How to Strength Train for Sports and Performance

In this week's episode of the Enterprise Fitness Podcast, we take you behind the scenes of a live event that we had, the Elite Results Bootcamp. We present on a number of different topics from training, nutrition, but more importantly, how we get the elite results we do here at Enterprise Fitness. So check it out and let's jump in.

Okay, so the irony of this presentation is I'm going to sit down because I've got a torn hamstring. Playing soccer. So, um, that's the funny part. To get us started, who's played sports? Give me a show of hands. Who's played a sport in their lifetime? Beautiful. Who still plays sport currently? Few hands still up. Who trains people who play sport? A few people. Who would like to train people who play sport, or at least understand how to train people who play sport? Okay, beautiful. So The reason I pieced this together is to give you a simplified approach to how to structure training for sports. Now, as you can see by the title, I have kind of designed this more around field and court-based sports. However, a lot of the general principles are applicable across every sport. You've just got to look at the different variables. The reason I chose these sports is because they're probably the most common, right? So we've got soccer, football, basketball, netball, cricket. Like, we've got a multitude of different sports included just in this. But the other reason why I chose these sports is because they've got a very good structure to help you guys understand how to take what I'm going to teach you and put it into a model that's very easy to use and get the outcomes that you want. There's some sports that aren't that well structured. So if we look at something like, um, fighting sports, so whether it's MMA, boxing, generally fighters pick up fights and they're like, hey, I'm fighting in 12 weeks. And it's like, okay, well, we've got to completely change your training. We've got to figure out what we're going to do for this window to get you ready for this fight. So the periods of training can be a little bit more variance with combat sports, whereas with your field and court-based sports, there's generally a lot of structure. You know that there's going to be offseason, preseason, in-season, and it gives you a better run-up in terms of planning forward as to exactly what you want to achieve. At each of those points in time. Okay, now like Mark said, I come from professional sporting background, played soccer my whole life, um, and I've obviously been in the industry for coming up to 10 years now. And it can be very saturated, and there's lots of different ideologies and ideas of how you should do certain things. And one of the key reasons I wanted to create this was to help you guys understand it doesn't need to be that complicated. Like if you strip it all back to the bare basics, it is actually very simple if you understand the key principles that we're trying to work on. And by the end of today, my goal is to put you guys in a position where if I asked you to design a program for a specific athlete in a specific sport, you'd have the skills and skill sets, understandings of the specific adaptations that we're training, to be able to do so in the correct order. Okay, so It can seem pretty complicated, but after today, hopefully it'll seem a little easier to piece everything together. Working. Okay, beautiful. So first of all, looking at our primary considerations when we are programming for an individual. So the first one, obviously, training age. Now, a lot of the things I'm going to go through here will tie in nicely to some of the things that Mark's gone through as well. Um, so So I should have said at the beginning, questions-wise, please, if you have any questions, note them down. There will probably be a point in the middle where I might take some and towards the end as well. You guys are here to learn at the end of the day, right? So don't be shy to ask a question. As the saying goes, there's no stupid questions, but we'll, we'll see as we, as we go. But please write any questions down and fire away when we get the opportunity to do so. So firstly, training age. So this determines whether somebody is a beginner, intermediate, advanced, and is obviously going to govern how we start to structure their program from the get-go. Next one, movement quality. I always like to have a massive focus on movement quality. Um, I was very fortunate to work with one of the best defenders that's ever come out of the AFL just after he retired, and this is someone we're talking is the most elite of the most elite, right? And his movement quality when I brought him into the gym was shocking. Like, it was terrible. So just because you have athletes who are at the top in their sport doesn't necessarily mean they're going to be at the top when you bring them into this type of setting, right? Now, this isn't obviously the main thing that's going to govern how well they perform the sports, which is perfect case in, um, case of scenario. Um, but if you can improve their movement quality in here it is guaranteed to have a good crossover into improving their performance when they do step back into the field, and that's the game, right? Next is injury history. So I think this one's pretty self-explanatory. If players have had a long injury list, we obviously want to understand what those things are, maybe start to connect the dots as to what the mechanisms might be as to why they keep getting maybe a recurring injury or common injuries. and that's going to make a big part of how we start to look at those early stages of programming and probably things that we incorporate longer term to keep on top of those recurring issues as well. Sport and position played, as Mark said earlier, obviously different sports have different demands and different positions have different demands. So it's important that if you don't understand what the demands are, that you do your research and then you figure out based on that what exactly that player needs for that sport and for that position. And lastly, players will generally come to you with certain areas that they want to improve on, which has got to be one of your big considerations, because at the end of the day, they want to get out of training with you what they want to get out of it. Generally, your big ones are going to be run faster, jump higher, all your basic things, right? Um, but making sure that you take these into account alongside the other important factors that you want to work on is very important. Other considerations to make is program duration. Different sports have different off-seasons, different pre-seasons, different in-seasons. So this is going to govern, okay, well, how long do you actually have to work on specific qualities? If you've only got a 4-week window, okay, well, you're probably not going to be able to work on an awful lot of things. So again, like Mark said, you might just go, okay, we're going to focus on this one quality. That's what we're going to try and work on for the next 4 weeks. So with some people, you're going to have longer periods. With some people, you're going to have shorter periods. That's going to govern how long you can work on specific qualities that you want to develop for the individual. What training methods and when— I'm not going to talk too much about this one. It'll make more sense as we get into the meat and potatoes of things. Load management is a big one. Certain points of the season require a bigger focus on load management than others. Obviously, the key factor with anybody who plays sports is that on the day of competition, they are in the best possible state to perform at their maximal capabilities, right? If we put too much stress on them in the gym setting and affect how they perform on the field, that's not the ideal outcome that we're searching for. Recovery strategies— I think people get a bit carried away with recovery