You simply need to be very unique and a solid aerobic base and you have the ability to have repeated brain activity. So all of when there’s rugby, soccer don’t require a player.
You should start by providing strength. You need to know that we refer to an you about the gaps in games when we do things in our activities. And am I underperform. I’m underperforming relative in my position of a underperforming. Okay. That didn’t help you. How much power do you need of the hour into your conditioning program? You get what you should what you realize is that you’re already doing conditioning work.
You fluctuate. So let’s say you’re training three nights a week, you’re doing wrong and you’re running that. You’re doing all that is in there. And for some players, that might be a lot for them to actually be at a high level of fitness relative to the players on the team. But for others they’re not okay. So what you identify where you stand on that ladder and if you were the person that you’re doing all the training on the pitch, but you were able the engine is clearly much poorer and that is the a priority for you both within the season and in the off season.
Okay. So what you can do is you review your team, your team training, then the criteria work accordingly. For example, that could be after a skill session, the maybe on a Wednesday evening, you have a field session and you’ve got a gym on site or you can access. That’d be a good place to go and do some additional aerobic work.
Okay, so you’re going to do your conditioning work there when you’ve had a session. You could also do it as a recovery session after a game or in the morning ahead of the session later on and so on. But the idea here is that you want us to fill in the gaps in your week with additional aerobic work so that you’re building on mentally that aerobic engine.
Okay. So that that can look like a multiple that can be set up in multiple different ways. For example, if you find that you you’re laying down super fresh, you might be running. If you find that your legs aren’t that fresh, you’ve got already, maybe you’re going to do a lower impact activity like a bike, garbage, stationary bike, cross trainer, etc. All you’re doing is trying to get additional they work, got a station.
So what you might do is maybe 30 minutes around two more. So so you’re looking at about 60 to 70% through maximal heart rate. If you’re doing that on top of your typical training and you’re doing that maybe three times per week, probably at the perspective that that will contribute to you having a higher level of fitness and it definitely you can prioritize in the off season because you can then maintain that if you put a lot of effort into the off season so that there the you may be okay.
So from an anaerobics perspective, I think it’s a really big point. You need to have very sort of the role of fitness in training multiple ways. But it all starts out with like, is this something that you really need to work on? Do you need more current, you need more stamina? And if you’re gasping it out always in the last 15 minutes games, you’re always underperforming.
Any real big tech? Yeah, that question will be yeah.
Paddy
Yeah. And I think the vast majority of people I shouldn’t say the vast majority of their athletes are maybe not, but the vast majority of people that tend to be more recreational athletes, they probably need a bit more of an aerobics gas tank than they actually think they do. You know, like you can go into like, you know, some more quote unquote objective measures being like, oh, what’s your resting heart rate?
Is it sub 50? Oh, so 50, you’re probably aerobically quite fit. You know, you can maybe use your V or something if your HIV is over 70 consistently, probably quite fit. But those two things are also influenced by so many other things stress levels, sleep, etc. etc. So it’s not quite perfect. So going back to that needs analysis, These are looking at how you perform in the games, how you recover between sessions, you know, are you someone that always has to be subbed off after half time or whatever because you know your performance is just slowly, quite quickly actually just going down into the bin, right?
Because you start off great. But then as soon as you have to do more and more repeated sprints, you just you just don’t have the ability, right? So again, you have to go back to that needs analysis. You have to identify where you’re weak. And for the vast majority of people, I would argue that it is that aerobic fitness and that’s somewhat unfortunate, especially if you are doing this recreationally, because training your aerobic system is probably the system that takes the most time to train.
But you have to just dedicate a lot of hours to it, not just like, oh, I can I can get stronger with a 30 minute gym session twice per week. You know, I have a lot of, you know, sports athletes that do that. They’re consistently getting stronger and their actual training sessions are quite short. They’re just like, Right, cool.
I was a gym on site and I just do a quick 30 minute session and oh, I’m still consistently getting stronger. Whereas if you’re aerobics is one that needs work, you just need to put in the hours, you know? And unfortunately it takes a lot of time and that is why there is a huge focus on, oh, we’ll do some high intensity interval training for your sport.
Now, your sport is a repeated sprint sports, so this is the thing that makes the most sense. And that’s true to an extent. Like you’re doing some high intensity interval training will improve your aerobic fitness, especially if there’s a larger volume of it. But there’s no denying that. But and especially in a sporting context, there’s a lot of fatigue generated from that.
