Training Organization: The Intro

by Bram Wood

Training Organization: The Introduction

A familiar struggle coaches and athletes face is creating and planning training programs that coincide with their tactical training (the practice of the sport). Am I doing too much? Am I doing too little? How many days a week should I train? What should I do on those days? With that said, the goal of this blog series is to provide training suggestions based upon how many days you want to train and how to balance that load with practice.

 Luckily for us, plenty of brilliant coaches and scientists have come before us to work through the details to ensure that we can create a program that breeds success. Before we take a deep dive, no program is perfect, and nothing trumps hard work. If you show up day in and day out and put in the work, you will get better. It does not matter how many days you train or what you do because believing in what you do can provide more significant results than a program where an athlete doubts its impact.

The Charlie Francis Training System

First, let us look at the classification of stressors in a training program.

The late Charlie Francis, Canadian Track Coach, most known for coaching Ben Johnson, created this table to identify different training stimuli and their impact on the Central Nervous System. It is essential to recognize these activities as stressors and their impact because the Central Nervous System is the software that guides the hardware. If the software is overworked, it is going to directly impact how the hardware can function.

Charlie had a great analogy of comparing the CNS to a cup, and as stressors occur, they begin to fill up the cup. As we can see from the chart above, different stressors fill up the cup more or less, so coaches must plan accordingly to make sure they do not cause the athlete's cup to overflow. Also, understand that other life stressors impact how quickly this cup fills up. This is why it is essential always to understand what athletes are going through outside of sport and training.

The Consolidation of Stressors

This chart serves as a great tool and can help guide coaches in planning their physical and tactical preparation for a week, but please also understand that it is best served to write it in pencil and not pen when writing a program. Be flexible to best serve your athletes and how they feel that day. 

Different researchers have evaluated the Acute/Chronic Work Ratio and its impact on performance in past and current research. Derived from this research is the concept of consolidation of stressors. Consolidation of stressors is the pairing of a high-intensity tactical session (practice) with a high-intensity physical preparation session (workout). Then vice versa of pairing low with low. This way, when athletes practice with light intensity, they do not walk into the weight room and get destroyed. This helps both coaches and athletes make sure they are recovering correctly between sessions. 

Is it High or Low?

For some coaches, it may be hard to recognize if a practice is high or low intensity. An easy question is how game-like is the practice to the actual sporting event, and what is the emotional and physical intensity required to complete the tasks? This is individual-dependent, but when working with a team, it is okay to generalize to gain a better understanding. 

That intensity is then paired with volume. For example, did this practice take place for 1 hour? 2 hours? How much of the practice were the athletes actually working and or competing? Being able to answer these questions allows a coach to understand what the volume of the practice was. 

Coaches can then take this information on intensity and volume and classify their practice as either High/High, High/Low, Low/High, and Low/Low. This model determines the stress that should then be attacked in the weight room. This idea was derived from Daniel Bove's book, The Quadrant System: Navigating Stress in Team Sport. 

An example of what a High/High day in the weight room would look like is we're going to be lifting heavy weights with high volumes, relatively speaking. High/Low day would look like lifting heavier loads with lighter volume. An excellent example of this would be using Velocity Based Training if a coach has the tools and has the athletes operating in the strength-speed zone of the spectrum suggested by Dr. Bryan Mann (.75 m/s - 1.00 m/s). Low/High day would be lifting submaximal weights for repeated efforts or what Charlie Francis calls accumulation weights. A Low/Low day is a full rest day in the weight room for athletes to have the ability to recover fully. 

Wrap it Up

I took this blog all over the place, and some of the information felt like drinking water from a firehose. However, I am going to wrap it up and explain what the blog series will look like. 

I presented all of this information in this first blog because these are some of the necessary items that need consideration when writing a training program. A loose understanding of these concepts allows coaches to create informed plans focused on what they deem essential for their athlete or team.

Moving forward, I am going to present a training program and weekly layouts of what a week with 2, 3, 4, or 5 training sessions will look like and what can be included in those workouts. These templates are only meant to invoke thought and are not being presented as the only way or best way to do things. I recognize each training program is context-dependent, but the more a training plan is grounded in principles, the more manageable the creation process. To all of the coaches out there working hard, cheers to you; let's keep pushing the field forward. Till next time, work hard and enjoy the process.