The semi-professional/amateur environment can be quite chaotic in nature. Athletes need to work (including manual labour), the training schedule can be at the mercy of the coach or club, and fancy college training facilities are a pipe dream. Worse, every paper you read in school was either on professional athletes or untrained teenagers. What do you do when you’re still training high-level athletes, but you can only see them 2-3 times a week. Does this sound familiar? If so, keep reading, because here are some of the biggest lessons I’ve learned in working in this extremely challenging environment.
Principles over Methods
As a young S&C coach it is easy to get caught up using new exercises and methods. Just because the elite are doing it, does not mean your athletes should be. Context is everything. When programming there are several principles that I like to adhere to namely:
Right stimulus, right time, right amount. In summary, my programs follow these principles:
- Simple to complex
- General to specific
- Extensive to intensive
- Low intensity to high intensity
- Closed to open
- Slow to fast
- Technique before load
Whilst the cliché often used is ‘Many roads lead to Rome’. I prefer to choose the most efficient and least risky road. Following these principles prevented me from making big or frequent mistakes, whilst assisting the planning and execution of my programs. I have written extensively about these principles HERE.
Simple, common sense progressions
Creating a library of exercise progressions simplified my programming. Previously, I would plan out my entire pre-season using several methods. Each season I would find myself with several athletes being signed 4-6 weeks into the pre-season. Quite often they had no chronic training load and I had to modify their program to mitigate the risk of injury. Using simple progressions as shown below, allowed me to place athletes into a plan so that they were exposed to the appropriate exercise and stress.
Stop considering the gym in isolation
The goal is to allow your athletes to place their energy into the most important aspect there is. The sport. Therefore, you want to place the most intense and specific activities, to the least intense and general activities. It also helps reduce the likelihood of injuries. As they say, the best ability is availability. Sprinting out on the field following a gym session with heavy posterior chain work is not the smartest idea.
However, sometimes you are at the mercy of how the coach wants to structure the program. Here are some tips to help you navigate this situation and be more adaptable in your work.
Switch to a full-body split
This approach is an anti-fragile approach for a semi-professional/amateur environment. Quite often athletes arrive late due to work commitments or miss the session completely. If you had planned a lower body session, then this could mean your athletes did not train legs the entire week. I’ve followed this approach for years and my athletes still got strong and powerful. If you do have to complete weights before field work then leave the Nordic and razor curls until after the field session. It only takes a few minutes for athletes to partner up and complete a few sets.
If the gym is planned after the field sessions and all your athletes are completing the gym sessions (85% + attendance) then there are a few other splits that I have found successful.
Pre-season 4 days per week: 2 x lower, 2 x lower
Pre-season 3 days per week: either 3 x full body or 1 x lower, 1 x upper, 1 x full body
Pre-season 2 days per week: 2 x full body
In-season 2 x full body
Utilise robustness circuits
Keeping athletes on the field is probably the most important goal of the strength coach. In my programming, I made it mandatory that athletes completed ‘robustness circuits instead of the more traditional foam rolling and static stretching. Athletes would perform a circuit of two sets of each exercise, focussing on common injury-prone areas of the sport. Circuits included strengthening the area of the foot/ankle, groin, hamstrings, shoulders, and neck region.
I created an exercise library of these movements so that they had logical progressions throughout the pre-season. Whilst these could be easily completed at the end of a session, I made it mandatory to use them as a warm-up. An added bonus when using this approach, if athletes wanted to train some extra pump work (biceps, triceps, delts) then they would show up on time and get to work. Time is a valuable commodity for an S&C coach at the semi-professional level, and prioritisation of important elements is essential.
Microdose speed and COD work into warmups
Every field session warm-up is an opportunity to work on patterning and posture for positions seen on the field. I like to perform a few minutes of general work, followed immediately by speed power drills, or closed multi-directional mechanics. Rather than spending an hour training a specific quality, I break it up into periods of 15-20 mins every field session, in a micro-dosing format.
Do not let the opportunity presented by the warm-up go to waste. Every warm-up offers the opportunity to get better at specific movements seen within the game. We want our athletes to become unconsciously competent in movement patterns. Cueing athletes in closed environments at slower speeds is a great place to start. Both speed and agility can be micro-dosed at the end of the warmup. This means high-quality speed work can be trained multiple times per week. Two to three quality reps performed 3-4 times a week, adds up to a huge volume of speed training over the year. If you would like to read more on this topic, I have written an article in greater detail that can be found HERE.
Stimulate what the sport doesn’t touch
It is important that we do not try and just replicate the sport all the time. It is much more productive to train above and below the demands of the sport. For example, rarely do athletes reach 90%+ of their maximum velocity during a game or in training. When this does occur, it is usually a crucial moment. A player could be making a break to score, whilst a defender is chasing the player down. These high-speed moments are big moments, and speed can be essential in winning these. Therefore, we need to prioritise it in our training. An added bonus of regular exposure to near maximum velocity is potentially reduced risk of lower limb injuries like hamstring tears.
Nor should training below the demands of the game be ignored. Coaches enjoy small-sided games and hard glycolytic sessions because it feels like hard work, but lower RPE activities can be just as, if not more important. Back in 2015-2016, I started combining elements of tempo training with traditional MAS running. Using this method allowed my athletes to stimulate their aerobic energy system at higher outputs than normal, but with improved mechanics and less overall fatigue generated. I’ve also found lower-level change of direction work to be great for building work capacity and preparing athletes for high-intensity changes of direction in training and games.
It is important to realise even though specificity is what drives true transfer in sport, general preparation is probably what drives robustness. As I have discussed in other articles (HERE), an exercise does not need to necessarily look specific for it to produce positive adaptations. It is important to acquire the right balance between general and specific training volumes. This balance will allow for continual improvement, whilst staying healthy, and avoid boring or monotonous training
Educate your athletes about health and recovery
Educating your athletes on the importance of recovery can assist you in reducing injuries and improving the general wellbeing of your team. As an amateur coach, you are unlikely to have access to resources such as hot/cold tubs, normatec, and massage therapists, but it costs nothing to educate your athletes on the importance of impactful things like sleep, nutrition, stress management and hydration. These may be obvious things to you as a coach but remember: common sense isn’t so common, especially amongst athletes.
I’ve found great success using simple excel questionnaires to screen athletes for soreness, general well-being, sleep, and nutrition. This was mandatory to fill out before training and took no time at all and allowed us to automatically flag outlying data, and establish a dialogue. Athletes could be sent to the physiotherapist if any particular area were worrisome, or I could prescribe or reduce some exercises to better prepare the athlete for training. These conversations were never formal and also assisted in building rapport and trust with my athletes.