strategies. Um, first and foremost, sleep. Nutrition, hydration should be your big 3. If they don't get those 3 right, forget about everything else. Forget about saunas, ice baths, bloody massage guns, all that shit. You've got to get sleep, hydration, nutrition right first. That'll create a really good foundation to add all the little bits and pieces on and find other things that might work for that individual. And lastly, measuring improvements. So another key reason why I wanted to design this presentation in this way is because you can see in a lot of high-performance environments, technology to track things, measure things, spit out all this data, whatever you want, they've got it, right? You don't necessarily need to have that to get really good outcomes with an athlete as long as you stick to the key principles, which is what we're going to go through today. And Perfect case in point of this one, unfortunately, is myself. So last year I was training at another facility that did have all of these metrics to be tracked, and I'm not sure if any of you guys are familiar with a Nord Board Nordic test, Nordic exercise maybe. So essentially what it does is it measures your distal hamstring output, so essentially the part of the hamstring that's closest to your knee, and it gives you a measurement of how high a percentage you pull in relative, um, to your body weight. So I pulled 140% of my body weight on this test, which is the most they've ever seen. 2 games into the start of season, grade 4 rupture of my hamstring in that exact spot. So case in point is, just because you have data and just because the data says X doesn't necessarily mean the data is correct, because in sports there's so many variables, there's so many things that can happen. It's not like coming in the gym where it's very structured and you know exactly what you're doing and it's very managed and measured. In sport, it's chaotic, right? Like, you don't know what's going to happen at a certain point in time, and you might put yourself at a very, um, a joint angle that is very weak, and you might not have trained in that joint angle, and all of a sudden, regardless of what the numbers say, you put yourself in a position where injury risk goes up. Quite drastically, which is exactly what happened. So other ways of measuring improvements, obviously we can use our traditional measures of things like load on the bar. By eye, we can track speed on the bar to some degree. Obviously, as we see that bar slowing down, if we're focusing on, let's say, the outcome of power, that's going to be the point where we want to start to look at cutting those reps off. A big one which I think is overlooked is how the athlete feels. Like if the athlete feels like they're more dominant, they're stronger, they're playing better than they've ever played before, that's real-life data that what you're doing is having a really positive outcome. And maybe it might be placebo, but if it's placebo and it gets the job done, that's what you want at the end of the day, right? So the areas that we will discuss is firstly velocity. So I will go into a little bit more detail on what Mark discussed with the plyometric side of things and give you guys a little bit more of an idea of exactly what that is and how it should be utilized. Strength and power, so ties in nicely to some of the things we've gone through so far and will give you a better understanding of which is which and how to utilize both of those at different times. Accessory and resilience work, Um, so this is basically anything that comes after your primary work, um, and it could be like injury prevention type things as well. It could be sports-related, um, resilience work as well. So obviously different sports, different demands, so you might want to have some resilience work in to target those specific areas. So in a sport where there's— or in a position where there's lots of high-speed running, having lots of hamstring resilience in is going to be important. In, let's say you've got a cricketer who's a fast bowler, having some rotator cuff work in there is probably going to be really beneficial for their resilience work. So just to give you an idea of how that might differ between sports. And lastly, the conditioning, sprinting, and change of direction elements. Now you may or may not program this type of stuff. A lot of what we go through is going to be more centered around what we do in the gym, so more from a strength perspective. But I just want to give you some really important points to consider with these areas if you did want to delve into programming this. Um, sometimes the challenge you're going to face is you're going to be doing this alongside what they're doing at their clubs and what their managers are managing as well. And from my experience, like, a lot of coaches are still in that old school mentality where first day of preseason you just get smashed and that continues until game week 1, and away you go. So understanding how to manage some other aspects of conditioning, sprinting, change of direction around those things as well can be pretty important. And if anything else, just to understand the demands that are being put on the athletes so then you can moderate what you do in the gym setting a little better as well. This diagram is very beneficial. It might not make an awful lot of sense right away, but we will revisit it later. But it's just given us an idea of the different qualities that we're training at different percentages of 1RM, essentially. So Mark obviously discussed with you guys strength and power, um, outcomes before at the start. This now starts to give you a bit of quantifiable percentages as to what that looks like and where you can still be working on those adaptations within the force-velocity curve. So at the very top we've got maximal strength, which I don't think we need to explain, and at the very bottom we've got maximal velocity. So that's where we'll be looking at things like our plyometric movements, right? So anything that's unloaded is where we're able to produce the most velocity or the most speed that we possibly can. And by the end of today, you're going to learn how to essentially ride the wave as like is the way I like to explain it at different points of the season. Okay, so firstly we have our velocity. So what is it, I suppose, is the first question. So it's explosive by nature, so all your velocity stuff should be performed with some type of speed. That is non-negotiable when you're focusing on building your velocity movements. Maximal intent So again, Mark made a really good point about kind of CrossFit and doing maximal box jumps for a period of time. That is not true plyometric training because the intent in that moment is not to move as fast as possible, it's just to minimize fatigue and get through the reps, right? If we're trying to improve true plyometric qualities, there has to be an intent to get from A to B in the quickest fashion possible. That's what we're trying to do with a true plyometric And as we've discussed, so we've got plyometrics, we've got ballistics, and we've got Olympic lifts that fall into the velocity category. And why would we train these qualities for an athlete or for an individual? So, faster muscle contraction. So obviously, if you can contract the muscle faster, you're going to be able to get from A to B faster. You're going to be able to perform actions at a faster speed. Which is obviously going to be very beneficial for sports. Increased force production. So pretty self-explanatory, this one, but your ability to produce more force is going to enable you to jump further, run faster, jump higher, all of these qualities that we associate with the best sports people in the world. Muscle tendon stiffness. So this is something that benefits your force production as well. Another benefit of muscle tendon stiffness is it can be protective of joints. So in terms of injury prevention, it's going to be really