Melbourne Heart FC Assistant Coach Gerard Nus provides some insight into the thought process that goes into planning weekly training sessions.
Melbourne Heart FC Assistant Coach Gerard Nus provides some insight into the thought process that goes into planning weekly training sessions.
A lot of preparation goes in to a training session. When you plan one, I like to consider it an art.
Football is a sport that is not as easy as 2+2= 4. There are many factors that you have to take in to consideration when planning your weekly schedule. A big part of that are injuries, travel and time between matches.
The opponent, the players, any injuries, the turn around between matches, the conditions and the loads are the main things. It-s not the same every week.
Some weeks you might have a four hour flight, other weeks you may be at home and have a lot more energy you need to conserve. We consider all these things before we put them in a session.
During the week you have to make sure that everybody understands the plan for the weekend. We also have to understand not just our own, but the strengths and weaknesses of our opponents as well.
This week we play against Wellington Phoenix. We played them month ago, and won 5-0, but we know it-s going to be a completely different game. We shouldn-t think at all that we will get a result like last time.
The way we approach this game is a completely new approach. It-s going to be difficult to get a result because they are a strong side fighting to get in to the top-six for the play-offs.
It-s been a long week to train, because we played last Saturday, so we have a full week in between games which means plenty of sessions to work many things.
We believe there are still a number of things we need to get better on and improve.
Normally we plan the sessions one week in advance. Before we start the first day of the week we know what we will be working on for the rest of the sessions.
There are details you might change depending on players and injuries and things like that, but you have a main idea of the session planned and organized.
I like to use this tool that we created a few months ago, an app called Efficiency Match, which helps us to put all our ideas in a visual animation so we see what is going to happen and there we will put all the parts of the session.
Warm ups, small games and tactical drills… all those sorts of things. You can take it all and put it in the right day. You have a calendar so you can plan what days you do which sessions.
Obviously you have different things and try to stimulate different things depending on when the next match is. We always need to put in all the right ingredients to the training session so we can get the maximum performance and result on the weekend.
You can download Efficiency Match by visiting effmatch.com.