And the thing that I say to a lot of my athletes, the thing that changes between being like a beginner to an intermediate athlete and then to an advanced athlete is the ability to manage fatigue appropriately. You know, like you see beginner athletes, they just basically blow their load every single week. They go hand on. They’re like, Oh, I was going to fucking train as hard as possible in the gym.
So I know I’m fatigued from that. I’m going to train as hard as possible with my conditioning stuff. I’m really doing like a lot of anaerobic intervals and blah, blah blah and they’re just super fatigued from that. And then they get to the game and they’re fatigued. They don’t perform as well. Whereas you see intermediate and advanced athletes, they know when to push and they also know when to pull back and they know how hard they should be training so that they’re able to perform when they are supposed to perform.
You know, and that’s just a very hard thing to do. It’s very hard thing for me to explain for all you guys tell you what to do if this is just a generalized podcast. But it is really important and it really does come back to that fundamental needs analysis. And if you’re in doubt, it probably comes back to building a bigger aerobic gas tank.
Gary
Absolutely. Now, with that said, it doesn’t mean there’s no place for speed in interval work. This can be incredibly important. There’s fine deficiency in terms of just doing hard interval. It don’t build your fitness when bringing these into your work. You just have to be a bit more specific about what you’re doing. So number one, what I would do it if I’m doing, you know, like maximal short sprint, I’m doing slightly longer really hard lactic sprint definition in the moment.
But if you’re doing what you generally want to do is have them in that kind of Monday to Thursday window. If you have a match on the weekend. So for example, if you’re playing a massive battery that doubles when your bosses are you really hard because on a Friday you’re going on the performance that or because you’re going to be sore.
If had you done a light, it will be different. It wouldn’t have had an effect. Maybe it might be a little bit. What would it be for in consideration with this for anybody, cardio sprint interval cardio is that it is more fatiguing and the more Gordon in particular to get it done with a weight bearing activity. So if you’re doing everything you get a lot of loading as when muscles are stretched, you get eccentric loading, loading time muscle and that can be flammable.
Something like an assault, like the beauty of which is that it is primarily a concentrated activity involving eccentric loading. So these are the considerations that make your play so I would say Monday to Thursday when you’re doing that sprint or anaerobic type of activity and ideally from the start, more time to recover identical structure and what you need to do better in that yourself.
What am I actually trying? Is it maximal and or maximal acceleration? Okay, slightly different, but in that what you’re looking for and doing for long distance, or is it your anaerobic capacity that you’re trying to develop? So for example, the ability to it’s not necessarily the speed that you’re trying to keep, but rather the maintenance of that speed and the ability to overcome that muscle burning there that you get drawn on again.
Is it the repeat principles that you need deeper to be different things? Because if you go out and you do less than 100 meters sprint and you do ten reps that with 30 seconds training, that is going to be a brutal effect, but it’s not going to make you faster or generally probably not going to beat you faster because what you’re doing there in the first, in the first, yeah, you’re going to be training maximal day, you’re going to be working.
I’m trying to read about like how fast you can run for a good rep. You’re going to slow, Don’t go down about you don’t really have any role with training. You’re getting a lot of volume in there as well, but it’s not taking it. Work may be so unique. No different between sessions, maybe 200 to 400 meters, very close that you might be doing or 1030 seconds.
People like you going out and doing 20 to 60 meters with adequate recovery between. So you’re able to get back velocity. They’re very different things that people do differently between the two, which is why I don’t like the term to get into because what exactly you mean invariable.
Paddy
Yeah. And this is again goes back to our needs analysis. Like you have to be so specific, but if you’re a beginner, you can probably afford to be more generalized. But again, one second inside intermediate and advanced, you need to be more and more specific, like maybe you are fast enough, maybe you are able to keep that up, but your change of direction is shit.
You know, like if it’s a straight line that you’re you’re good, but as soon as there’s a bit of zigzagging going in, you’re off. Or perhaps it is a case that as soon as someone gives you a little bit of a knock while you’re at top speeds, then you’re off, you know, so all of these things have to be trained differently.
And also, obviously, some of them are easier to train, like going out and just being like, Oh, here at the field, I can just run in a straight line happy days, you know, versus if I’m like, Oh, it’s actually it is when I get a knock and then I can’t recover that momentum or whatever, you know, that’s a lot harder to train, but you can train that.
