Every few months, I pose the question on Twitter, “what’s your biggest challenge in prescribing conditioning work?”
If I get 20 responses, without fail, at least 18 of them are some variation of “I don’t have time.”
So I thought I’d take the entire session design module from my new Coaches’ Conditioning Course and give it to you guys as a newsletter.
Speaking of Twitter, there have been some popular threads recently weighing the pros and cons of a 3 day vs a 4 day training split. And while that’s all well and good, in my experience, it’s not the number of training days in a week you have, it’s the total time you’re working with in a week that matters most.
The Microcycle
With this in mind, I feel that it's always best to start with how much training time you have allocated, and then determine what qualities you need to prioritize in training (i.e. speed, power, strength, conditioning), then determine how much time you can allot for each quality within the microcycle (i.e. every 7 / 10 / 14 days).
How to Distribute Training
I'll use the example of an early off-season 7 day microcyle with 4 hours of total training time over 5 training days, similar to many high school S&C schedules.
After determining how much training you have to work with is to order training qualities from highest neuromuscular demand to lowest. This will help determine how much time to allocate to each quality within the microcycle as the qualities with the highest neuromuscular demand will require the most recovery.
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Speed
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Power
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Lower body strength
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Upper body strength
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Conditioning/ESD
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Mobility
Individual Session Design
As far as what an individual session looks like, conditioning work will almost always be later in the session because we want to prioritize the training qualities with the highest neuromuscular demand and the highest intensities first.
In terms of actual prescriptions, it's always best to use time and distance for prescriptions.
Putting it all together
In the diagram below, I’ve designed a 5 day training split with 3 speed days (linear, multi-directional, and games-based), 2 lower body lifts, 2 upper body lifts and 2 conditioning sessions.
I’ve divided the total training time of 225 minutes and allocated time blocks of different lengths into each session based on what the training volume of each quality should look like during an early off-season phase.
I hope you find this helpful are able to take some lessons away to put to use right away!
And remember, my Coaches Conditioning Course is still on pre-launch sale for my subscribers for less than $200! But only for 2 more days!
Happy New Year!
Tim
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