THE FOUR

ELEMENTS OF
A SUCCESSFUL
PRE-SEASON
E-BOOK

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PLANNING

1. HAVE A PLAN

At the very start of pre-season, before you’ve
even stepped out onto the training pitch, it’s
vital that coaching and sports science staff
sit down to discuss two key questions:
• What are you trying to achieve?
• How will you achieve it?
These may seem like basic questions, but
without the clarity of purpose that comes
from answering them and establishing key
principles, it is impossible to create a truly
effective pre-season training programme.
By starting with a broad overall aim (e.g.
achieving promotion) and an agreed playing
style, you can begin to quantify the likely
physical demands that will be required of the
players if they are to attain those goals.
Once those probable demands have been
quantified, you can start to build a training
programme that fully prepares players for
the season to come. This ‘preparatory’ phase
is crucial and can be seen as the foundation
for all future activity over the course of the
season. It is during this phase that base levels
of strength and endurance are established,
combined with improvements in the
players’ capacity to recover effectively from
repeated bouts of high-intensity exercise.
“We always spend the first week in Leicester
at our training ground,” says Matt Reeves,
Head of Fitness and Conditioning at Leicester
City. “We’ve got a very structured pre-season
where the players will go through days one to
five, working through different movements.
What we try and achieve at that time is a
gradual progression. We want players to safely
move from day one through to five, increasing
their loads and getting used to the different
demands that make football performance.”

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PLANNING

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1. HAVE A PLAN Player 2

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Typically, a pre-season programme will look By generating interdisciplinary cooperation Player 5 40 40 45 30 90 90

to achieve a number of aims, all of which on an agreed plan, you can ensure that
contribute towards realising the overarching coaching, medical, science, and strength and Player 6 25 25 40 45 90 90

goals for the season. Those aims should include: conditioning staff are all working towards the
achievement of agreed aims. This should ensure Player 7
• Increasing base strength and 40 40 40 60 90 90

that the input players are receiving across

endurance capacity
different departments is fully aligned and Player 8 40 40 40 60 90 90
• ‘Programming’ the movement consistent. Without this level of organisational
characteristics of your sport coherence it can be extremely difficult to
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• Enhancing gross and fine motor skills correctly prepare players for the demands
they will experience during the season.
• Introducing tactical and Player 10 60 13 40 60 90 45

strategic elements Clearly, there are a wide range of other

factors that require careful management for Player 11 40 40 45 60 90 18
Creating a structured pre-season plan
a pre-season programme to be successful
is an important step towards the team
(e.g. overseas travel, game time during
achieving its in-season goals, but it can only Player 12 60 40 60 30 45 45
friendlies), but those things will only fall into
be executed correctly is all stakeholders
place within a robust fundamental structure 0 50 100 150 200 250 300 350
within the club are on the same page and
and a plan tailored towards the specific aims Mins Played
working towards the same targets.
of the club. If your pre-season programme
v U21 v AZ
is going to adequately prepare your players,
v Rangers v Heerenveen
you’ve got to have a robust plan. •
v Middlesbrough v Burton Albion