You can be more specific with that. But first of all, you have to identify it. You have to identify, oh, that’s actually the area that I need to improve on. You know, So again, I agree with you, Gary, when we’re talking about intervals or anaerobic training or spring training or whatever, we need to be specific. And not only do we need to be specific with what we’re actually trying to train, we also need to be specific with regards to the recovery from that.
And I mean both during the session and then after the session because you see this all the time across the board, across various athletes, they’ll try to turn their sprint training sessions into these like death sessions being like, I’m doing some sort of like 32nd sprint and I’m only going to take 30 seconds recovery and yeah, that’s definitely a potential method for creating some sort of metabolic, you know, stress on the body.
But that’s not the way that you maximize your performance in a 32nd sprint like you want, complete or almost complete at least recovery from that, you know, so you’re probably going to do yeah 32nd sprint with three, maybe even 5 minutes rest in between, you know, And again, there’s potential to do other things during not potentially to do like skill work like you’re doing like somewhere like active recovery and you’re just dribbling the ball for example, you know there is still potential for stuff to do in that recovery period, but you’re not just going, Oh yeah, I’m going to do 32nd sprint, 30 seconds off, 30 seconds brand, 30 seconds off.
You know, it’s just not the the best way to set things up. So again, we need to be cognizant of the recovery demands during the session, like what’s the best way to maximize the performance in that session and the training adaptations in that session? But then also, how long is it going to take me to recover from this?
You know, if I do 20 hard sprints, even if I take enough recovery in between them, I’m I know dead for a week. Like are my legs. They’re just in bits for a week, you know, am I just destroyed. Like that’s very possible. You know, over 20 hard sprints like that’s a lot, that’s a big recovery. Like if I needed 20 hard sets of squats, for example.
Right. You’d be like, right. That’s that’s a big I was a hard work s you know, if you’re used to training in the gym, so why would you think any different from sprinting like it’s quote unquote maximal effort, even if it’s, you know, so maximal like you need to think about the rest of your week. And again, this goes back to what I said earlier on about, like beginners, they just blow their load early.
They just go, Oh, I am just going to go in and destroy myself in this session with no regard for what’s coming up later in the week or later in the month or later in the year, you know, whereas those intermediate and advanced people, they’re going, okay, yeah, well, actually if I train that hard on, even if it’s a monday and I have a game on Saturday, I’m probably still going to feel some fatigue in my legs.
You know, I’m probably gonna still feel a little bit drained, you know? So during the training sessions during the week, the coach is going to be looking at me going, He’s not fit to play. He’s not at his best. You know, he needs more rest. So then you don’t even get that gain. You know, So intermediate and advanced, they know when to push and they know when to pull back.
And I would say for the vast majority of people training all sports, if they actually just trained and went into training with the thought process of training a little bit below their capacity, I just keep it a little bit more in the tank. They would actually get way more out of their sport. Maybe not just initially, you know, they might see, Oh, there’s no difference over a month, three months, maybe even 12 months.
But across their whole career, their whole training career, they’re going to get less injuries. They’re going to have more playing time. They’re going to be more rested when it’s important to be rested so that they can actually perform, you know, So that is something that it just takes time to learn and you just have to be cognizant of this.
Gary
Absolutely. And I think the what strength training really helps to illustrate the point to people, because, like, if you’re a power actor and you try to do, let’s say, like 585, 90% max, you’re going pretty much and you’re like, I do that with 45 to 60 seconds. How do you think that would go? Very poorly. You’re not going to recover.
That’s the key point our actors will read. So much between that they’re trying to recover their ability to have maximum output again. And that’s the exact thing here when it comes to maximal ability. So in summary there, you’ve kind of got three primary modes of conditioning that you can do. You’ve got your your speed training, which is maximal, short and rested.
Okay. If you want to be well, right between both, obviously the motion, if you really can fight ten meter acceleration. Fast forward to 15 minutes from the recovery. You’ve got your rear of the training. That’s your easy, long continuous work. And then you’ve got your enabling collective training, which is extremely hard, short, moderate intensity. It could be anywhere between ten and 60 seconds.
You might even get 3 minutes of back effort working with maximum effort. And it’s generally very tricky. Okay. And obviously there’s crossover between all three of these demands, but thinking of them in that way and help you to try to map out your training. Now, of course, when it comes to your work, there are a couple of additional bespoke elements that fit in there.