beneficial to develop your client's ability to create those stiff muscle tendons when they make contact with the ground. And lastly, muscular coordination. So I don't think Mark mentioned this, but plyometrics by nature are a pretty advanced training method. But the caveat to this is regardless of what your level is, if you play sport, you perform plyometric actions regardless whether you're doing well or you don't do them well. You still perform plyometric movements. So my personal opinion is it's very important to still incorporate metrics in whether somebody's very bad at them, whether somebody's exceptional at them. That's just going to govern what your starting point is in terms of the complexity of the movements that you give them to get started, right? But as we build muscular coordination, we obviously build the athlete's ability to do things much more efficiently. So if a player needs to change direction and they've got better muscular coordination, the change of direction is going to be done at a faster rate, which are all benefits that we want to achieve through our velocity training. So to break down some of these things a little bit more. So what is a plyometric movement? Generally plyometrics are unloaded. I say generally, they should always be unloaded by nature. The main part of a plyometric is the stretch-shortening cycle, right? Does everybody know what that is or have an idea of what that is? So it's your ability to load concentrically, so on the way down, if we're looking at, let's say, a squat jump— store that energy and then use that energy that you've stored on that eccentric phase to create a rapid contraction. That's what they are by nature, right? I have also put concentric contractions only in here because they're kind of on the board of a plyometric and not a plyometric. They can be used as a teaching skill, but they can also be used as lowering the load of plyometric movements as well. So if we're in, let's say, the offseason, it can be a really good use to be able to give the joints a bit of a break but still get a little bit of work on those really explosive concentric contractions as well. Ground contacts, short or long? So this is an interesting one. So we do want ground contacts traditionally within plyometrics, but you can have shorter ground contacts and longer ground contacts. So what that means is anything under 0.25 a second is considered a short ground contact. Anything over 0.25 a second is considered a long ground contact time. So what's the benefits of utilizing both? So short ground contact, you're generally not going to go as high or as far with whatever the movement is that you're performing, but the amount of muscle stiffness is going to be a lot greater because you're having a much shorter contact time on that ground. So you're having to move as fast as possible as you hit the ground. Okay, with your long ground contact times, generally the joint angles will be a little bit greater, the absorption of energy will be a little bit more, which means that your height or distance will increase. So these can be really beneficial for transition to proper power training because you're having a little bit more time down the bottom to absorb that energy, which allows you to output put more force, essentially. However, they both have their uses at specific points in time, but I just wanted to make you aware that there is two slightly different ones— ones that can be slower, one that can be faster. And lastly, probably a controversial one for Mark, but they can be done from 1 to 20 reps, but the determinant factor is high amplitude versus low amplitude. So high amplitude is generally greater joint angles, higher force output, which is where you will be much lower on the rep range, so generally 6 and below. Your low amplitude will be lesser joint angles and lesser force production, which means you can do them for slightly higher reps. Um, they will be really beneficial for developing qualities like muscle-tendon stiffness. So if we look at something like a pogo jump, which is essentially just a very shallow bound off the ground. There's obviously very limited joint angle, there's not an awful lot of force production, but it's very good for developing muscle tendon stiffness. If we look at something like a depth jump where you would drop from a box onto the ground, quick ground contact, then jump as high as you can, that would be where we would be looking the lower end of the rep range, and that would be considered a much more higher amplitude plyometric variation. Okay, so here's an example. So first we have the seated box jump variation. So this would be low amplitude, and the reason I put this one in there is because again it's kind of on the cusp because the joint angles are greater but the force production is minimal because there's no ground contact involved with this as well. So this won't be a great variation to have in someone's offseason to minimize joint loading on on the back end of a big season. The next one would be high amplitude, and as we can see, there's a little bit more of a slower ground contact here as well. So he goes a lot deeper into the movement, so the joint angles are a lot greater. He absorbs a little bit more force before producing as much concentric as he possibly can. Okay, so high amplitude slow is what this would be considered, and then your first variation is your low amplitude. Ballistic movements. So this is where now we're starting to add load, okay? An easy way to categorize this is moving an object rapidly through space. So it could be a throw of a ball, a med ball of some description, but it also could be an Olympic lift because you're still moving a load through space at the fastest speed that you possibly can. Includes Olympic lifts, 6 reps or less. So this is one where you want to prioritize quality over quantity. As we start to reach that point of fatigue, training the adaptation of power production starts to decline rapidly. So as soon as we start to see the bar slow or the ball slow or whatever implement that you're getting them to project, slow down. That's where we're no longer training the quality of improving peak power. Okay, so 6 reps is generally a cutoff. I would say sometimes you can be on the lower end of that as well, depending on how aggressive you're going with the loading. If you've got someone who's pretty advanced from an Olympic lifting standpoint, well, 6 reps of a power clean is going to be quite a lot of reps if your load is quite high. So that's your determinant factor, is the amount of load is obviously going to bring you down in that rep scheme overall. So this is a good example of a ballistic— so accelerating that ball through space as fast as possible. This guy's a baseball athlete, I believe, which just gives you an idea. You can see the amount of intense that he puts into that throw as well, which is the most important component. And as I've just said, the common theme with your plyometric or ballistic movements is the speed and intent that it is performed at. This is where your CrossFit-style box jumps don't fit that mold in terms of developing actual plyometric qualities, okay? That's more conditioning with a plyometric movement but doesn't get us the outcomes that we want from true plyometrics. Strength and power. So what is strength and power? It's generally going to be lifting weights, variance of load and speed. So this is where that force-velocity curve becomes important— understanding at what point are we training true strength and at what point are we starting to develop the power elements of that strength curve. And more often than not, it's going to be based around your compound lifts. So squat, bench, deadlift, trap bars— those types of movements are going to be key lifts because they're going to be the lifts that are going to allow you to lift the most load possible. You can also have points in time where you might use unilateral-based movements here, so you can load up