Ellerslie AFC Pre-Season
Goals for pre-season training discussed with Head Coach Ben Fletcher:
#1 priority was improving high-intensity actions' repeatability. Followed by increasing the intensity of those actions. Concurrently raising the ceiling of movement and bringing the floor up with it. Meaning increasing maximal outputs and reducing the decrement of the outputs across repeated efforts.
The ACHIEVE the desired goals from pre-season we:
· Conducted initial testing including 10/5 RSI, Horizontal Jump, 5m sprint, max velocity & yo-yo intermittent recovery test level 1 (IR1).
· Based on results bucketed athletes into one of three groups for the central nervous system (CNS) focused training. 1) power, 2) reactivity, and 3) speed (including sub-groups with higher acceleration or max velocity focus).
· Athletes were placed into either fast, medium, or slow groups for conditioning, with the differentiator being just accumulated volume between the groups.
What the groups did for CNS and conditioning WORK:
· Power group focused on rapidly overcoming resistance, including med ball throws and banded sprints.
· Reactivity group had a large focus on a range of plyometrics from rudimentary to intensive across leaps, split stance exchange, bounds and hops. Focusing on being stiff on the ground, improving stretch-shortening cycle function and rate of force development.
· Speed group performed a bunch of short & long sprints, with the two sub-groups performing a higher percentage of acceleration or max velocity work. Also performed high-intensity game speed/agility drills, with relatively low context (e.g., 1 v 1, 2 v 1, 2 v 2).
· Everyone had some percentage of sprints in the session, and all did max velocity work.
· Brought awareness to how they performed movement tasks, as opposed to just asking for maximal outputs with no consideration for efficiency.
· Conditioning: we utilized extensive tempo (70-75% of max speed), progressing first via accumulation of volume and secondly from intensification through reducing rest periods.
· Head coach Ben Fletcher also progressed small-sided games (SSG) well throughout pre-season, providing a strong mixed aerobic & anaerobic stimulus, albeit mixed from player to player, due to being unable to control load and the stimulus in SSGs.
What RESULTS did we achieve from the pre-season training:
· Everyone improved their yo-yo IR1 in 4 weeks! With a mean difference from pre- to post-testing of 1.5 and 95% confidence intervals of (1.11, 1.88)
· Qualitative improvements in movement efficiency through key markers such as ankle stiffness/heel drop, front side mechanics, trunk control, initial contact relative to centre of mass, and vertical/horizontal projection.
· (No speed or power testing was re-conducted; can’t conclude that we improved effectiveness).
· Reduced the risk of injury through improvements in tissue tolerance and neuromuscular responses such as pre-tension and stiffness improvements that will aid in ACL prevention.
REFLECTING on how it went so that we keep improving:
· What would we do differently? If we had a longer pre-season build-up, the preceding phases would’ve been spent working on aerobic capacity and power, then progressing upwards of maximal aerobic speed.
· We went very specific off the cuff, with repeat efforts through extensive tempo due to limited time, which meant the conditioning transfer would be high BUT if we had preceding phases developing aerobic capacity & power the work performed could’ve been higher in the repeat efforts and thus a stronger stimulus.
· To combat this, effort should be placed in the off-season to provide guidance around the work to be performed that will lay the foundations and maximize the work done in the preseason.
· Improving the transition from isolated speed work to contextual input, we performed our CNS work and then dived into game speed/agility drills but with often very dissimilar movements. More focus should be placed on slowly integrating context whilst maintaining similar content of movement (e.g., acceleration, max velocity, change of direction) to allow for greater transfer from the decontextualized isolated work.
· Opposed to spending the whole session within their specific groups, bring all the groups together after their specific capacity work for the isolated speed and game-speed/agility drills.
· Intentions in future to organize a thorough athlete monitoring process & system, which could include performing the 10/5 RSI on the jump mat and intervening if players are below their normal range.
The Ellerslie boys are currently sitting 5th after 8 rounds and a big round 1 Chatham cup win, looking forward to chipping away for the rest of the season and seeing how they track across the next few months!
Yo-Yo IR1 test scores pre & post pre-season intervention