For example, like you mentioned previously, in your event, that is your straight line running. Fantastic. But when it comes to changing direction, training, agility, etc., these are additional challenges for you. These are the things that you’re limiting factors. Then they might come in and factor in with your speed training. For example, you might do at a coal event, change direction or sprints of waiting for directions run that you really have to make up.
Okay, so you don’t practice these. Many of putting all the conditioning training practices are in general summary of things you should be thinking about running conditioning, training for your work.
Paddy
Yeah. The only thing I would add to this and it’s obvious enough is that most feel sports have on seasons and off seasons, and you’re going to be able to train potentially harder during your off season. But that doesn’t always mean that you should. Right? And the reason I say that is because so many people go into their season with a boatload of fatigue because they spent their offseason better, was two months, three months, four months obviously depends on the sport.
They spend all that all season absolutely destroying themselves, which is fine. Yeah, we all want to train hard, but again, you need to be ready when you’re supposed to be ready, you know, and I very often do this like I know I’ve a few athletes right now who are thinking, okay, well, sports start again in September, so we’re going to still be maximizing our training.
We’re certainly maximizing our performance right now. But we need to be thinking, okay, well, I want to have at least a week, maybe two weeks of this kind of like tapering before I actually get back into the season itself so that I can wash away that fatigue. Right. So there you do need to think about this stuff on a yearly, ideally multi yearly timescale.
And that’s just hard for a lot of people because again, it’s just a recreational thing. You’re not thinking like, when should I organize my holiday so that I can maximize my recovery going into my training season? You know, I know a lot of people, they do actually do that because, you know, sport is a big part of their life, but you do kind of need to be thinking, well, when is it appropriate to push and when is it appropriate to pull back?
So that’s just something that I wanted to make a note of.
Gary
Absolutely. And then that brings us to the second big category of training, which is true. This is obviously a big part of the strength component, in particular of strength conditioning. It may be scoping it or it may be global led coach led it totally dependent on sport and the level at which you play. Okay, different clubs in different regards and you may or may not have a strong position coach.
There are again hugely variable requirements. If you’re in rugby, you need a lot of a lot of training. If you’re a winger in soccer, you played on the best way in your whole game. Based on you being in a center, it will have 2 to 300 feet. That and it probably wasn’t what most athletes in most uniform in general probably would benefit from relative strength and greater muscle fat mass.
The way we think about that is relative strength, meaning that the amount you can lift relative to your body weight. So for example, if you’re ADHD and everything, other players ADHD, but you have a considerably stronger gender or double body weight versus everyone else, which is just one eighth body weight, that’s an advantage. Okay. If you have that center, your body has, it may not be an advantage.
Generally when it comes to the muscle, the fat doesn’t do much for you in sport, or at least in more. Obviously, that is having an extra fat in terms of just not for certain rugby, for a sport like sumo wrestling or the sport. But there will be that that having a little bit of extra just to make up some extra matter.
But generally speaking, the more of your weight it can be composed of that the better enough that you will be remembered as the work though if your sprinting to be able to sprint and you had to think about having an extra five back, that’s going to do something for you like your back. It literally just be carried. Okay, So if you get an extra kilo of hamstring over the next the next time your leg hamstring muscle can produce sports, okay?
It can be trained in arms to fight loss of strength and high speed boxers, but it’s not to do anything for you. So don’t covered pretty much all the way.
Paddy
Down and really hard thing about this is that some sports like say for example again rugby like the ideal would be that you have low body fat and just boatloads of muscle. However, that’s actually quite hard to do. So you do have to have this little bit of a tradeoff where, okay, you know, all the other players that are in my position are 120 kilos and yeah, I’m 100 kilos of muscle, but they’re still 20 kilos heavier than me, you know.
So if I’m taking a hit from them or I’m trying to defend them or whatever it is, whatever the sport is, you know, you still have to have that tradeoff where they have 20 kilos more than you and mass just moves mass, you know, So you might actually have to gain some more fast. The ideal would be that you were just able to gain more muscle, but that’s not always the case.
So even though fat fat mass is not ideal when compared to muscle, that doesn’t mean to say that you’re never prioritizing, that. You’re never trying to intentionally gain some fat. However, the tradeoff in a sporting context is that you now have to carry around for the vast majority of time whatever ten, five, ten, 15, 20 of quote unquote nonfunctional mass.