things like Bulgarian split squats, regular split squats, pretty heavy with a barbell as well, which would fall into this category and obviously very beneficial for your sports-based, sports-based athletes. Why do we do these? So overall stronger structures. So if we can create stronger joints, stronger muscles, stronger tendons, stronger ligaments, that's obviously going to be beneficial for reducing the chance of injury. It's also going to make your athlete a lot more robust. So in the majority of sports, there is some level of contact, obviously some more than others. So we can create a more robust structure for your athlete they're going to be less susceptible to those injury risks as well. Improve athletic qualities. So Mark touched on it before, as strength goes up, generally your athletic qualities are going to have some benefits alongside that. It isn't always the case, and you do have to make sure that the sport is trained specifically as well. What I mean by that is just because you improve somebody's back squat, does not necessarily mean that they're going to be able to run faster. Okay, so if I look at Thor Bjornsson, the strongest man in the world, doesn't necessarily mean he's fast, right? Whereas I look at this guy in the picture who's the top Chinese weightlifter who's moving things with as much speed as he possibly can, I reckon if I pit them off on a race against each other, I know who's going to win. The guy who's moving things explosively and fast, right? He's still shifting a lot of weight. He's got what, 100 and 260 kilos on that bar, I think. Um, so he's still very strong, but the way he trains for those specific adaptations lends itself to sprinting more. But the moral of the story is you still need to sprint. You still need to learn how to translate that strength in the gym out onto the field or the court. And lastly, muscle function. So we can teach things to be more coordinated, to work more efficiently. Again, it's going to allow us to really develop those athletic qualities a lot better and a lot easier. As I said at the beginning, I'm a big advocate for training full ranges of motion first. So when you build strength and full ranges of motion, you unlock a greater athletic potential and reduce risk of injury. My biggest view on this is If you train somebody through a full range of motion, they're going to be a lot stronger through a shorter range of motion, right? So at certain points of the season, it can be beneficial to reduce ranges of motion to minimize fatigue, minimize the load that you're putting through specific joints. So if you create a really solid base where your athlete is strong through full ranges of motion, they're going to be able to keep a very high load through those shorter ranges of motion in season. and then you just manage the fatigue that comes with that based on the load and the specific outcomes that you're trying to achieve, whether it's strength, whether it's power. We'll get a little bit deeper into that when we get further in. Accessory and resilience work. So what is it? It can be lifting weights, and in some instances it cannot be lifting weights. So as you can see in the image on the slide, this guy is doing an isometric hamstring hold. So isometrics can be beneficial because they allow you to produce a lot of force, but they don't generate a lot of fatigue because you don't have the shortening and lengthening of the muscle throughout. So they can be really beneficial and will still improve overall tissue tolerance to certain things within a sport. Isolated movements. So if we go back to Mark Ottobre diagram earlier, We generally start with our more complex stuff and work to our more isolated movements as we come down, and the intensity starts to taper as we move through the session. No difference to us to what we're going through here. So you start with your velocity and your high neural demand, then you go into your main compound, you've got your accessories, then you've got your isolated work. This is essentially exactly the same as what this is. So just giving you guys a real clear structure as to what that is going to look like when we start to piece it all together. And as I mentioned at the start, you can program things that have a sport-specific demand. So if you've got throwing athletes, obviously rotator cuffs are going to be important to keep them nice and strong. If you've got somebody who's very fast and they've got a lot of sprint efforts, we obviously want to prioritize some hamstring resilience in there to minimize any issues there. Why do we do them? So we want to minimize imbalances. So this can be an area where you probably will start looking a little bit more towards your unilateral work, whether it's single arm, single leg. I did mention before that you can also load some single thing, single unilateral movements are relatively heavy, which is great as well. But this gives you the opportunity in your accessory work to really dial in on any specific things that you found when you screen your athletes. That they might need to work on specifically that is then going to have a carryover and improve their ability to execute their bigger lifts as well. Building muscle— this is— I see this can be commonly misinterpreted for athletes. So you will find out when you sit Jacka's presentation on Friday, building muscle is a long, arduous process, right? If you've got 6 weeks of an offseason with an athlete the amount of muscle you're going to build is going to be very small. So if you know how to program it well, you can maintain some level of hypertrophy work throughout an athlete's whole season, as long as you manage the fatigue, right? So a way you might do that is you might give them an accessory day after their game day. That's arms and shoulders, let's say, as an example. Because yes, it's hypertrophy, but yes, it's still going to have a benefit to their sport as well. Then obviously the more muscle they gain, we want to train the specific adaptations and qualities of that tissue. So if it's specific muscles that we want to be explosive and powerful, once they've gained more muscle, we then need to teach them how to actually utilize that new tissue in the ways that we want to. Okay, but it can be incorporated throughout an entire training year. Injury prevention, pretty self-explanatory, and All in all, this stuff helps you create a well-rounded athlete, right? So you can have some people who can mask imbalances in their big heavy compounds, but then when you put them into more isolated movements, that's where issues present themselves. So dealing with those things in your accessory and resilience work will help you create a real solid foundation for a very strong, powerful athlete. And lastly, we have conditioning sprinting change of direction. So what is it? Could be low-intensity steady-state intervals, fartlek-style training for more of your conditioning component, high-speed running, so your sprinting element, and then lastly, change of direction is your agility work. Why do we do it? Energy system development. So a lot of your field and sport, field and court-based sports are very similar energy system demands. So this is a little bit more specifically geared towards that, obviously. Again, as Mark said previously, with someone like a combat athlete, these are going to be slightly different parameters that you're going to utilize. So all of the strength stuff we've gone through has massive crossover, a lot of sports. The conditioning sprints and change of direction in this instance is a lot more specific to field and court-based athletes. Then your biggest variance is going to be what position they play, because if you've got like a tackle in rugby, they're not going to be doing an awful lot of like long distance recovery stuff, because ultimately those types of players need to be carrying a little bit more weight to be able to perform what they need to, which is heavy contacts in a game of rugby, right?

