Pre-season homework - training schedule
You have prepared your club and staff for the upcoming season and now it’s time to get your athletes slowly back into the training cycle.
This week we will discuss five topics you can cover with your athletes that will help them hit the ground running when they are back to full training.
Today we will cover how you can create a training schedule for your athletes that can turn into a home training camp.
Start the snowball
It’s hard for athletes, especially children, to get back into full training after a period of rest (off-season). Usually you would allow for a short period to refresh your athlete’s work habits and help them get back into the training cycle.
Training schedule for week(s) 0
It’s always beneficial to create a training plan (of a few variations of it) for people to work on while they are home or still on vacation. You can look at this as their own personal training camp that will help them get back into training.
It doesn’t and should be a full on training regime you would prescribe in a typical week but more of a list of options they can pick and choose from for the week(s) leading up to the start of a season.
Someone who wants to start it a little slower can choose activities like "30 minute walk outside”, or a “10 minute swim in the lake”, or they can even be as abstract as “hike somewhere you haven’t been before”. This can create excitement and at the same time put your athlete’s mind already into the new season.
You will always have eager athletes who want to have a flying start so you can also accommodate for them by having a detailed training plan but you, again, keep the load on the light side while you can still put a little intensity in the workouts.
Instead of having a 50 minute run session with 5 x 2 minute hard efforts and 1 minute of recovery, you can have 5 x 30 second efforts with 2 minutes of recovery and 10-15 minutes of warmup and cool down. You can post a leaderboard of finished workouts at the end of the week for everyone to see. This can create a friendly competition and ease your athletes into the new season.
Drills and games
Another thing that can be beneficial to your athletes is to start doing simple drills in the days and week leading up to a new season. They can execute those drills in 15 to 20 minutes and it can be a springboard for the remainder of the season.
It’s up to you to know what you want to start working on first and have your athletes be aware of the tasks that are in front of them.
Try making it as fun as possible by creating games that will incorporate those drills and have your athletes post them on social media.
Create small challenges that will get your athletes excited about coming back to you and you will have a lot of eager people at the first day of practice.
Happy coaching!