Yeah, it’s functional when you’re taking that hit and you’re 20 kilos of extra mast to help you or 20 kilos of extra mass to do to tackle. But then all of the other time you have to run around with that you’ve to carry you’ve to basically run around with a 20 kilo weight vest on, you know, So that’s the tradeoff.
And that’s really hard, especially in a sport like rugby, where you kind of really do have to be a little bit bigger. You know, you do have to have a bit more mass, especially for certain positions. Obviously, other positions, it’s not the case. And but in most sports, you’re probably going to want to be on the leaner side of side of things and have that little bit more muscle mass.
That does mean that you have to have maximal amounts of muscle mass, like you’re a soccer player, like I would argue that it’s not really all that functional. Like, yeah, obviously to an extent it is. If it’s all located on your your legs, for example, you would presume you have better ability at least or capacity, I should say, to be able to sprint faster, generate more power, jump higher, whatever.
Right. But you still have to carry around that muscle. You know, you still have to carry around that weight. So there is a there is a balancing point here, depending on the exact sport.
Gary
Yeah. You don’t all have calves like Jack Grealish, although that would be the ideal. Then I’ll say it’s all the same.
Paddy
If you look at any of the best sporting athletes, none of them have got big calves. For all the best athletes, knockouts in all of the like Sprint sports, no calves, jumping sports, no calves. So it’s just just something you know, it’s maybe not causation, maybe it’s just correlation. Maybe it’s just a little bit of cope by my lack of calves. But calves are a nonfunctional muscle.
Gary
Those big bungee cords Achilles.
Paddy
Actually just this thick Achilles
Gary
You know. Yeah. The one, the normal, brilliant muscles. What you should do when you’re doing resistance or important prioritize what functional I want to be with other models that play a primary role in your sporting activity. Okay probably it but obviously you’re playing soccer hamstrings and later probably for that bicep. Okay very good for their considerable advantage to get in will be to having strong upper body but in soccer and probably nothing for you if not even you’re barely allowed that when you do people dive anyway.
So it’s not a very heavy contact sport, is it? So prioritize muscles that are actually going to give you a return on investment. Okay. It’s actually all of the contribute to the relative strength component and the the muscle, the most of the overall body mass ratio of particular multiple that might be better. Let’s say that, Armstrong, from that example when he was taking to a different so the story goes that you wouldn’t even carry shopping or anything you didn’t want any extra mathematics on and upper body because you wanted to be aerodynamic, you wanted to carry any additional mass.
You just want to be able to say that was the only goal. So, you know, to some extent it’s similar in field work. So if you are soccer player having some upper body muscle might maybe might be small advantage, but it lower body mass, the train ought to give you the effect so that you could take their both the Medicare gene and you know take my ticket or one of the nice you know, an extra ten could you provide enough the last one is technology of lower body mass.
But inactivity do something for that nature. That’s not to say again that having lack of legs is important, but rather that if you are going to prioritize your resistance training, it would be more advantageous to focus on the muscles that are active. Support for your support that.
Paddy
Yeah, and this is this is also another really hard thing because you ideally still want to be strong in your upper body regardless of your sport. Like if it’s soccer for you and Gary saying, Oh, look, you don’t really need to use your whole body, you can hardly even tackle like, yes, that’s true. But even stuff like just being able to like have the other way to hold off a player when you’re both like right beside for a ball, like you still need to be strong in that position.
You still need to be strong in the upper body to, you know, just be able to physically hold yourself up, know physically, maneuver yourself in the environment, you know, there’s been a jostling in, you know, whatever in the corner or something like you still need to have some sort of physicality about you both with the limited training time that we have, the limited training budget that we have, spending 20 hours trying to, you get your upper body, your get your forearms, get your, you know, deltoids to be as perfectly symmetrical as possible.
It’s probably not the best use of your time. Right. So you just have to prioritize the things that make the biggest difference for your sport, for your position. Again, going back to that needs analysis. And but and again, maybe it’s our bias. We would probably still say that being strong in the upper body is a good thing, you know, even if it isn’t necessarily perfectly applicable for your sport, it is definitely a benefit for your long term health.
You know, like I don’t think that’s debatable, really.
Gary
Absolutely. And I mean, we certainly can’t make the argument that body strength is going to are our body that is slowing it down very much. If you look at the 100 meter sprint to the extent that more than the lap. So like, you know, it’s not really a case of just prioritization. That’s all we’re talking about. We have to be practical here.