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Resilient tissues and structures. Now, when you sprint Your soleus muscle, which is the bottom portion of your calf, essentially. So this portion down the bottom, that can withstand up to 6 to 8 times your body weight. So let's just let that sink in for a second. There's nothing in the gym that we're going to be able to do that's going to recreate 6 to 8 times our body weight. It's virtually impossible, right? Unless you've got someone who's hella fucking strong. So the importance of utilizing your sprinting within your training structure for an athlete is imperative to helping them, one, create resilient tissues, but to be able to translate what we're teaching them here into the— into their sport as well, because we can't recreate certain things that we do in the gym. So these qualities have to be trained through these specific methods. Lastly, it has to be sport-specific, position-specific, like we discussed previously. Like I said, the only way to truly run faster is to run fast. So no matter how much lifting you do in the gym, that's not going to be the only thing that's going to help your athlete to be faster on the field. Okay, 3 key training blocks we're going to look at is offseason, preseason, and in-season. So these generally run true for all of your field and court-based sports. Um, some of the sports don't have as much structure. So like I said, it's a lot easier to help you guys see how we're going to implement what we've just gone through into a nice easy structure so that you follow along. But if you wanted to use it for a sport that doesn't necessarily fall into this category, all you've got to do is start to look at the variables. Okay, how much time do we have for specific blocks? What's the, the timeout from a specific competition? Which is then going to change what your focus is going to be. Is it more strength-based? Is it more power-based? Is it more velocity-based? Obviously, as you get closer to competition, generally speaking, it's going to become more velocity-based and the load is going to taper so you have a fresh athlete to perform. But you'll see as we get into the in-season components, like I said earlier, I like to ride the wave a little bit, um, in terms of that force-velocity curve, as long as you understand how to do it correctly. So now we're going to piece it all together and look at all those training adaptations and how we actually put them into those specific points of the season. Before I go ahead, does anybody have any questions at this point? Oh, we're all good. Beautiful. So training block number 1 is going to be our offseason. This is the same guy who was in the picture of our strength before, just repping out 170 like nothing. So obviously super efficient, super strong, and that is going to be our primary focus of our first block. So in our offseason, this is where we're going to get the most work done in terms of increasing total relative strength of an athlete. Okay, we don't have to worry about competition, so we've got a lot more room to move in terms of fatigue and load management. So at this point in time, this is where we want to be prioritizing getting our athletes as strong as possible. Bulletproof the body. So going back to what we said earlier, with increased strength comes obviously increased tissue tolerance, increased joint strength, all of these things that are going to enable your athlete to be a lot more robust when they go back into the following season. Gain some muscle mass. So you can obviously gain muscle through lesser reps than what was traditionally once thought. So as long as the load is relative and the proximity to failure is there, you can still build muscle at 2 to 6 reps. Okay, our strength rep ranges are generally 6 and below, so as long as you've got enough weight on the bar, you can still build good quality muscle size with that 6 reps and below. they're your key variables. And lastly, starting to build out your foundation for the season ahead. Your velocity work at this point in the season, we're looking at more low amplitude plyometrics. So you're going to come off the back of a season where your athlete might be fatigued, they might have some niggles, they might have some injuries. We don't want to go into super high amplitude plyometrics that are going to require a lot of force production, a lot of load on the joints. We want to minimize those at this point, and then we can gradually start to bring those into those more high-amp variations later on. Basic ballistic movements. So you might have some very light-loaded jumps. You could even work on jump and landing mechanics at this point, which would be where you're essentially kind of breaking your plyometrics down into different components. and then you can kind of rebuild and bring them together as you get closer to the season. So if you have an athlete who has to— or you want to work on a specific area of their plyometrics, then this is a point where you can focus on landing mechanics, jumping mechanics. If you've got younger athletes, this can be really beneficial because teaching them how to jump and land correctly is going to have massive carryover and keep them a lot more injury-free. And there we go, technique focus. So jump and landing, acceleration, deceleration, So you're not necessarily going through a true plyometric focus at this point if you don't need to. You can manage that load and fatigue a little bit more. So strength and power components— so maximal strength, 6 reps or less like we said earlier. At this point, I always like to prioritize full range of motion, okay? So again, competition is no longer a factor that we need to take in in the offseason, so we can put an athlete through those much more challenging ranges of motion and build their strength in those ranges of motion, which is going to improve, um, tissue tolerance, joint health, and then it's going to allow us to have a much wider base to develop other qualities as we get closer to the season as well. You can experiment with harder systems here, so this is a point where you can really push your athletes, okay? Now you can use systems that you might never use before that you might think will be beneficial to the athlete. You can use very demanding systems that are going to take them very close, if not all the way to their 1RM, to actually improve their overall maximal strength. But if there's a point to do so, this is the point in the season you would do it. And lastly here, you're going to have higher set volume as well. So again, just overall workload can be a lot higher in the offseason because you don't have to worry about fatigue management, those types of things. So the primary work that they're going to be doing is developing their maximal strength, and then we'll talk a little bit about what their conditioning might look like at this point in the season as well. Accessory and resilience work— obviously you can push your hypertrophy a little bit more at this point. So when we talk hypertrophy for athletes, we're not talking about giving them bodybuilding splits, right? It needs to be still moderated in terms of how much volume and how much muscle soreness you're going to create. Um, muscle soreness isn't always