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OFF-SEASON
2. KEEPING PLAYERS IN CONDITION
DURING THE OFF-SEASON
As with the implementation of any new process,
the ability to get buy-in from your athletes
is key to sustaining its success within your
organisation. Without a strategy for engaging
players with athlete management systems,
it’s unlikely that they will be fully cooperative
in helping you to maximise the potential of the
technology.
You may have spent weeks and months planning
your pre-season programme, but even the most
thorough plans can struggle to make a positive
impact if players return from the off-season in
poor physical condition.
After a long and gruelling campaign, it’s vital
that players are given several weeks to rest and
recover over the summer, but players should also
be given structured off-season programmes to
maintain a certain level of physical activity. For
many clubs, the off-season is around six weeks
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long, meaning that players can be exposed to
a well-balanced combination of rest and light
An off-season programme
training over an extended period. should still allow them
“The very first stage of pre-season is the off- time to have a recovery
season lead-up to it,” says Dr. Steve Barrett,
First Team Lead Sports Scientist at Hull City
and taper period after
Tigers. “If we know the date of the first pre- the season,” says Barrett.
season session, then the questions is how do
“This allows the players
we gradually build the players up to it?”
Following an initial spell of complete rest
to regenerate and so
(perhaps one or two weeks), it’s important on, while progressively
that players are given bespoke off-season
increasing load
programmes to follow for the weeks that
remain before they report back to the training throughout it so they’re
ground. Typically, these programmes involve ready for pre-season.
a combination of cardiovascular exercise and
strength work in the gym, ensuring that the
athletes maintain their conditioning while also
being given time and space to fully recover
from the rigours of the season. •
4
QUESTIONS

2. KEEPING PLAYERS IN CONDITION

DURING THE OFF-SEASON
The primary motivation behind off-season Volume
programmes is to avoid reversibility, the simple
principle that, just as positive adaptations
follow periods of overload, negative adaptations
will follow periods of reduced (or no) activity.
Without off-season programmes, it’s likely that Intensity
players will lose a lot of the physical capacity
they worked so hard to build up during the
Technique
season, negatively impacting on your club’s
progress during pre-season.

In order for you pre-season programme to fulfil

the objectives you have set for it, it’s key that
players can arrive back at the training ground
ready to meet the physical demands required
of them. If players are at an appropriate level
of fitness at the beginning of pre-season,
then coaches can spend more time getting
their ideas across and less time having to get
individuals up to speed with basic fitness work.
Maintaining fitness during the off-season
General Training Specific Training
also means pre-season is less of a shock to
the system, avoiding sudden load increases
and ensuring that players are protected from
unnecessarily high risk of injury.
“Each player will get an individual programme
depending on their schedule during the off-
season,” says Barrett. “We try and make sure
that they’re in as good a state as possible so
Competition Transition
that it’s not too big a shock or change to the
system when they arrive back.”
It can be easy to get caught up in the detail
of planning a comprehensive pre-season
programme, but without bespoke off-season
schedules you will risk jeopardising the aims
and intentions of the work you give your players
during the pre-season phase. •

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PROGRESS
3. M ONITOR PERFORMANCE
PROGRESSION
Historically, pre-season was a time when
coaches would ‘beast’ players, subjecting
them to relentless cardiovascular programmes
with little consideration for individual needs,
position, or sport-specific movements.
The days of those one-size-fits-all pre-season
programmes are largely gone, replaced by
more scientific approaches that consider
the overarching performance goals of the
organisation and the needs of individual
players and their specific positions. In order
to establish a successful and fully validated
pre-season programme of that kind, it’s vital
that clubs quantify and monitor performance
progression on both a team and individual
level by establishing effective athlete
monitoring processes.
Naturally, technology is at the heart of any
performance monitoring process. Given that one
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of the key aims of a pre-season programme is
to help players adapt to meet the demands they
will face during the season, athlete monitoring
technologies are a crucial tool for practitioners
in terms of tracking that progression.
By monitoring internal and external load as
a starting point, it is possible to gain a more
complete picture of an athlete’s response to
their programme and better understand the
general effectiveness of the training you are
prescribing. The relationship between internal
and external load metrics can be valuable
measures of athlete efficiency, shedding light
on the state of readiness of your athletes
and – when analysed longitudinally – offering
an important insight into how a player is
adapting ahead of the new season.
“We should plan and deliver training dose
according to the external training load, but we
should monitor the athlete response to that
load from the internal responses,” says Aaron
Coutts, professor in sport and exercise science
at the University of Technology Sydney. “These
are only useful for monitoring athletes if we
contextualise that with other data.”
Not only can athlete monitoring technology
help you to track player progression and the
effectiveness of your pre-season programme,
it can also help to answer performance
questions from coaching staff. Generally, the
questions asked of sports science staff can be
distilled into two general categories: a) How
much work have the players performed?, and
b) How hard have they worked? Rather than
swamping coaches with data, a well-designed
performance monitoring process can help you
to identify key insights that provide the most
valuable information within the context of the
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PROGRESS