So what you might do it, consider yourself at a fairly general upper body training, but maybe you do our work for one day and then you do the work for Push on a Wednesday, something like that, where you’re getting far more specific is in your body training. So in your lower body training, what you’d be thinking about are things like, for example, hypertrophy and strength generally lower the offseason pre-season, you’re thinking about fight, maybe build up muscle mass.
You don’t have most of the matter or developing maximal strength. You do that farther from the even then you want to do that big or actually like that in the form of height. The strength, power and speed as it comes to the period, the example you might take from doing maximal 33 by reps on while you’re doing something like repeat that free with 50% of one rep back for your opponent becomes really explosive.
It’s something like that. You know, you might bring in jumps block for plyometric ability and explosive you’re you’re looking at your training in a paid period approach for hypertrophy and strength is more appropriate for the season and then a higher velocity tolerance component, a more of a priority as a competitor to people. That does not to be absolute.
It’s not obstructive and you can do both at the point of the year, but it’s just a case of where you what your priority take. And the other thing is that when you’re focusing on have generally what that looks like that you’re doing more overall training, you do more overall train volume. But then when it comes the intake period, we’ve already mentioned that you’re going to be in your field training, you’re focusing on your sport, be training, you’re focusing on the conditioning that we’ve mentioned.
Clearly doing an additional five day training isn’t going to be in your best interest rate. So it might be that you just do maintenance, training, volume, maybe two session per week versus doing your 3 to 4 seconds per week in the office. And again, it all comes back to priorities. This also I did with kind of already happened pre considerations as well because through the training plays an important role here.
If for example if you’ve had contracted strains or current not with you or whatever happens to be, that might be more of a priority area for you. Similarly, you could have higher many issues in your back. Maybe you might think of it as being a very important part of your sport, but you could have had low back pain or low back injuries or multiple friends.
Maybe that’s more awkward for you as an individual. So it all depends on, again, going back to the needs analysis and not just strengths and weaknesses, but it also injuries that you’ve had in the past and how that that is factored in to your training.
Paddy
Yeah, 100%. And this is this is one of those things as well where it really depends on what you actually need. Again, in going back to our needs analysis, like I’ve had lots of trainees, athletes that we still really just focus on getting stronger, getting a little bit bigger in the off season and throughout the season now. Yeah, we might put a little bit more emphasis on it in the off season and we’re just kind of more out of what I would call a gain tenants phase during the season excuse me, where we’re still focusing on like general hypertrophy exercises, rep ranges, etc. But we’re not necessarily pushing the volume, pushing the intensity, etc., etc. and we might do that for two, three years. Yeah, and that’s okay because that was the biggest thing that they actually needed. They just needed to be generally a bit stronger, generally a bit bigger. They didn’t need they, they were okay in terms of speed, they’re okay in terms of all those other qualities that we could potentially be focusing on in the gym right now.
There usually comes a point where we’re like, right, We don’t necessarily need to get much stronger. You don’t necessarily need to get much bigger. Now, we need to really hammer down on, okay, can we quote unquote, convert that into we’re really sports specific, you know, exercise selection, really sports specific exercise modalities, etc., etc.. You know, And so even though Gary is saying that the ideal case here is you have to have this like general phase based training, that’s not always the case.
And similar to what we said earlier on about like the aerobic fitness side of things where, you know, most people probably need to spend a little bit more time with just general getting fitter, getting more of an aerobics base. I would argue that a lot of people just generally need to get a bit more consistent with some sort of resistance training and probably the easiest to do that is to have this like quasi bodybuilding style training where you’re doing like three sets of 6 to 8 reps.
Not excessively fatiguing, not Well, maybe say like 2 to 3 reps from failure, maybe four reps from failure during the season, maybe a little bit lower volume or even two sets, whatever. Right. For a lot of people, that’s probably all they realistically need to do and that should be their focus. But once you start getting into those kind of more intermediate and advanced ranks, then you kind of need to be focused on are things.
Gary
Absolutely. I don’t think that too much of that relies on training or conditioning component. The only thing I’d like to wrap up on, again, just reiterating that point, that there are sports specific skills that cannot really be trained all that well in your training, and I’d encourage you to avoid like over specialized training in what to be, but how to just try to replicate your sport in the gym.