a good gauge of creating hypertrophy either. So studies are showing that the more damage you create, the less able your body is to uptake carbohydrates once you train. So that's why muscle soreness isn't always a great gauge of being able to build more muscle. Athletes is a perfect case where you want to try and manage that as best as you can, but offseason gives you a real good opportunity to program more hypertrophy work. Developing weak areas. So if your player comes off the back of a season and they're like, oh, I struggled with this, I struggled with that, I had these niggles, so on and so forth, this is a great point to start connecting the dots. Start trying to figure out exactly why that might have been and what you can do to overcome those issues. Building strong foundations, pretty self-explanatory. And lastly, with your strength work in the gym, in the off-season, you can look anywhere between 3 to 5 sessions. It really is governed by how much they want to do. Obviously how much you would like them to do is a factor, But if you're going to give them 5 sessions and they're only going to do 3, then there's going to be 2 days of work that you could have programmed a little bit differently to fit into your 3. So it's always important to make sure you listen and understand well how much you're actually going to do, because if you're putting work in that's not getting done, then kind of defeats the purpose of you doing it in the first place. Lastly, your conditioning sprinting change of direction. So low intensity steady states is going to be your primary focus here. So we don't want to be doing anything that's going to put excessive load on, like your sprinting and your change of direction. You're really just trying to maintain, if not develop, their aerobic base more. Now, regardless of what sport, what position anybody plays, your ability to tap into the other energy systems comes from having a solid aerobic base, period. So those longer, slower runs or cycles or whatever it might be for the athlete is what's going to allow them to develop those other systems later on. Okay, so everybody should do some form of aerobic work just for general health, but as an athlete, it's going to allow you to tap into those other systems and optimize them a lot better. So longer interval-based work and 2 to 3 sessions per week depending on your athlete. So obviously, if you've got somebody who might be in an instance of, let's say, rugby. They're one of your heavier athletes who their main focus when they play is to tackle. You're not going to be giving them heaps of cardio sessions to do per week. You might give them one, maybe two aerobic development sessions per week. One might be on their feet, one might be on the bike. So again, you're minimizing the amount of load that you're putting through the joints at these points of the season because we do want to manage and make sure we can recover from the previous season and then get them ready to ramp up the demands of the more power-based work as we get closer to season as well. So that is your first block, which is your off-season. So in summary, this is your point of the season where you really push your athletes to their maximal capacity in terms of strength. Next training block is our preseason. So by nature, this is going to be the block that is going to be most demanding, especially in this sport. So like I said earlier, a lot of coaches are still stuck in that old school mentality where as soon as you go back, they just slam you into the ground. That's something that we need to be very aware of when we're programming here, and we need to manage the frequency and the volume of what we do in the gym a little bit more, but we also still want to put our athletes in the gym as well. We just got to understand how and when to do so. So our primary goals is transfer of strength into power. So it's no good having a strong athlete if they don't know how to actually utilize that and be explosive and be powerful with it. So this is where our strength curve becomes really important. And the percentages that are on there will give you a really good guide as to where you want your athlete to be sitting in terms of their load selected on the bar. So when I program for my athletes as they get to this point in time, I give them guidelines of you do not exceed X percentage of your 1RM. That way I know that they're not going to creep up into areas where they're going to be focusing more on relative strength I'm going to keep him in that power window, which is where I want him to be. Now, with your power, it tops out at about 80% of your 1RM. So if you've got a strong athlete, that's still relatively heavy. There's still quite a bit of load on the bar, right? So it may slow down a little bit, but you just want to moderate how much it does slow down. Okay, the big factor is going to be your rep ranges. You don't want to select the real high rep range where by 9 and 10 reps, it's really starting to slow down the grinding out because like the relative to the load are very high. Um, the biggest focus is intent of the movement. So if they're still having the intent to move that load as fast as possible when it gets towards those 80%, that is one of the key variables. But then we can start to taper that percentage as they get closer to whether it's game day or, um, in season. Complement the demands of preseason. So like I said, understand exactly what is expected of them when they train. How often are they training for their sport? Are they getting slammed? Do they have certain sessions that are harder, certain sessions that are easier throughout the week? And that'll enable you to— okay, well, I can program a harder session here because I know you're not going to be working as hard in training, but we need to taper it off to the end of the week because that's where I know you're going to work. Really hard. So starting to understand the variables and mix and match depending on what you want to get out of that individual is important at this point. Ultimately, at the end of this block, we want to have the body ready for competition. So we want them to be strong, explosive, powerful, and ultimately fresh and ready to perform is the big one. So we don't want them going into the season sore, niggly, want them going into the season feeling amazing, feeling like they've made a lot of progress in terms of developing, whether it's sprint speed, jump height, whatever it might be. We want to put them in a position where they're super confident going into that season ahead. So your velocity-based movements at this point in the season— so we're now starting to progress to more of those high amplitude options, Olympic lifting variations if they have the capability to do so. The biggest thing with Olympic lifting variations is there is a big element of skill acquisition required. So if you have someone who isn't very coordinated, it wouldn't be my go-to to develop their power in the early stages. There's a lot more regressed versions of these things that you can use, most notably ballistics. Like, if you get someone to throw a ball as high and as far as they can, there's not really an awful lot of skill involved to that. We've also got to manage what they're doing in