3. M ONITOR PERFORMANCE
PROGRESSION
physical and tactical aims your pre-season remain coaching and talking to people, but

Player 1
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programme is trying to achieve. outside of that go with wellness measures, 708

3479
session RPE, and external training load. I
Of course, the effectiveness of performance
think with that you’ve got a good basis of a
monitoring is increased when all parties (e.g.

Player 2
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fundamental monitoring system.” • 519
coaches, athletes, sports scientists) share 2998
a common understanding of the rationale
behind the plan. Everyone involved should

Player 3
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understand why the monitoring is taking place, 3963
what will be monitored, by whom, and how
often. If that level of internal communication

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isn’t in place, then there is a risk of athletes 330

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feeling as though they are merely guinea pigs,
or coaches failing to buy in to the process.

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“One approach doesn’t fit all,” says 4411
Coutts, summarising the key elements of
an effective athlete monitoring system. “I’d

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recommend that practitioners use simple tools 565

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and good science; collect the data properly
and analyse it thoroughly. The best tools still Load (Units) Sprint Distance Distance

USING PERFORMANCE TECHNOLOGY TO ANSWER KEY COACHING QUESTIONS 7

P L AY E R S
4. M EET THE SPECIFIC NEEDS
OF INDIVIDUAL PLAYERS
All pre-season training programmes are
designed to prepare a squad to meet overall
team objectives, but can sometimes fall
down when it comes to making allowances
for the needs of individual players.
Even at the elite level, individual athletes
vary in their capacity for exercise. This
variation comes from a series of factors,
including age, genetics, training history,
skill level, and motivation. There are also
other nuances to consider, such as players
coming back from injury, or the physical
demands of different positions on the
field. As a result of this variance, coaches
shouldn’t expect all athletes to respond in
the same way to the same set of drills.
These differences between athletes mean
that an effective pre-season programme
should incorporate a level of individualisation
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within the wider context of preparing to
meet the overarching team goals for the
season to come. Given that different players
will require different training stimuli, a
programme that prescribes the same training
to a diverse group of players is destined to
fall short of its objectives and potentially
result in some players being overloaded
and other underloaded. Conversely, a
programme with a more individualised
approach is more likely to succeed and
optimise the performance of athletes while
simultaneously reducing their risk of injury.
“Once you have enough data, it’s
important to start building ‘fingerprints’
of the athletes that you work with that
are specific to themselves,”​says Chris
Barnes, Football Performance Consultant.
“The beauty of that is we can then set
working ranges for our athletes and the
positions that they play in, and we can set
up alerts or ‘red flags’ to identify when
they are stepping out of those ranges.”
In order to strike the right balance between
collective and individual training within a pre-
season programme, it is vital that coaches
and sports scientists set goals on both team
and player levels. Team goals will focus on
broad targets for the coming season and the
physical attributes required to attain them,
while individual goals will ensure that players
are prescribed training that addresses their
specific requirements without jeopardising
the development of the team as a whole.
To achieve this often complex balancing
act, practitioners may be required to
segment certain sessions or drills to allow
for different individual needs. For example,
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P L AY E R S

4. M EET THE SPECIFIC NEEDS

OF INDIVIDUAL PLAYERS
players might start a speed session together
before moving away into smaller groups
to work on more specific movements,
or do some general strength work as a
collective before going to work on their
own individualised weights programme.

By working in this more nuanced way

and incorporating an individualised
approach to all aspects of a programme,
you will create structures and systems
geared towards optimising performance,
whilst also minimising risk of injury. •

All images courtesy of bcfc.com

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