You see people do this all the time with this kind of just replicating sports activities with, you know, cable and or they’re trying to overcomplicate things like squat on an uneven surface, like a blow to ball, or that they can practice their bottom line for these types of things. But these are all really low yield activities. And, you know, just because it looks a bit more like your sport or seems like it’s more advanced it often, how much more high on what you see amongst the best the best athlete, especially those that make the most improvements to their conditioning, is that they’re focused on their resistance training, you know, in a way that they need to as a as we discussed, in accordance with the needs analysis, they focus on conditioning. They don’t do anything all that fancy. They’re doing the hard stuff on the bike or doing the sprint work. They’re doing that slow, boring aerobic work and maybe they do some additional focused on their own injury, but they’ve had or really their activities put out before few on the pitch crack kick.
You have a certain few that you use which is on the pitch and so on that that’s the core of the sport. I can see it’s complimentary.
Paddy
Yeah. The other thing I want to just expand on there excuse me, is on the injury prevention side of things like a lot of this just comes down to building general robustness, like being strong all over. However, if you can’t identify things in that needs analysis where you’re like, Oh well, I play this sport and these are very common injuries, These are very frequent injuries that happen in my position in whatever, you know, rugby, whatever sport you play right?
Identify them then maybe identify injuries that you’ve had in the past or you struggle with and then integrate that into your programing. Okay. That’s I always frequent shoulder injuries. You know, can we come up with a just generalized strengthening of that shoulder girdle area? You know, maybe it’s not you’re not actually doing any specific, you know, rehab or rehab or whatever you want to call it, work Like you’re not sitting there doing like Cuban rotations or, you know, rotate rotator cuff.
Actually, rotator cuff exercises or anything like that. You’re just well, I’m just going to do a dumbbell shoulder press. You know, I’m generally going to get my shoulders a bit more strong, you know, a bit stronger, a bit more robust. It could look like that. But this is something that you should have an eye to. If you have frequent recurrent injuries, that’s going to have to be in like taken into account in your program design.
If there are frequent recurring injuries or frequent injuries that happen in your sport and in your position, again, you want to just have an eye to that. And it’s a little bit beyond the scope of this episode because it’s obviously sports specific, injury specific person specific. But if you can build a little bit more robustness just in a general sense and then in a specific sense to whatever injuries are likely to occur in your sport, that’s a good thing.
And it doesn’t have to be excessive. It could literally be just part of your program, whether it’s just an exercise or two that you have in your program, whether it’s just you pay a little bit more attention in your warm up or cool down or whatever to those areas. Or maybe you just have like the you know, a bit more of a focus.
You’re like, I consistently have hamstring issues, so I’m going to actually just spend a lot more time really rehabbing this really pretty, having this really just getting those hamstrings as strong as possible. Like it just has to be taken account of in your overall program design. And if you’re making me say I’m not.
Gary
No, I mean, I totally agree really. You know, when it comes to injury prevention, we talk about it all the time, like the old management to the core factor, considering all these factor and then your injury history. So for example if I Porterfield 440 and the hamstring that you might already do are too much about trying to prevent strange or anything, I don’t have a basis for that.
Okay. My hamstrings are weak. Point one out of them being a weak point in the past and that just personal knowledge of what I need to work on for you. It might be your cat. Don’t just focus on just the general. Do try to give me specific and that would then guide you. Far too many people do these like complex, like so-called injury rehab and rehab routine to prevent injury, but they do them for multiple joints that they’ve never had an issue with and not to the point of getting any additional adaptation.
So don’t care why we’re spending time with those activities.
Paddy
Yeah, like again, you see people doing 40 minutes of a generalized rehab prehab before they even get into hard training. And now all they are is fatigued for their actual day.
Gary
So yeah, I think that summarizes the recovery when it comes to training for sports. Hopefully you have some complaints. I think the big thing that we mentioned so many times is just that need to not board. It is so important. It’s important for us, as you know, to get the athletes training. And you know, again, we’re not going gym every day thinking, God, I need I definitely need to have an extra ten kilos in order, get better.
And that would be nice, but I would take it. But probably more time drilling, probably more time revising technique is going to be more tired and that’s important for the vast majority of sport. Okay, So and that because the end of this episode, if you’d like, with your training or nutrition, we do have a coaching service that we run.
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Paddy
On a free I don’t have anything else to add, so we’ll see you guys next week.
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