their actual sport training as well. So generally 3 to 4 sets with maximal intense, maximal outputs is going to get you what you want out of it. The, the thing with plyometric training is it doesn't seem very fatiguing, right? Like if I get you to do 3, 3 reps of maximal jumps, you're going to be like, oh, is that it? But it's not necessarily about the fatigue we're creating, it's about the adaptation and the qualities that we're trying to train. that's what the focus is. So it's not designed to make you tired and make you fatigued. That's the difference here. Your accessory resilience work, so you can maintain your hypertrophy focus at this point, that's not a problem. You obviously want to minimize, depending on the sport, the areas that get or have more soreness. So if you've got an athlete who's doing a lot of sprinting, you don't want to go too hard on the lower body hypertrophy because it's going to have a bit of a negative impact. But if they want bigger arms, bigger shoulders, which generally most dudes do, right, like you can still incorporate some arms work, some shoulders work at the back end of their sessions that aren't going to cause an awful lot of crossover and fatigue in this sport. Continue to build on weaknesses. So this is kind of your final window to really double down on those areas that might be causes for concern. In terms of injury or imbalance and trying to build them up as much as you can. The thing with imbalances is everybody is going to be imbalanced. You're never going to get that perfectly symmetrical individual, but we also don't want the discrepancies to be huge because if you have one side that's way stronger than the other, then the chances of that side being prioritized when they're performing certain actions is going to be higher. At some point, it's not going to be able to deal with those demands and it's going to break down. So if we can manage that and try and balance that out as best as possible, that's going to give us the best outcome long term. You can start implementing strategies to manage the intensity. So I touched on isometrics earlier. So it's a way where you can create maximal, um, muscle contraction and motor unit recruitment, but you alleviate a lot of the things that come alongside that, which is generally muscle damage, muscle soreness. So isometrics can be really beneficial for increasing someone's ability to produce more force. 2 to 3 sessions per week during preseason is generally the range I like to sit in. Um, if you've got someone who is more advanced, you can go towards the top end. Somebody who's still a bit new to strength training, I'd probably go with the 2. Make sure what they're doing is good quality, is efficient. And then as they get better, you can potentially build them up a little bit more. Your conditioning, sprints, and change of direction. So maintenance of aerobic base, there should always be a focus throughout the entirety of somebody's training. Progressions into high-speed running. The demands of preseason are going to go up here. And again, some coaches' views of what training high-speed running is, is be on me, but make sure that you understand what they're doing in their sessions at training before you start to prescribe things here. But generally, you can get away with a small amount of efforts per week to maintain that tissue tolerance. You just don't want to— you just don't want your athletes to do too much, because if you put too much stress on them with the high-speed running Again, if you— if I get you guys to line up and run 100 meters as fast as you can, it's not too dissimilar to doing a 1RM, right? You're doing something at your maximal capability and producing as much force as you possibly can for that period of time. So it is very demanding, very fatiguing. When you're doing high-speed running, again similar to your heavy lifting, your rest period should be very long if you're focusing on developing true speed. You're looking at 3, 4, 5-minute rest periods between sprint efforts. And that's even if it's 40, 50-meter efforts. If it's maximal effort, you need a lot of time to let your nervous system recover. If you're trying to improve somebody's ability to do repeated efforts, obviously the intensity is going to reduce a little bit, but the aerobic demands are going to go up a little bit. So you can get away with slightly lower rest periods in that instance. Introduce— introduction, should I say, of agility-based drills. So starting to work on that change of directions, starting to load joints in different positions that are going to be demanding and going to be indicative of what is required when they start going back to training and when they get into season. Again, this is going to be really important for developing really strong structures and tissue tolerance as well. A lot of— I touch on this a bit later, but a lot of what we do in the gym, we can sometimes get stuck in one plane of motion. It's very important that you train multiple planes of motion. It's very important that you do lateral plyometrics. It's very important that you do rotational work, because when you play sports, it's very three-dimensional, right? You don't do everything in one plane of motion. So we want to be able to recreate those things somewhat in the gym as well and start to develop those strengths for when they are actually playing their sports. 1 to 2 sessions per week additional to what they do in their sport. So if they're training 2, 3 days a week, you probably only need to have 1 day where they're focusing on, let's say, some high-speed running. And it doesn't need to be a long session. They might do a warm-up, and then they might do maximum 4 to 6 efforts of max sprint speed if we're working on trying to get them running faster, let's say. So it doesn't need to be a huge amount of volume. Again, similar to plyometrics, the focus is on improving the quality of the adaptation, not just pushing people to the point of ultimate fatigue. Training block number 3, and the final one, is in-season. So we are revisiting the force-velocity curve. Now you guys have a little bit more understanding of what it is and how we're going to utilize it, we're going to start to get towards the bottom end of the curve somewhat in this last little bit. And I'm also going to have to speed up a little bit. So primary goals is game day priming. So game day priming is essentially a session that stimulates the nervous system enough to have crossover to help your athlete be ready to perform the next day, but doesn't create too much fatigue that it has a negative impact. Okay. So this would be very low volume, very high intensity in terms of, um, the output, but it's not going to generate an awful lot of fatigue. It's just going to get their nervous system peaking so that the next day they're able to perform really well. You can do this within 24 to 36 hours of a game as well, so it can actually be in quite close proximity. Maintenance, incremental gains— so this is the point of the season where we're not chasing PBs. What we're chasing as a bare minimum is to maintain what we have built from your offseason and in-season. You can incorporate some strength work still into their week. You're not going to be trying to push crazy numbers, but you can still aim for very small gains on their strength, but it's not going to be anything near what you do in the offseason. And lastly, injury prevention. If our athletes aren't on the field, they're no good to nobody. So If we can maintain our injury prevention during this point of their season, that's going to be key. Velocity work, so reducing exposures as we go into competition. Demand goes up quite significantly. Um, again, as Mark said, plyometrics are very demanding movements. Yeah, like they're very neurally demanding, but they're also very taxing on your passive structures, so tendons, ligaments. We don't want to add to that fatigue that they're already getting through their competition. We want to work both high amplitude and low amplitude throughout the week. I would generally have your high amps at the beginning of the week and your low amps closer to competition, again just to manage that load. Quality over quantity, always. Strength and power stuff, so ride the force-velocity curve. What I mean by that is the way I structure my weeks generally is They'll have more of a strength day at the beginning. They'll have more of a power day in the middle. And their last day, that priming day, will be more velocity-based. So there won't be an awful lot of load. It'll just be focused on moving things very fast. It might be more ballistic-based, so throwing objects or things that aren't going to create an awful lot of fatigue. Reduced range of motion. So let's say we did high bar back squat in the offseason. This might be a point where we can start going to things like box squats. Can be really beneficial. You can still keep load relatively high because range of motion has reduced, but we minimize the fatigue and the load put through joints, the fatigue created on the muscles. So strength is still at a minimum maintained, but we're able to minimize the fatigue of all the other things of training full range of motion. Maintenance of strength as a minimum, we've discussed, and monitor and manage based on athlete fatigue. So one of the really important things with programming, whether it's for athletes, whether it's for general population, whoever it's for, you don't have to stick to a very rigid structure. Like, don't be afraid to change things if they need to be changed, okay? Ultimately, as long as you're still training to get the same outcome it doesn't really matter too much what movements you use. Like, if you get an athlete who comes in and you've programmed back squat but they're relatively fatigued or whatever it might be, put them on a hack squat, put them on something that's a lot more stable. The load will be able to be maintained and stay relative, but you're just going to create a lot more stability and minimize the chance of their fatigue crossing over and impacting their big lift negative and that goes for gem pop as well. Accessory resilience— so again, you can maintain your hypertrophy work. Focus is on complementing the sport and the positional demands of what they need. Minimum effective dose— so 2 to 3 sets can be enough here. So you can actually get quite a lot from just doing 2 sets of resilience work at the end. The goal here, like we said at the start, is not to create huge amounts of gains It's just as a bare minimum to maintain what we have, and if we get any incremental gains, then fantastic. 2 to 3 sessions per week total, again, for your strength stuff in the gym. Conditioning, sprinting, change of direction— if you can maintain one high-speed exposure per week aside to game day, that would be great. 4 to 6 efforts can be more than enough at close to that maximal um, output. Optional, you can have one slower, um, steady state per week. So it might just be a recovery. So it could just be jump on the bike, turn the legs over for half an hour, and that is their slow steady state recovery. It can be as simple as that. If you've got somebody who's fresh enough to go for a jog, then happy days. But have it determined by how your athlete feels. It doesn't always have to be the same. 1 to 2 sessions per week is more than enough. Um, like one if you want to do your— maintain your high-speed exposure, and then if you want to add a recovery whatever in, then you can do. Okay, final things to consider. Excel at the basics always. Don't overcomplicate it. Don't give your athletes something that is way too complex or is too high of a skill component for where they're at. Lift heavy, lift fast, run, jump, hop, and throw. If you incorporate these within your program, you will get really good outcomes with your athletes. Okay, this is honestly how simple it can be, but make sure that you incorporate these to some degree. As I touched on earlier, all planes of motion are very important, so sagittal, frontal, transverse. If we can train those the gym even better, there should be a focus on doing so. So rotations, lateral, forwards and backwards movements, especially with your plyometric and your ballistic-based stuff as well, because it's those real rapid contractions, very similar to playing sport. Unilateral, bilateral— so you don't just want to always train bilateral stuff because sport is very much a unilateral-based endeavor in most instances. Train hard, recover harder. So it's all well and good pushing your athletes, but if they're not recovering and you haven't got strategies in place for them to recover, their ability to perform when it matters is going to be hindered. So it is very important that you can dial in their recovery, um, and look, it's somewhat more important than their actual training to some degree. Closing thoughts. Athlete A does front squats, athlete B does trap bar deadlifts. Does it matter? No, it does not. So when your athlete steps onto the field, no one cares what they did in the gym. What everybody is looking at is, are they robust, strong, fast, powerful, fit, and ultimately, do they play well? Okay, so Mark went over some of Charles's numbers before, which are great, and they make a great base. But if you have an athlete who can't do something specifically, it's not the end of the world. As long as you can train all these qualities, how you get there doesn't really matter. They don't all have to do the same thing. People are different. People excel in different movements than others. As long as we get the adaptations and the outcomes that we want, that is the key. We are done. Thank you very much. Just to wrap up, when you get your slides, there is a few extra slides at the end for you guys. I've basically just given you some examples of different days, different systems you can use at those different points of the season, just so you can actually see like exercise selection, systems used, qualities trained. So it'll just give you an idea to see those things firsthand. They're not, they're not training weeks, so don't just take them and copy and paste them because they're not set up that way. Like, day 1, day 2, day 3 are all different systems that you wouldn't use in conjunction with each other, but I just did it to give you different options to see how you can put things together differently. Okay, so that's just some bonus stuff at the end, and now we have training time.

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